Lifeboat Foundation

A new study shows that cerebrospinal fluid reduces current treatment efficacy in brain cancer and identifies new therapeutic opportunities.

Cerebrospinal fluid, the clear colorless liquid that protects the brain, also may be a factor that makes brain cancers resistant to treatment, Australian researchers led by Associate Professor Cedric Bardy at the South Austraila Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) and Flinders University reveal in the journal Science Advances.

Reporting how this occurs, the study, titled “Human cerebrospinal fluid affects chemoradiotherapy sensitivities in tumor cells from patients with glioblastoma,” in Science Advances shows that a decades-old anti-anxiety drug can improve the effectiveness of chemo-radiotherapy towards glioblastoma, or GBM, the most common and lethal brain cancer.

The price difference between a barrel of crude and a barrel of petrol offers a glimpse of things to come for the industry.

How have advanced surgical techniques improved breast cancer diagnosis and treatment? Jessica Salmans LaCross discusses the latest technologies.

Now anyone can visit NIH anytime, from anywhere, through a Virtual Tour newly launched by NIH’s Office of Communications and Public Liaison (OCPL). The idea came about during the pandemic, when NIH suspended in-person campus tours to protect the safety of staff and patients.

While in-person visits and tours have resumed, the mobile-friendly tour opens NIH to people from around the world—to patients who want to participate in clinical trials; investigators, trainees and other staff; educators and students; policymakers and anyone else interested in NIH’s work and mission.

Humane hasn’t officially revealed its AI assistant device yet, but the bits of information keep coming.

Humane’s first gadget, the AI Pin, is currently slated to launch on November 9th, but we just got our best look at it yet thanks to a somewhat unexpected source. Before it has even been announced, the AI Pin is one of Time.

The write-up is brief and relatively light on details, but there are a couple of new details, along with the best photo we’ve seen yet of the device. It appears the AI Pin will attach magnetically to your clothing, and… More.

Continue reading “The Humane AI Pin apparently runs GPT-4 and flashes a ‘Trust Light’ when it’s recording” »

‘About this image’ is designed to show where on the web an image appeared in the past and how it was described to help you find the truth about its origins.

Google is starting to roll out its new “About this image” tool, which aims to provide essential background information and context about images in Google Search. The feature was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, and now it’s rolling out to English users globally. You can access the feature from the three-dot menu that appears in Search and Google Images results. The search giant is also announcing updates to its Fact Check Explorer initiative and AI-powered Search Generative Experience.

The “About this image”… More.

Continue reading “Google Search can now help verify an image’s origins” »

Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars. A notable example of such a legendary doctoral advisor is the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler. A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Hugh Everett (who proposed the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics), and a host of others who could collectively staff a top-tier physics department. In ecology, there is Bob Paine, who discovered that certain “keystone species” have an outsize impact on the environment and started a lineage of influential ecologists. And in journalism, there is John McPhee, who has taught generations of accomplished journalists at Princeton since 1975.

Computer science has its own such figure: Manuel Blum, who won the 1995 Turing Award—the Nobel Prize of computer science. Blum’s métier is theoretical computer science, a field that often escapes the general public’s radar. But you certainly have come across one of Blum’s creations: the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” better known as the captcha—a test designed to distinguish humans from bots online.

The Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on studying “frontier” AI models along the lines of GPT-4 and ChatGPT, today announced that it’ll pledge $10 million toward a new fund to advance research on tools for “testing and evaluating the most capable AI models.”

The fund, says the Frontier Model Forum — whose members include Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — will support researchers affiliated with academic institutions, research institutions and startups, with initial funding to come from both the Frontier Model Forum and its philanthropic partners, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn.

The fund will be administered by the Meridian Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., which will put out a call for an unspecified number of proposals “within the next few months,” the Frontier Model Forum says. The Institute’s work will be supported by an advisory committee of external experts, experts from AI companies and “individuals with experience in grantmaking,” added the Frontier Model Forum — without specifying who exactly those experts and individuals are or the size of the advisory committee in question.

A number of news and media publishers are already blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their sites, worried about the impact on traffic when all their work is swept up into AI chatbot experiences. However, a startup called Direqt believes publishers should embrace AI chatbots — just on their own terms. The company, which has now raised its first outside capital of $4.5 million, offers media companies like ESPN, GQ, Wired, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and others, their own customizable chatbot solutions that provide a direct connection to their audience, increased engagement with their own published content, as well as monetization via ads.

The startup was originally founded in 2017 with a focus on chatbot monetization, before turning more recently to AI. In its earlier days, the company had built out the ability to serve promotions and ads inside a chatbot experience, which it licensed to a larger customer in the U.S. In 2021, the team pivoted to start building a chatbot platform for publishers, still slightly ahead of the GPT wave and the rise of ChatGPT.

“Part of that was, candidly, us being a little bit early to the market,” remarked Direqt co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Nick Martin. “Fortunately, things over the last couple of months have really broken the direction we did anticipate all these years,” he said.