Lifeboat Foundation

The breadth of BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s AI aspirations just got a lot clearer — and if he has it his way, AI use at the viral publisher won’t be limited to time-killing quizzes and bottom-tier travel guides.

“BuzzFeed has always lived at the intersection of technology and creativity. And recent developments in artificial intelligence represent an opportunity to take this convergence to the next level,” Peretti told eager investors at the company’s Investor Day last week. “We view AI as an exciting new creativity tool, one that humans can harness to open up new avenues for imagination, storytelling and entertainment and explore new premium product offerings that allow us to innovate and collaborate with our clients and partners on a new frontier in media.”

“Over the next few years, generative AI will replace the majority of static content, and audiences will begin to expect all content to be curated and dynamic with embedded intelligence,” he continued. “AI will lead to new formats that are more gamified, more personalized, and more interactive.”

New TSA screening methods will allow passengers through security without showing their boarding passes or by simply taking a picture.

Their data provide insight into a longstanding debate in the field of astronomy.

The James Webb Space Telescope has helped astronomers detect the first chemical signs of supermassive stars, “celestial monsters” blazing with the brightness of millions of Suns in the early universe.

So far, the largest stars observed anywhere have a mass of around 300 times that of our Sun.

But the supermassive star described in a new study has an estimated mass of 5,000 to 10,000 Suns.

SpaceX rolled the Ship 25 Starship upper-stage prototype out to the launch pad early Thursday morning (May 18) to test-fire its six Raptor engines.

Fitbits and Apple Watches weren’t designed for people with atypical health conditions. But the tech can be extremely useful—with some creativity.

Evidence that non-invasive sensory stimulation of 40 Hz gamma frequency brain rhythms can reduce Alzheimer’s disease pathology and symptoms, already shown with light and sound by multiple research groups in mice and humans, now extends to tactile stimulation. A new study by MIT scientists shows that Alzheimer’s model mice exposed to 40 Hz vibration an hour a day for several weeks showed improved brain health and motor function compared to untreated controls.

The MIT group is not the first to show that gamma frequency tactile stimulation can affect brain activity and improve motor function, but they are the first to show that the stimulation can also reduce levels of the hallmark Alzheimer’s protein phosphorylated tau, keep neurons from dying or losing their synapse circuit connections, and reduce neural DNA damage.

“This work demonstrates a third sensory modality that we can use to increase gamma power in the brain,” said Li-Huei Tsai, corresponding author of the study, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Aging Brain Initiative at MIT, and Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS).

Cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks, are a leading cause of death worldwide resulting from a limited self-healing power of the heart. Unlike humans, zebrafish have the remarkable capacity to recover from cardiac damage. Researchers from the group of Jeroen Bakkers (Hubrecht Institute) have used the zebrafish to shed light on their regenerative success. They discovered a new mechanism that functions as a switch to push the heart muscle cells to mature in the regeneration process. Importantly, this mechanism was evolutionary conserved as it had a very similar effect on mouse and human heart muscle cells.

The results of the study, published in Science on May 18, show that examining the natural heart regeneration process in zebrafish and applying these discoveries to human heart muscle cells could contribute to the development of new therapies against cardiovascular diseases.

Continue reading “How to repair a damaged heart: Key mechanism behind heart regeneration in zebrafish revealed” »

Dark matter, matter in the universe that does not emit, absorb or reflect light, cannot be directly detected using conventional telescopes or other imaging technologies. Astrophysicists have thus been trying to identify alternative methods to detect dark matter for decades.

Researchers at Tsinghua University, the Purple Mountain Observatory and Peking University recently carried out a study exploring the possibility of directly detecting dark photons, prominent dark matter candidates, using radio telescopes. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could inform future searches for dark photons, which are hypothetical particles that would carry a force in dark matter, similarly to how photons carry electromagnetism in normal matter.

“Our previous work studied the conversion of dark photons into photons in the solar corona,” Haipeng An, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.