Lifeboat Foundation

“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” — Michio Kaku, PhD.

Since most examples of brain-inspired silicon chips are based on digital electronic principles, their capacity to fully imitate brain function is limited. Self-organizing brain organoids connected to microelectrode arrays (MEAs) can be changed in function to create neural networks. These networks, called organoid neural networks (ONNs), show the capacity for unsupervised learning, which is what artificial intelligence (AI) is based on. These mini-organs, when connected to the right hardware, can even be trained to recognize speech.

This brain-inspired computing hardware, or “Brainoware,” could overcome existing shortcomings in AI technologies, providing natural solutions to challenges regarding time and energy consumption and heat production of current AI hardware. These ONNs may also have the necessary complexity and diversity to mimic a human brain, which could inspire the development of more sophisticated and human-like AI systems.

Bad things can happen when you hallucinate. If you are human, you can end up doing things like putting your underwear in the oven. If you happen to be a chatbot or some other type of artificial intelligence (AI) tool, you can spew out false and misleading information, which—depending on the info—could affect many, many people in a bad-for-your-health-and-well-being type of way. And this latter type of hallucinating has become increasingly common in 2023 with the continuing proliferation of AI. That’s why Dictionary.com has an AI-specific definition of “hallucinate” and has named the word as its 2023 Word of the Year.

Dictionary.com noticed a 46% jump in dictionary lookups for the word “hallucinate” from 2022 to 2023 with a comparable increase in searches for “hallucination” as well. Meanwhile, there was a 62% jump in searches for AI-related words like “chatbot”, “GPT”, “generative AI”, and “LLM.” So the increases in searches for “hallucinate” is likely due more to the following AI-specific definition of the word from Dictionary.com rather than the traditional human definition:

hallucinate [ h uh-loo-s uh-neyt ]-verb-(of artificial i ntelligence) to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user and present it as if true and factual. Example: When chatbots hallucinate, the result is often not just inaccurate but completely fabricated.

Continue reading “Dictionary.com 2023 Word Of The Year ‘Hallucinate’ Is An AI Health Issue” »

Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University and an author. Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter in our reward pathway. It tells us when to feel pleasure and pain, it can cause depression and anxiety, and it’s being hijacked by the modern world. Phones, video games, porn, food, our world is filled with cheap dopamine, which in turn is making us miserable. Expect to learn how dopamine creates a see-saw balance of pleasure and pain, why cravings to use your phone are driven by dopamine, the truth about dopamine detoxing, how to reset your brain’s dopamine balance, the most successful interventions for changing your relationship to dopamine long term and much more…

A quickie about E5.

Dr. Steve Horvath shares some studies on evaluating whether young plasma fraction affects the epigenetic clock and lifespan in this short video.\
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37875…\
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…\
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37500…\
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2…\

Continue reading “Aging Rewind: What The Studies Show — Can Young Plasma Turn Back the Epigenetic Clock?” »

Developing predictive mechanistic models in biology is challenging. Elektrum uses neural architecture search, kinetic models and transfer learning to discover CRISPR–Cas9 cleavage kinetics, achieving high performance and biophysical interpretability.

Prior studies have linked high blood cholesterol levels to various cancers, including colorectal cancers. However, it hasn’t been clear that lowering cholesterol can prevent colorectal cancers. Now, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have found in mice hard-to-detect colorectal pre-cancerous lesions known as serrated polyps, and the aggressive tumors that develop from them, depend heavily on the ramped-up production of cholesterol. Their finding points to the possibility of using cholesterol-lowering drugs to prevent or treat such tumors.

The findings are published in Nature Communications in an article titled, “Enhanced SREBP2-driven cholesterol biosynthesis by PKCλ/ι deficiency in intestinal epithelial cells promotes aggressive serrated tumorigenesis.”

“The metabolic and signaling pathways regulating aggressive mesenchymal colorectal cancer (CRC) initiation and progression through the serrated route are largely unknown,” the researchers wrote. “Although relatively well characterized as BRAF mutant cancers, their poor response to current targeted therapy, difficult preneoplastic detection, and challenging endoscopic resection make the identification of their metabolic requirements a priority. Here, we demonstrate that the phosphorylation of SCAP by the atypical PKC (aPKC), PKCλ/ι promotes its degradation and inhibits the processing and activation of SREBP2, the master regulator of cholesterol biosynthesis.”

A University of Oxford-led study has found that diverse communities of resident commensal gut bacteria collectively protect the human gut from disease-causing microorganisms by consuming the nutrients that the pathogen would need to be able to gain a foothold in the host.

The team used an ecological approach to investigate how colonization by two major bacterial pathogens— Klebsiella pneumoniae and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium)—is influenced by a range of human gut bacteria both in vitro and in gnotobiotic mice. They found that the ecological diversity of the microbiome was important for colonization resistance. While single species of gut microbiota alone had negligible effects on providing effective resistance to pathogens, certain combinations of essential key species within diverse communities exhibited much greater colonization resistance when together.

Having found that these communities block pathogen growth by consuming nutrients that would be required by the pathogen, the team also showed that the concept of nutrient blocking can be used to predict specific sets of commensal microbiota that will resist a novel bacterial pathogen, using genome sequence data alone.

Researchers at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine’s Laboratory of Gene Regulation, led by Professor Doug Higgs and Dr. Mira Kassouf, have published a study in the journal Cell, in which they reveal another piece of the puzzle of how the code in our DNA is read.

In this study, the authors introduce the concept of “facilitators,” a newly identified type of non-coding DNA that can help to drive gene expression.

All of the cells in your body contain the same DNA. However, these cells are able to develop into over 200 different types and make up a variety of different specialized tissues such as the skin, the blood, and the brain.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, China, have discovered that shutting down part of the innate immune system increases anti-tumor activity.

In a paper, “Noncanonical MAVS signaling restrains dendritic cell–driven antitumor immunity by inhibiting IL-12,” published in Science Immunology, the team details how exploring the role of mitochondrial antiviral signaling in tumor immunity uncovered unexpected insights into the relationship with immune responses and potential therapeutic implications.

Mitochondrial antiviral-signaling (MAVS) proteins are part of the innate immune system encoded by the nuclear genome found mainly on the mitochondrial outer membrane. Considered a first line of defense against viral infections, they are rapidly produced upon viral recognition and quickly reduced when a virus is cleared from the system.