Lifeboat Foundation

The economic downturn is already a devastating blow to job seekers everywhere. Now scammers are taking advantage of the situation by ramping up their methods of swindling people.

Job scamming is a threat to job seekers all over the world. For example, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) reported an increase in job scam complaints in the United States and Canada in the past several years. Singapore job seekers lost $660 million SGD ($495 million USD) in 2022 alone. And in the UK, 10,000 people were approached on LinkedIn and Facebook by “foreign spies and malicious actors” to steal information.

Phishing attacks and malware are the primary methods of scamming job seekers, according to a February Trellix report. Scammers create fake websites, often employing typosquatting. A fake site uses a real name like Indeed that’s slightly misspelled (such as “Indeeed”) or extends the URL in hopes the job seeker will not notice the base domain name. These sites appear legitimate but are used to steal passwords and financial information.

One year ago, we published a hypothesis that generative AI would become a profound platform shift in technology. Then came the firestorm.

In a new study in mice, a team of researchers from UCLA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Harvard University have uncovered a crucial component for restoring functional activity after spinal cord injury. The neuroscientists have shown that re-growing specific neurons back to their natural target regions led to recovery, while random regrowth was not effective.

In a 2018 study published in Nature, the team identified a treatment approach that triggers axons —the tiny fibers that link nerve cells and enable them to communicate—to regrow after spinal cord injury in rodents. But even as that approach successfully led to the regeneration of axons across severe spinal cord lesions, achieving functional recovery remained a significant challenge.

Continue reading “Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury” »

Generative artificial intelligence – the kind of AI behind the hugely popular ChatGPT application – already is disrupting the healthcare industry. C-suite executives and other health IT leaders at provider organizations need to know much to keep up and what to be wary of.

Venky Anant is a partner at research and consulting firm McKinsey Digital. He is our guest on this week’s podcast. He has vast expertise in AI and knows well its disruptive potential.

Learn more about the ways this disease travels to different parts of your body, and how treatment can help stop the spread.

The boundaries of science are constantly being pushed and expanded as newer and more advanced technology is developed, and researchers are now promising a “new era” of discovery as the world’s most powerful X-ray laser comes online.

The laser in question is the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) II, and it’s able to produce up to a million X-ray flashes every single second. That’s some 8,000 times more than the original LCLS laser, creating a virtually continuous beam of highly energetic light that is 10,000 times brighter than before.

Continue reading “California Just Fired The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser” »

“If you can get up to a watt per square meter, it would be very attractive from a cost perspective,” Assawaworrarit says.

The invention taps into a source of energy that’s easily overlooked

The Earth is constantly receiving a tremendous amount of energy from the Sun, to the tune of 173,000 terrawatts. Clouds, particles in the atmosphere, and reflective surfaces like snow-covered mountains immediately reflect 30 percent of that energy out into space. The rest of it ends up warming the land, oceans, clouds, atmosphere, and everything else on the planet.

In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (public library), Annie Murphy Paul explores the most thrilling frontiers of this growing understanding, fusing a century of scientific studies with millennia of first-hand experience from the lives and letters of great artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Challenging our cultural inheritance of thinking that thinking takes place only inside the brain, she illuminates the myriad ways in which we “use the world to think” — from the sensemaking language of gestures that we acquire as babies long before we can speak concepts to the singular fuel that time in nature provides for the brain’s most powerful associative network.

Paul distills this recalibration of understanding:

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us — drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have, for the first time, witnessed nerve plasticity in the axon in motion.

Our nerve cells communicate through rapid transmission of electrical signals known as action potentials. All action potentials in the brain start in one unique small area of the cell: the axon initial segment (AIS). This is the very first part of the axon, the long, thin extension of a nerve cell that transmits signals or impulses from one nerve cell to another. It acts as a control center where it is decided when an action potential is initiated before traveling further along the axon.

Previously, researchers made the surprising observation that plasticity also occurs at the AIS. Plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to create new connections and structures in order to scale the amount of electrical activity, which is crucial for learning and memory. AIS plasticity occurs during changes in brain network activity.