Lifeboat Foundation

A research team co-led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has recently made a significant advancement in spinal cord injury treatment by using genetically-modified human neural stem cells (hNSCs).

They found that specifically modulating a gene expression to a certain level in hNSCs can effectively promote the reconstruction of damaged neural circuits and restore locomotor functions, offering great potential for new therapeutic opportunities for patients with spinal cord injury. The findings were published in the journal Advanced Science under the title “Transplanting Human Neural Stem Cells with ≈50% Reduction of SOX9 Gene Dosage Promotes Tissue Repair and Functional Recovery from Severe Spinal Cord Injury.”

Traumatic spinal cord injury is a devastating condition that commonly results from accidents such as falls, car crashes or sport-related injuries.

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Spin-based sensors have attracted attention due to their high sensitivities. Here authors present a fullerene-based nano spin sensor for in-situ sensing of gas adsorption in porous organic frameworks, demonstrating the potential applications of molecular spin systems in quantum sensing.

Not many pure-play quantum computing start-ups have dared to go public. So far, the financial markets have tended to treat the newcomers unsparingly. One exception is IonQ, who along with D-Wave and Rigetti, reported quarterly earnings last week. Buoyed by hitting key technical and financial goals, IonQ’s stock is up ~400% (year-to-date) and CEO Peter Chapman is taking an aggressive stance in the frothy quantum computing landscape where error correction – not qubit count – has increasingly taken center stage as the key challenge.

This is all occurring at a time when a wide variety of different qubit types are vying for dominance. IBM, Google, and Rigetti are betting on superconducting-based qubits. IonQ and Quantinuuum use trapped ions. Atom Computing and QuEra use neutral atoms. PsiQuantum and Xanadu rely on photonics-based qubits. Microsoft is exploring topological qubits based on the rare Marjorana particle. And more are in the works.

It’s not that the race to scale up qubit-count has ended. IBM has a 433-plus qubit device (Osprey) now and is scheduled to introduce 1100-qubit device (Condor) late this year. Several other quantum computer companies have devices in the 50–100 qubit range. IonQ’s latest QPU, Forte, has 32 qubits. The challenge they all face is that current error rates remain so high that it’s impractical to reliably run most applications on the current crop of QPUs.

Scientists found a way to translate brain waves into music, using a Pink Floyd song — here’s how the tech could be used for communication in the future.
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Published: August 8, 2023 8.29am EDT

Alexis souchet, university of southern california.

The big idea.

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This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Many artificial intelligence tools use public data to train their large language models, but now large social media sites are looking for ways to defend against data scraping. The problem is that scraping isn’t currently illegal.

According to Cybernews, data scraping refers to a computer program extracting data from the output generated from another program, and it is becoming a big problem for large social media sites like Twitter or Reddit.

What if “looking your age” refers not to your face, but to your chest? Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model that utilizes chest radiographs to accurately estimate a patient’s chronological age. More importantly, when there is a disparity, it can signal a correlation with chronic disease.

These findings mark a leap in medical imaging, paving the way for improved early disease detection and intervention. The results are published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.

The research team, led by graduate student Yasuhito Mitsuyama and Dr. Daiju Ueda from the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka Metropolitan University, first constructed a deep learning-based AI model to estimate age from chest radiographs of healthy individuals.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have found that molecules in vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower help to maintain a healthy barrier in the lung and ease infection.

The AHR—aryl hydrocarbon receptor—is a protein found at barrier sites like the gut and the lung. Natural molecules in cruciferous vegetables—for example, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, or cabbage—are dietary ‘ligands’ for AHR, which means, once eaten, they activate AHR to target a number of genes. Some of the genes targeted switch off the AHR system, allowing it to self-regulate.

The effect of AHR on immune cells is well understood, but this research, published in Nature, now shows that AHR is also highly active in endothelial cells lining blood vessels in the lung.