Lifeboat Foundation

A team of biologists has discovered how to awaken neural stem cells and reactivate them in adult mice.

Some areas of the adult brain contain quiescent, or dormant, neural stem cells that can potentially be reactivated to form new neurons. However, the transition from quiescence to proliferation is still poorly understood. A team led by scientists from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL) has discovered the importance of cell metabolism in this process and identified how to wake up these neural stem cells and reactivate them. Biologists succeeded in increasing the number of new neurons in the brain of adult and even elderly mice. These results, promising for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, are to be discovered in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

From Google’s Bard to Microsoft’s new Bing, here are all the major contenders in the AI chatbot space.

Quantum bits inspired by Schrödinger’s cat could allow quantum computers to make fewer mistakes and more efficiently crack algorithms used for encryption.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Researchers claimed to have found a way to build a spacecraft that can travel at one-fifth of the speed of light, making traveling to another solar system a reality. Read the article to learn how this could be possible.

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) transport small molecules into the body. The most well-known LNP cargo is mRNA, the key constituent of some of the early vaccines against COVID-19. But that is just one application: LNPs can carry many different types of payload, and have applications beyond vaccines.

Barbara Mui has been working on LNPs (and their predecessors, liposomes) since she was a PhD student in Pieter Cullis’s group in the 1990s. “In those days, LNPs encapsulated anti-cancer drugs,” says Mui, who is currently a senior scientist at Acuitas, the company that developed the LNPs used in the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. She says it soon became clear that LNPs worked even better as carriers of polynucleotides. “The first one that worked really well was encapsulating small RNAs,” Mui recalls.

But it was mRNA where LNPs proved most effective, primarily because LNPs are comprised of positively charged lipid nanoparticles that encapsulate negatively charged mRNA. Once in the body, LNPs enter cells via endocytosis into endosomes and are released into the cytoplasm. “Without the specially designed chemistry, the LNP and mRNA would be degraded in the endosome,” says Kathryn Whitehead, professor in the departments of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Your thoughts, emotions and behaviours arise from the complex network of electric activity in your brain. But what can we do when we need to tweak it?

Featuring works by six artists, “Refigured” is on view through July 3.

Richard Whiddington, March 7, 2023.

I can’t help myself. I keep thinking about the 1961 musical Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. After opening in Manchester, England, the show transferred to the West End, London, where it ran for 485 performances.

It’s not that the plot of this extravaganza has anything to do with what we are talking about here. It’s just that the sentiment embodied by the show’s title reflects the way I’m currently feeling about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

On the one hand, the current state of play with AI and ML is tremendously exciting. On the other hand, I’m starting to think that I’ve enjoyed all the excitement I can stand.

X-AR uses wireless signals and computer vision to enable users to perceive things that are invisible to the human eye (i.e., to deliver non-line-of-sight perception). It combines new antenna designs, wireless signal processing algorithms, and AI-based fusion of different sensors.

This design introduces three main innovations:

Continue reading “Augmented Reality with X-Ray Vision” »