Lifeboat Foundation

Prehistoric insects, with their delicate and soft bodies, are challenging to preserve as fossils. While wings are more commonly fossilized, the bodies of these insects are often fragmented or incomplete, posing difficulties for scientific study. Paleontologists often rely on trace fossils to learn about these ancient insects, which are almost exclusively found as traces on fossil plants.

“We have a great fossil plant record,” said Richard J. Knecht, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. “Further back in time, it’s the trace fossils that tell us more about the evolution and behavior of insects than the body fossils because plants and the trace fossils on them preserve very well. And the trace, as opposed to a body, won’t move over time and is always found where it was made.”

Two geneticists explain the groundbreaking CRISPR-based therapies approved for sickle-cell disease and β-thalassaemia, and other genetic therapeutics in development, including base-editing and prime-editing.

Dark matter may be more vibrant than previously thought, UC Riverside study reports.

Thought to make up 85% of matter in the universe, dark matter is nonluminous and its nature is not well understood. While normal matter absorbs, reflects, and emits light, dark matter cannot be seen directly, making it harder to detect. A theory called “self-interacting dark matter,” or SIDM, proposes that dark matter particles self-interact through a dark force, strongly colliding with one another close to the center of a galaxy.

In work published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team led by Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, reports that SIDM simultaneously can explain two astrophysics puzzles in opposite extremes.

Our research at Vertex is built upon two strong pillars: biology and therapeutic innovation. We continue to fill our drug discovery toolbox with cutting-edge tools and technologies. One of these tools is CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. Watch this video to learn about how CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing works and how it can be used in therapeutic development.\

For company updates and to learn more about Vertex Pharmaceuticals, follow us on Twitter (/ vertexpharma, YouTube (/ @vertexpharmaceuticalsglobal) and LinkedIn (/ vertex-pharmaceuticals, or visit our website at www.vrtx.com.

Several women have filed medical malpractice lawsuits against a southern California plastic surgeon well known on Instagram, alleging that they endured botched surgeries, unexpected scarring and serious infections.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the series of lawsuits allege that Dr. Arian Mowlavi degraded the women by requiring them to take off all of their clothes during an examination, touching their bodies without consent and attempting to sell them additional procedures like breast augmentations and body sculpting.

Mowlavi, who was based in Laguna Beach, called himself “Dr. Laguna” and a “renowned body sculptor” while charging 10s of thousands for procedures that his patients allege were done sloppily or, in some cases, not by Mowlavi at all.

Electronics that mimic the treelike branches that form the network neurons use to communicate with each other could lead to artificial intelligence that no longer requires the megawatts of power available in the cloud. AI will then be able to run on the watts that can be drawn from the battery in a smartphone, a new study suggests.

As the brain-imitating AI systems known as neural networks grow in size and power, they are becoming more expensive and energy-hungry. For instance, to train its state-of-the-art neural network GPT-3, OpenAI spent US $4.6 million to run 9,200 GPUs for two weeks. Generating the energy that GPT-3 consumed during training released as much carbon as 1,300 cars would have spewed from their tailpipes over the same time, says study author Kwabena Boahen, a neuromorphic engineer at Stanford University, in California.

Now Boahen proposes a way for AI systems to boost the amount of information conveyed in each signal they transmit. This could reduce both the energy and space they currently demand, he says.

The concept of dendrocentric learning artificial intelligence is proposed to replace synaptocentric learning, reducing the energy use requirement and removing the thermal constraint.

The study found a direct correlation between specific brain rhythms during sleep and the process of memory consolidation.

Summary: Researchers unveiled a critical link between breathing and memory consolidation during sleep. In an extensive study involving EEG and breathing analysis, they discovered that specific sleep-related brain rhythms are directly influenced by our breathing patterns.

These findings highlight the importance of respiration in reinforcing learned information while we sleep. This work could have significant implications for addressing age-related memory issues and sleep disorders.

Join the discussion on this paper page.