Lifeboat Foundation

A group of researchers created a first-generation AI worm that can steal data, spread malware, and spam others via an email client to spread through multiple systems.

Researchers successfully tested this Morris II worm and published its findings using two methods.

The first UK patients received the experimental mRNA therapy – a type of immunotherapy treatment called mRNA-4359 – at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust as part of a phase 1/2 clinical trial. The trial aims to evaluate its safety and potential for treating melanoma, lung cancer and other ‘solid tumour’ cancers.

The treatment is designed using messenger RNA (mRNA) and works by presenting common markers of tumours to the patient’s immune system. This should help to train patients’ immune systems to recognise and fight cancer cells expressing these markers, but also potentially eliminate cells that may suppress the immune response.

The University of Chicago Medicine is among the first 30 institutions in the country to offer tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy for advanced melanoma, immediately activating as an authorized treatment center after federal regulators approved the treatment on February 16, 2024.

TILs are…

Some patients with advanced melanomas — those that can’t be surgically removed or have spread to other parts of the body — don’t respond to standard treatment options such as immunotherapies and targeted therapies. TIL therapy gives these patients another therapeutic option: a completely personalized treatment made from the patient’s own cells that needs to be administered only once, since the cells remain in the body and keep performing their tumor-attacking duties.

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A new class of cancer treatments that harness the body’s immune system to fight tumors is being hailed as the biggest thing in oncology since CAR-T revealed the promise of cell therapy more than a decade ago.

There’s a growing pipeline of cancer therapy candidates that harness a patient’s immune system to fight tumors.

During a sunny morning on Florida’s Gulf Coast last month, an 11-year-old golden retriever named Hunter bounded through a pine grove.

A Yale researcher developed a vaccine that can slow or halt certain cancers in dogs. And it could be used to treat humans in the future.

Continue reading “Novel cancer vaccine offers new hope for dogs — and those who love them” »

This year, Rockefeller scientists plumbed the depths of wound repair and tackled how songbirds solve problems; they used microchips to grow mini-lungs and proposed an environmental trigger for multiple sclerosis. Efforts to combat COVID, Hepatitis B, and other infections bore fruit, and countless papers shed light on basic research, answering questions that have long baffled biologists. Here are some of the intriguing discoveries that came out of Rockefeller in 2023.

Old sperm, new mutations

As the male reproductive system ages, it becomes more and more susceptible to mutations. New research from the laboratory of Li Zhao explored this phenomenon in fruit flies, by focusing on how mutations arise during the formation of sperm. The team found that, while mutations are common in the testes of both young and old flies, the repair mechanisms that remove those mutations and maintain genomic integrity during spermatogenesis become less efficient in older individuals, leading to the accumulation and persistence of more mutations in older flies.

Computing has already accelerated scientific discovery. Now scientists say a combination of advanced AI with next-generation cloud computing is turbocharging the pace of discovery to speeds unimaginable just a few years ago.

Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, are collaborating to demonstrate how this acceleration can benefit chemistry and materials science – two scientific fields pivotal to finding energy solutions that the world needs.

Scientists at PNNL are testing a new battery material that was found in a matter of weeks, not years, as part of the collaboration with Microsoft to use to advanced AI and high-performance computing (HPC), a type of cloud-based computing that combines large numbers of computers to solve complex scientific and mathematical tasks.

Microsoft presents LLMs in the Imaginarium.

Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error https://huggingface.co/papers/2403.

Tools are essential for large language models (LLMs) to acquire up-to-date information and take consequential actions in external environments.

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Chatbot Arena.

An open platform for evaluating llms by human preference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked new capabilities and applications; however, evaluating the alignment with human preferences still poses significant challenges.

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