Lifeboat Foundation

NIH-funded study suggests reducing exposure to airborne particulates may decrease dementia risk.

Higher rates of new cases of dementia in a population over time — known as incident dementia — are linked to long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution, especially from agriculture and open fires, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Scientists found that 15% of older adults developed incident dementia during the average follow-up of 10 years.

“As we experience the effects of air pollution from wildfires and other emissions locally and internationally, these findings contribute to the strong evidence needed to best inform health and policy decisions,” said Richard J. Hodes, M.D., director, National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of NIH. “These results are an example of effectively using federally funded research data to help address critical health risks.”

How will AI affect businesses and employees? It’s the million-dollar question, and according to Harvard Business School’s Raffaella Sadun, the answer will depend on how well an organization connects the new technologies to both a broad corporate vision and individual employee growth.

One without the other is a recipe for job elimination and fewer new opportunities for all. Luckily, she points out, we are early in our AI journey, and nothing is predetermined. Smart leaders don’t need to understand every technicality of AI. But they do need to identify the best use cases for their specific business and communicate a clear strategy for reskilling their teams.

Continue reading “How to Lead and Reskill in the Age of AI” »

Over $2772.7 billion, that’s how far global programmatic advertising display spend will march by 2028. In realms where consumer habits gravitate toward online experiences and cross-channel digital content consumption, the share of programmatic advertising in the total media-buying spend reaches 80%.

Meanwhile, the worth of the overall adtech market is expected to hit $2.9 trillion by 2031; it is heavily oversaturated, meaning that everyone striving to enter it should know how to do it the right way while saving resources but still offering competitive tech.

The adtech market is booming; however, it is not that it doesn’t face challenges. On the contrary, the last couple of years have been giving it a hard time—first with tightening privacy regulations, then with cookies crumbling, and finally with a pandemic period full of uncertainty.

How much time elapses between a blow to the head and the start of damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease?

A device that makes it possible to track the effects of concussive force on a functioning cluster of brain cells suggests the answer is in hours. The “traumatic brain injury (TBI) on a chip” being developed at Purdue University opens a window into a cause and effect that announces itself with the passage of decades but is exceedingly difficult to trace back to its origins.

“We’re basically creating a miniature brain that we can hit and then study,” said Riyi Shi, lead researcher and the Mari Hulman George Endowed Professor of Applied Neuroscience in Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “We know there’s a link between TBI and Alzheimer’s; that’s well established in clinical observation. But teasing out the basic essential pathway is not easy. With the TBI on a chip, we’re able to test a lot of hypotheses that would be very difficult to do in living animals.”

The Winer lab has helped establish three sub-specialties that are fueling the field.

The experimental interface allows the patient to communicate through a digital avatar, and it’s faster than her current system.

Animals have a living pulse. Do microbes have something like that as well? If so, it could be a universal biosignature for detecting extraterrestrial life and be useful for many other applications. For more see:

When can we call something alive? This question is more difficult than you may think and has far-reaching practical implications.

Most modern computers – from primitive room-filling behemoths like the ENIAC to the smartphone in your pocket – are built according to a set of principles laid out by the mathematician John von Neumann in 1945. This von Neumann architecture, as it is known, incorporates many familiar elements, including a central processing unit, a memory for storing data and instructions, and input and output devices. Despite its ubiquity, though, von Neumann’s model is not the only way of building a computer, and for some applications, it is not the most desirable, either.

One emerging alternative is known as neuromorphic computing. As the name implies, neuromorphic computers are inspired by the architecture of the human brain and use highly connected artificial neurons and artificial synapses to simulate the brain’s structure and functions. For researchers like Le Zhao of China’s Qilu University of Technology, this neuromorphic model offers a fantastic opportunity to develop a new paradigm for computing – as long as we can develop artificial neurons and synapses that have the right properties.

In a recent paper published in Materials Futures, Zhao and colleagues describe how to use a memristor – essentially a switch that “remembers” which electric state it was in, even after its power is turned off – to emulate the function of a synapse in the brain. Here, he explains the team’s goals and plans.

The field of quantum physics is rife with paths leading to tantalizing new areas of study, but one rabbit hole offers a unique vantage point into a world where particles behave differently—through the proverbial looking glass.

Dubbed the “Alice ring” after Lewis Carroll’s world-renowned stories on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the appearance of this object verifies a decades-old theory on how monopoles decay. Specifically, that they decay into a ring-like vortex, where any other monopoles passing through the center are flipped into their opposite magnetic charges.

Published in Nature Communications on August 29, these findings mark the latest discovery in a string of work that has spanned the collaborative careers of Aalto University Professor Mikko Möttönen and Amherst College Professor David Hall.