Lifeboat Foundation

Synchron on Monday plans to launch an online…

WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) — Synchron Inc, a rival to Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant startup, is preparing to recruit patients for a large-scale clinical trial required to seek commercial approval for its device, the company’s chief executive told Reuters.

Synchron on Monday plans to launch an online registry for patients interested in joining the trial meant to include dozens of participants, and has received interest from about 120 clinical trial centers to help run the study, CEO Thomas Oxley said in an interview.

Continue reading “Exclusive: Synchron, a rival to Musk’s Neuralink, readies large-scale brain implant trial” »

Personalized vaccine + immunotherapy cuts advanced liver cancer in small trial.

There were no serious adverse reactions. The most common was mild injection site reactions.

This Geneos treatment is a DNA vaccine that delivers the genetic code of mutated proteins into cells through a small electrical impulse. Each vaccine can target up to 40 mutated genes.

Continue reading “Geneos vaccine shows efficacy in reducing liver tumors in trial” »

Could life be found in frozen sea spray from moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter? New research finds that life can be detected in a single ice grain containing one bacterial cell or portions of a cell. The results suggest that if life similar to that on Earth exists on these planetary bodies, that this life should be detectable by instruments launching in the fall.

The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Freie Universität Berlin shows that individual ice grains ejected from these planetary bodies may contain enough material for instruments headed there in the fall to detect signs of life, if such life exists.

“For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said lead author Fabian Klenner, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. “Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons.”

New technique measures the gravitational pull on a micron-scale levitating magnetic particle.

Mitochondria, organelles with an inner and outer membrane, are responsible for creating the energy that cells use to survive, and their morphology is key to accomplishing this task. The inner mitochondrial membrane contains folds, called cristae, that maximize the surface area available for mitochondrial energetic processes.

Recent research in mice investigates a new, immunotherapy-based approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease aiming to clear toxic protein accumulations in the brain.

Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the ‘Great Filter.’

Apple presents Ferret-UI

Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

Recent advancements in #multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been noteworthy, yet, these general-domain MLLMs often fall short in their ability to #comprehend and interact…

Continue reading “Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs” »

How humans, animals and even single-celled organisms cooperate to survive suggests there’s more to life than just competition, argues a cheering study of evolutionary biology.