Lifeboat Foundation

Alzheimer’s disease is marked by the gradual degeneration of nerve cells, resulting in memory and cognitive decline. A research team at KU Leuven and VIB investigated the molecular sequence driving this cellular breakdown, discovering specific inhibitors that can prevent nerve cell loss in various mouse models of the disease.

The findings open up new research avenues in the search for therapies that could halt or prevent the accumulation of brain damage occurring in Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s disease, the leading cause of dementia, affects over 55 million people worldwide. The disease is characterized by the buildup of amyloid-beta plaques and tau protein tangles in the brain, which disrupt cell communication and lead to the widespread death of nerve cells. The consequences of this massive cell loss are the heartbreaking cognitive decline and memory loss for which the condition is well known.

Research by scientists at the University of Sydney has identified a constituent in the cannabis plant that improves sleep. Their report is the first to use objective measures to show the component, known as cannabinol (CBN), increases sleep in rats.

The study has been published in Neuropsychopharmacology.

“For decades, cannabis folklore has suggested that aged cannabis makes consumers sleepy via the build-up of CBN, however there was no convincing evidence for this,” said lead author on the study Professor Jonathon Arnold, Director of Preclinical Research, at the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics and the Sydney Pharmacy School.

Researchers from the University of Bonn have trained an AI process to predict potential active ingredients with special properties. Therefore, they derived a chemical language model — a kind of ChatGPT for molecules. Following a training phase, the AI was able to exactly reproduce the chemical structures of compounds with known dual-target activity that may be particularly effective medications. The study has now been published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

Anyone who wants to delight their granny with a poem on her 90th birthday doesn’t need to be a poet nowadays: A short prompt in ChatGPT is all it takes, and within a few seconds the AI spits out a long list of words that rhyme with the birthday girl’s name. It can even produce a sonnet to go with it if you like.

Researchers at the University of Bonn have implemented a similar model in their study — known as a chemical language model. This does not, however, produce rhymes. Instead, the AI displays the structural formulas of chemical compounds that may have a particularly desirable property: They are able to bind to two different target proteins. In the organism, this means, for example, they can inhibit two enzymes at once.

Our brains—and specifically, our brain cells—are commonly known to store memories. However, a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also play a role in memory, opening new pathways for understanding how memory functions and creating potential for enhancing learning and treating memory-related conditions.

“Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University ’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.

Continue reading “Mind-Blowing Discovery: Scientists Discover That Memories Are Not Only in the Brain” »

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Bluesky, a social network that’s experiencing a surge in users this week as users abandon X, says it has “no intention” of using user content to train generative AI tools.

VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use.

In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro free for personal use, allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices.

Starting this week, the Pro versions and the two products will no longer be available under a paid subscription model.

The universe’s rapid expansion challenges current models. Scientists explore the KBC void and alternative theories to solve the mystery.

South Korean researchers have developed a groundbreaking photonic quantum circuit chip that promises to accelerate the global race in quantum computation.

This chip, capable of controlling up to eight photons, marks a significant leap forward in manipulating complex quantum phenomena like multipartite entanglement.

Breakthrough in photonic quantum circuit development.