Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH, Bethesda, have discovered a potential breakthrough for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), marked by extreme exhaustion, post-exertional malaise and cognitive issues.

In a paper, “WASF3 disrupts mitochondrial respiration and may mediate exercise intolerance in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome,” published in PNAS, the team details the influence of increased WASF3 proteins on the assembly of mitochondrial proteins, hampering energy production.

The study focused on a woman (S1) who experienced severe long-term fatigue. Measuring her muscles for phosphocreatine regeneration after exercise revealed a significant delay in mitochondrial ATP synthesis capacity. This discovery was followed up with a cell assay which found increased phospho-activation of an enzyme in a signaling pathway (MPAK).

A recent study published in Nature Machine Intelligence examines a novel deep-learning method known as BigMHC, which can predict when the immune system will respond to triggers from cancer-related protein fragments, thus killing the tumors. This study was led and conducted by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University and holds the potential to develop personalized cancer immunotherapies and vaccines.

Rendition of cytotoxic CD8+ T-cells identifying cancer cells via receptor binding neoantigens. (Credit: Image generated by DALL-E 2 from OpenAI)

“Cancer immunotherapy is designed to activate a patient’s immune system to destroy cancer cells,” said Dr. Rachel Karchin, who is a professor of biomedical engineering, oncology and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, and a co-author on the study. “A critical step in the process is immune system recognition of cancer cells through T-cell binding to cancer-specific protein fragments on the cell surface.”

The Sotheby’s auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby’s auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs “an air of legitimacy… to generate investors’ interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand,” the class-action lawsuit claims.

The boost to Bored Ape NFT prices provided by the auction “was rooted in deception,” said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Central District of California. It wasn’t revealed at the time of the auction that the buyer was the now-disgraced FTX, the lawsuit said.

“Sotheby’s representations that the undisclosed buyer was a ‘traditional’ collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience,” the lawsuit claimed. Lawsuit plaintiffs say that harmed investors bought the NFTs “with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them.”

Ethics watchdogs are looking out for potentially undisclosed use of generative AI in scientific writing. But there’s no foolproof way to catch it all yet.

Mathematics has a reputation of being all about cold, calculating logic — but that couldn’t be further from the truth, says Eugenia Cheng.

The term ‘Expensive optimization problem’ (EOP) refers to any problem that requires expensive or even unaffordable costs to evaluate candidate solutions. These problems exist in many significant real-world applications.

On the one hand, the “expensive cost” can refer that an evaluation itself that requires abundant time, money and so on. On the other hand, the “expensive cost” is a relative concept rather than an absolute concept in many real-world problems.

For instance, when encountering emergencies like epidemics or natural disasters, transportation and dispatching can be urgent for supporting daily operations and saving lives, where the time cost of optimization will become too expensive to accept at this time.

Daily top 2023/08/18.

We’ve watched the remarkable evolution of robotics over the past decade with models that can walk, talk and make gestures like humans, undertake tasks from moving heavy machinery to delicately manipulating tiny objects, and maintain balance on two or four legs over rough and hostile terrain.

As impressive as the latest robots are, their accomplishments are largely the result of task-specific programming or remote instruction from humans.

Continue reading “New program takes us one step closer to autonomous robots” »

I’d heard that fear of the dark is a protein, Scotophobin A, which can be isolated from the brains of rats. My Chemistry teacher told us that 1-hexanol smelled like cut grass. I watched her draw it once, on the whiteboard. A colorless liquid that, I imagined, smelled like memory, summer term, sports day, an army of ants cresting the summit of a picnic blanket, damp loam after rain.

I’d hoped that studying neuroscience would teach me all about things like that. I imagined watching sunlight refract through a conical flask, some clear liquid roiling inside. “Fear of abandonment is a sequence of seventeen peptides,” our lecturer might say, “isolated from the muscles of the heartbroken.”

“Look here,” he would say, pointing to another vial. “We can synthesize these things in a lab now. This one is awe.”