Lifeboat Foundation

In pre-clinical trials, a small molecule effectively regrew neurons, reduced inflammation, and improved memory, speed, coordination, grip strength, and more. The finding could have a profound impact on aging and the diseases that accompany it.

In conducting the research, scientists at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, turned their focus to telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT), an enzyme that is known to help synthesize and extend telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that help cells divide. TERT levels are reduced as we age.

Without sufficient levels of TERT, when our telomeres shrink or get seriously modified, they can lead to a process that continually damages our DNA, which causes cells to release inflammatory compounds that can in turn lead to aging, tissue damage, and cancer.

What Matters in Transformers?

The official implementation of the paper ‘Demystifying the Compression of Mixture-of-Experts Through a Unified Framework’. — DaizeDong/Unified-MoE-Compression.

Toys ‘R’ Us tapped a creative ad agency to create a short story called The Origin of Toys ‘R’ using OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora.

They were gradually replaced by AI.

A hot potato: CEOs, bosses, and the those who make the technology love to assure people that artificial intelligence isn’t going to replace everyone’s jobs; it will merely augment them – working alongside humans to make life easier. Yet we keep hearing stories like the one about a writer whose employer fired his 60-person team and replaced them with an AI.

A writer using the pseudonym Benjamin Miller told the BBC that his company wanted to use AI to cut costs in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors who published blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data.

Continue reading “Company cuts costs by replacing 60-strong writing team with AI” »

A fine of more than $20 billion could be waiting for the tech giant.

While solid-state spin qubits show promise as quantum information platforms, their qubit-to-qubit interactions extend over too short a distance to connect many of them together, posing a problem for complex computations. Now Frankie Fung and colleagues from Harvard University have devised a mechanical method—involving a vibrating nanobeam—to connect distant spin qubits, potentially overcoming this issue [1].

A popular solid-state spin qubit is the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center, a single-atom defect in a diamond crystal. This system is attractive for quantum information applications, as it has both a light-sensitive electron spin state (which offers a knob for controlling the qubit) and a long-lived nuclear spin state (which acts as memory). But direct interactions between NV centers are limited to a few nanometers.

To lengthen the connections, Fung and his colleagues propose using a nanobeam fitted with a micromagnet as an intermediary between distant NV centers. The idea is then to place a line of NV centers along the length of a scanning-probe-microscope tip and move the tip over the micromagnet. When a particular NV center comes close to the micromagnet, the magnetic-field interaction should entangle the vibrational state of the nanobeam with the spin state of that NV center. This quantum information is then shared with the next NV center along the line.

A long-running experiment aboard the International Space Station has found an unexpected population of cosmic rays made of heavy hydrogen ions.

Bright light triggers the chloroplast of a bioluminescent algae to fold into a pattern that minimizes the chloroplast’s exposed area.

A new technique combining magnetic resonance imaging and x-ray fluorescence can characterize, with single-neuron resolution, the presence of toxic forms of iron that might be associated with neurodegenerative diseases.

Iron plays a major role in life. Most obviously, it keeps us alive, helping to ferry oxygen around our bloodstreams. It is also essential in cellular energy production, in the immune-system response, and in brain function—where it helps catalyze the synthesis of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Iron can, however, be a double-edged sword. An iron excess has been implicated in many ailments, including neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease—where dopaminergic neurons (neurons that use iron to synthesize dopamine) degenerate. It is thought that the toxicity of iron depends on how it is stored: iron firmly bound within proteins such as ferritin may be less toxic than iron more loosely bound to low-affinity sites, where it is more able to participate in reactions that generate cell-damaging hydroxyl radicals [1].