Lifeboat Foundation

Dementia is a brain disease that affects around 55 million people worldwide and is characterized by the loss of cognitive functions like memory and reasoning.

The classic, early cognitive symptoms of dementia – like misplacing valuable objects, forgetting names, and finding planning difficult – can creep up slowly over time.

But there are other, more noticeable changes to the body that correlate with dementia risk and can be picked up over a decade before diagnosis. Recent research has found that hearing difficulties may be a warning sign of dementia that arises years before other symptoms of the disease.

Using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions, it might be possible to curtail the screaming horrors that plague our sleep.

A study last year conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with a nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies reduced the frequency of their bad dreams.

Scientists invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares in a positive light and then played sound associated with positive experiences as they slept.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed an artificial intelligence system that can create proteins not found in nature using generative diffusion, the same technology behind popular image-creation platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney.

The system will help advance the field of generative biology, which promises to speed drug development by making the design and testing of entirely new therapeutic proteins more efficient and flexible.

“Our model learns from image representations to generate fully new proteins, at a very high rate,” says Philip M. Kim, a professor in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. “All our proteins appear to be biophysically real, meaning they fold into configurations that enable them to carry out specific functions within cells.”

AMD is the latest manufacturer to commit to AI, joining forces with Microsoft to challenge Nvidia’s market dominance.

“Obviously not a complete success, but still nonetheless successful,” Elon Musk said.

On May 5, 1961, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard made history by becoming the first American to fly into space aboard the Freedom 7 capsule. To honor his pioneering achievement, we celebrate National Astronaut Day on the anniversary of his historic flight. This day provides an opportunity to recognize American astronauts’ accomplishments and inspire the next generation to reach for the stars.

Sierra Space is proud to commemorate National Astronaut Day as we democratize space travel and make it accessible to all. Looking toward the future of space travel, we want to acknowledge the role of commercial space companies that are reimagining human spaceflight in the Orbital Age. With the advancement of space technology, we can now explore space in ways that were once impossible, making it accessible to everyone.

To pave the way for the Orbital Age, Sierra Space is privileged to have three veteran NASA astronauts on our leadership team, including Dr. Janet Kavandi, Steve Lindsey, and Dr. Tom Marshburn.

Biofase, a company in Mexico, transforms avocado waste into bioplastic, which breaks down fast and requires less fossil fuels to produce.

Researchers at the KIT Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) now managed to characterize the formation of the SEI with a multi-scale approach. “This solves one of the great mysteries regarding an essential part of all liquid electrolyte batteries – especially the lithium-ion batteries we all use every day,” says Professor Wolfgang Wenzel, director of the research group “Multiscale Materials Modelling and Virtual Design ” at INT, which is involved in the large-scale European research initiative BATTERY 2030+ that aims to develop safe, affordable, long-lasting, sustainable high-performance batteries for the future.

The KIT researchers report on their findings in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

To examine the growth and composition of the passivation layer at the anode of liquid electrolyte batteries, the researchers at INT generated an ensemble of over 50 000 simulations representing different reaction conditions. They found that the growth of the organic SEI follows a solution-mediated pathway: First, SEI precursors that are formed directly at the surface join far away from the electrode surface via a nucleation process.

A small team of chemists at the Russian Academy of Sciences, has found that metal atoms, not nanoparticles, play the key role in catalysts used in fine organic synthesis. In the study, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the group used multiple types of electron microscopy to track a region of a catalyst during a reaction to learn more about how it was proceeding.

Prior research has shown that there are two main methods for studying a reaction. The first is the most basic: As ingredients are added, the reaction is simply observed and/or measured. This can be facilitated through use of high-speed cameras. This approach will not work with nanoscale reactions, of course. In such cases, chemists use a second method: They attempt to capture the state of all the components before and after the reaction and then compare them to learn more about what happened.

This second approach leaves much to be desired, however, as there is no way to prove that the objects under study correspond with one another. In recent years, chemists have been working on a new approach: Following the action of a single particle during the reaction. This new method has proven to have merit but it has limitations as well—it also cannot be used for reactions that occur in the nanoworld. In this new effort, the researchers used multiple types of electron microscopy coupled with machine-learning algorithms.