Lifeboat Foundation

Immune system changes in the pregnant body that protect the fetus appear to extend to the brain, where a decrease in immune cells late in gestation may factor into the onset of maternal behavior, new research in rats suggests.

In adult female rats that had never given birth—which typically don’t like being around babies—depletion of these cells sped up their care for rat newborns that were placed in their cage.

The loss of these cells, called microglia, and the related uptick in motherly attentiveness were also associated with changes to neuron activity in several regions of the rat brain, suggesting shifts in immune function have a role in regulating maternal behavior.

However, there are no drugs that specifically block MAPK4 that could be tested to reduce tumor growth. Instead, Yang and his colleagues explored an alternative approach.

We showed that blocking both AKT and PDK1 effectively repressed MAPK4-induced cancer cell growth, suggesting a potential therapeutic strategy to treat MAPK4-dependent cancers, such as a subset of TNBC, prostate and lung cancer.

“In this study we have not only advanced our understanding of the molecular mechanism underlying the tumor-promoting activity of MAPK4, we also have found a potential novel therapeutic approach for human cancers,” Yang said.

© 2023 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. All Rights Reserved.

Can AI capture the emotion that a singer today can convey, or dupe us into believing they’re not human? Can Ronnie James Dio’s voice be brought back from the dead? In this episode of The Singing Hole, we explore where AI’s technology is today, how creators are harnessing the technology and how we can better prepare for the eventual future with music.

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Continue reading “How long until AI can replace a singer? It’s already happening” »

Zach Kirkhorn’s replacement, Delhi-trained accountant Vaibhav Taneja, has kept a low profile since joining Tesla in 2016—a very low profile.

A lesson from ChatGPT: people get excited by progress when they understand what it means.

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Today I have an update on the reproduction efforts for the supposed room temperature superconductor, LK 99, the first images from the Euclid mission, more trouble with Starlink satellites, first results from a new simulation for cosmological structure formation, how to steer drops with ultrasound, bacteria that make plastic, an improvement for wireless power transfer, better earthquake warnings, an attempt to predict war, and of course the telephone will ring.

Continue reading “Superconductor LK99 Update” »

US scientists have achieved net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the second time since a historic breakthrough in December last year in the quest to find a near-limitless, safe and clean source of energy.

Scientists at the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory repeated the breakthrough in an experiment in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on 30 July that produced a higher energy yield than in December, a Lawrence Livermore spokesperson said.

For many people, they are tiny pests. These fruit flies that sometimes hover over a bowl of peaches or a bunch of bananas. But for a dedicated community of researchers, fruit flies are an excellent model organism and source of information into how neurons self-organize during the insect’s early development and form a complex, fully functioning nervous system.

That’s the scientific story on display in this beautiful image of a larval fruit fly’s developing nervous system. Its subtext is: fundamental discoveries in the fruit fly, known in textbooks as Drosophila melanogaster, provide basic clues into the development and repair of the human nervous system. That’s because humans and fruit flies, though very distantly related through the millennia, still share many genes involved in their growth and development. In fact, 60 percent of the Drosophila genome is identical to ours.

Once hatched, as shown in this image, a larval fly uses neurons (magenta) to sense its environment. These include neurons that sense the way its body presses against the surrounding terrain, as needed to coordinate the movements of its segmented body parts and crawl in all directions.