Lifeboat Foundation

A Seattle medical tech company’s revolutionary surgical imaging instrument has become the first light-enabled navigation tool for spine surgery to receive Food and Drug Administration clearance.

Why it matters: Officials with Proprio believe the tool, which allows surgeons to essentially “see” the spine being operated on in real time, could dramatically improve clinical outcomes.

Driving the news: This month, the Paradigm device received the FDA 510(k) clearance that’s required for new medical implements before they are taken to market, Proprio said in an emailed announcement.

A recent study demonstrated that non-invasive stimulation of the right cerebellum led to improvements in episodic memory performance in healthy elderly individuals, at the end of a 12-day neurostimulation program, and also at the point of a 4-month follow-up.

The steady increase in average life expectancy poses significant challenges to individuals, families, and societies across multiple dimensions. Estimating that by 2050 one in every six individuals will be over the age of 65, the study of aging and its association with cognitive decline, neurodegenerative diseases and overall frailty is becoming increasingly important.

Therefore, it has been an important goals of neurosciences research to understand the relationship between the aging brain and episodic memory deficits and to develop interventions to mitigate the age-related decline in our ability to remember personal past events (episodic memory).

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~“May you live in interesting times”~

Having the blessing and the curse of working in the field of cybersecurity, I often get asked about my thoughts on how that intersects with another popular topic — artificial intelligence (AI). Given the latest headline-grabbing developments in generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Sydney, and image generation tools like Dall-E and Midjourney, it is no surprise that AI has catapulted into the public’s awareness.

Doug Millay, Ph.D., a scientist with the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Cincinnati Children’s has dedicated his career to revealing the most fundamental mechanisms of skeletal muscle development. He has been a leader in characterizing how two “fusogens” called Myomaker and Myomerger mediate the entry of stem cells into mature muscle cells to build the tissue that humans depend upon for movement, breathing, and survival.

Now, some of the basic discoveries made by Millay and colleagues are translating into a potential treatment for people living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Their latest research, published April 12, 2023, in the journal Cell, reveals that in mice, modified viruses, engineered with Myomaker and Myomerger, result in specific fusion with muscle cells. These viruses can therefore be used as a vector to deliver a vital gene needed for muscle function that is mutated in people with DMD.

A key unknown prior to this work was whether proteins like Myomaker and Myomerger, which mainly function on cells, could even work on viruses. First author Sajedah Hindi, Ph.D., also with the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Cincinnati Children’s and a leading member of the research team, took on the challenge to test this idea.

By Carl Sagan #shorts #science #physics #interestingfacts

Created using Paragraph ai.

Time travel has long been a popular theme in movies, but scientists believe that the concept of time teleportation is unlikely in reality. However, they do not dismiss the possibility of time travel altogether. The laws of physics suggest that time travel may be possible, but the details are complex.

Physicists explain that traveling to the near future is relatively simple, as we are all doing it right now at a rate of one second per second. Additionally, Einstein’s special theory of relativity states that the speed at which we move affects the flow of time. In other words, the faster we travel, the slower time passes. Furthermore, Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests that gravity also impacts the flow of time. The stronger the nearby gravity, the slower time goes.

“It was very curiosity-driven,” says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. “We thought: ‘Can we do it? Let’s do it, let’s put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality.’”

“I have colleagues who are at the forefront in a field we call electronic plants. … We have worked with dead woods for this project, but the next step might be to integrate it also into living plants.” —Isak Engquist, Linköping University.

Even though the wooden transistor still awaits its killer app, the idea to build wood-based electronics is not as crazy as it sounds. A recent review of wood-based materials reads, “Around 300 million years of tree evolution has yielded over 60,000 woody species, each of which is an engineering masterpiece of nature.” Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood’s pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte.

A developer release of Microsoft’s Edge browser has a new address bar advertisement for the company’s Bing AI — but it only appears when the user goes to its main competitor’s site at bard.google.com.

Microsoft’s Edge can be a great Chromium browser alternative to Google’s Chrome, but the former is displaying some annoying new rivalry antics: advertising Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot while you’re trying out Google’s Bard AI. As pointed out by developer and Twitter user Vitor de Lucca, a new developer version of Edge will now display a new Bing ad next to the Google Bard URL.

When pointing Edge to bard.google.

Continue reading “Microsoft Edge users who use Google Bard get a bonus annoying Bing ad” »

VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global picking up new shares, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion — $29 billion.

Updated to note that the Microsoft investment closed in January. The money from VCs reported here, part of a tender offer, is separate to that.

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has picked up new backers, TechCrunch has learned.