Lifeboat Foundation

A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.

A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain.

When the woman’s illness began, “trying to identify the microscopic larvae, which had never previously been identified as causing human infection, was a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Karina Kennedy, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) Medical School and Director of Clinical Microbiology at Canberra Hospital, said in a press release.

Sepideh Sadaghiani, Associate Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, & Bioengineering at Illinois, lectured on “The functional connectome across temporal scales” at 4:00 pm in 2,269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom. Introduction by Ryan Miller, MBM trainee and PhD candidate in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.

For more information on the lecture and Dr. Sadaghiani: https://publish.illinois.edu/minibrain/2022/07/26/sepideh-sa…s-lecture/

Continue reading “The functional connectome across temporal scales” »

Don’t always follow what is popular, as what is good becomes popular, like the iPhone vs Nokia phones. How many people has Tiktok poached from Facebook? WeChat is inspiring Elon Musk. Yeah China has made fake stuff in the past, but this isn’t as well as China’s electric car market. I don’t discriminate, and I even want to buy my parents a Nigerian car that runs on LNG and CNG. Eric I hope if they make this concept, you buy Gen this Honor V Purse, or even buy both of you the Honor Magic V2.

Honor Magic V2 and Honor V Purse Unboxing, First Look and Impressions. Sponsored by HONOR.
►HONOR Magic V2: https://www.hihonor.com/global/phones/honor-magic-v2/?utm_so…=kolreview.

Continue reading “Honor Magic V2 & Honor V Purse — The Future of Foldables?” »

“When checking the system this morning, I noticed your account logged in for over 20 hours,” begins a December 1998 email from the president of my dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) at the time. “Our service is unlimited, but we ask that you actually be using the connection while logged in.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself—why do I have an email from 1998?

The Y chromosome, which normally confers male characteristics, features large amounts of repetitive DNA, which meant it was difficult to compile a complete sequence until now.

By Michael Le Page

Naked mole rats are rodents that are about the size of a mouse with a key difference, aside from having no fur — they’re extremely long-lived — reaching ages of around 40 years old. For comparison, lab mice live an average of about three and a half years. To explain their extensive lifespans, researchers have sought to pinpoint how naked mole rats evade the onset of age-related diseases like cancer. In doing so, they’ve identified a form of gelatinous substance called hyaluronan, which has anti-inflammatory and anticancer properties. Now, the question of whether the benefits of the naked mole rat’s abundant levels of this form of hyaluronan — called high molecular mass hyaluronic acid (HMM-HA) — can be exported to other species has recently drawn attention.

Published in Nature, Gorbunova and colleagues from the University of Rochester show that genetically modifying mice to harbor an enzyme that produces HMM-HA extends their lifespan. The researchers go on to show that increasing HMM-HA reduces the prevalence of cancer. Additionally, the nmrHAS2 gene improves the healthspan of mice by countering physiological dysfunction, as measured with a frailty score. These findings provide the first evidence that genes from long-lived species can be exported to other species, perhaps conferring benefits to humans one day.

The prized materials could be transformative for research — but only if they have other essential qualities.

The Internet just changed forever, but most people living in the United States don’t even realize what just happened. A draconian new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union on Friday, and it establishes an extremely strict regime of Internet censorship that is far more authoritarian than anything we have ever seen before.

From this point forward, hordes of European bureaucrats will be the arbiters of what is acceptable to say on the Internet. If they discover something that you have said on a large online platform that they do not like, they can force that platform to take it down, because someone in Europe might see it. So even though this is a European law, the truth is that it is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us.

When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI’s large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text —a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the abstract problems that Webb set for it—the kind of thing you’d find in an IQ test. “I was really shocked by its ability to solve these problems,” he says. “It completely upended everything I would have predicted.”

Webb is a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the different ways people and computers solve abstract problems. He was used to building neural networks that had specific reasoning capabilities bolted on. But GPT-3 seemed to have learned them for free.