Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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At Stanford HAI, we believe AI is poised to be the most transformative technology of the 21st century. But its benefits won’t be evenly distributed unless we guide its development thoughtfully. The AI Index offers one of the most comprehensive, data-driven views of artificial intelligence. Recognized as a trusted resource by global media, governments, and leading companies, the AI Index equips policymakers, business leaders, and the public with rigorous, objective insights into AI’s technical progress, economic influence, and societal impact.

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Lithium was introduced into psychiatric practice in the late nineteenth century and has since become a standard treatment for severe psychiatric disorders, particularly those characterized by psychotic agitation. It remains the most effective agent for managing acute mania and preventing relapses in bipolar disorder. Despite potential adverse effects, lithium’s use should be carefully considered relative to other treatment options, as these alternatives may present distinct safety and tolerability profiles. The World Health Organization classifies lithium salts as ‘essential’ medications for inclusion in global healthcare systems. Over the past two decades, the growing recognition of lithium’s efficacy—extending beyond mood stabilization to include reducing suicide risk and inducing neuroprotection—has led to its incorporation into clinical practice guidelines.

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Microbial life has dominated Earth’s history but left a sparse fossil record, greatly hindering our understanding of evolution in deep time. However, bacterial metabolism has left signatures in the geochemical record, most conspicuously the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). We combine machine learning and phylogenetic reconciliation to infer ancestral bacterial transitions to aerobic lifestyles, linking them to the GOE to calibrate the bacterial time tree. Extant bacterial phyla trace their diversity to the Archaean and Proterozoic, and bacterial families prior to the Phanerozoic. We infer that most bacterial phyla were ancestrally anaerobic and adopted aerobic lifestyles after the GOE. However, in the cyanobacterial ancestor, aerobic metabolism likely predated the GOE, which may have facilitated the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.

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University of Oregon chemists are bringing a greener way to make iron metal for steel production closer to reality, a step towards cleaning up an industry that’s one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions worldwide. The research was published in ACS Energy Letters.

Last year, UO chemist Paul Kempler and his team reported a way to create iron with electrochemistry, using a series of chemical reactions that turn saltwater and into pure iron metal.

In their latest work, they’ve optimized the starting materials for the process, identifying which kinds of iron oxides will make the chemical reactions the most cost-effective. That’s a key to making the process work at an industrial scale.

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Although ADHD was orig­i­nal­ly con­sid­ered to be a dis­or­der of child­hood, it has been clear for years that it also impacts adults. At least 60% of chil­dren diag­nosed with ADHD strug­gle with symp­toms into adult­hood and the esti­mat­ed preva­lence of ADHD in adults is between 4 and 5%. As with chil­dren and teens, med­ica­tion treat­ment is…

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Now online! Inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines act as neuromodulators to regulate anxiety levels via direct action on the same population of neurons in the amygdala of mice, underscoring the conservation of immune signaling and its receptor subunits in the brain.

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Key to this innovation in ultrasound imaging—a method called Nonlinear sound sheet microscopy —was the discovery of a sound-reflecting probe. The author said: “This probe is a nanoscale gas-filled vesicle that lights up in ultrasound images, making cells visible. These vesicles have a protein shell and we can engineer them to tune their brightness in images. We used these gas vesicles to track cancer cells.”

In addition to revealing cells, the team used ultrasound and microbubbles as probes circulating in the blood stream to detect brain capillaries. The author said: “To our knowledge, nonlinear sound sheet microscopy is the first technique capable of observing capillaries in living brains. This breakthrough has tremendous potential to diagnose small vessel diseases in patients.” Since microbubble probes are already approved for human use, this technique could be deployed in hospitals in a few years.

Ultrasound is one of the most widely used imaging techniques in medicine, but up until recently it hardly played a role in imaging the tiniest structures of our bodies such as cells. “Clinical ultrasound, like the kind used for pregnancy scans, creates real-time images of body parts”, the first author explains. “It allows diagnosis of various diseases, or to monitor a developing baby. However, what is going on at a microscopic level remains hidden.”

Now, a team of scientists managed to image specifically labelled cells in 3D with ultrasound. For the first time, they imaged living cells inside whole organs across volumes the size of a sugar cube. In comparison, current light-based microscopes often require imaging of non-living samples, the author says. “The sample or organ of interest has to be removed and processed, and you lose the ability to track activity of cells over time”

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First, the team discovered that heparan sulfate (HSPG), a sulfated glycoprotein on the cell surface, plays a crucial role in attracting LNPs and facilitating mRNA entry into the cell.

- Second, they identified V-ATPase, a proton pump at the endosome, which acidifies the vesicle and causes LNPs to become positively charged, enabling them to temporarily disrupt the endosomal membrane and release the mRNA into the cytoplasm to be expressed.

- Lastly, the study uncovered the role of TRIM25, a protein involved in the cellular defense mechanism. TRIM25 binds to and induces the rapid degradation of exogenous mRNAs, preventing their function.

So how do the mRNA vaccines evade this cellular defense? A key finding of the study was that mRNA molecules containing a special modification called N1-methylpseudouridine (m1Ψ)—which was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—can evade TRIM25 detection. This modification prevents TRIM25 from binding to mRNA, enhancing the stability and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines. This discovery not only explains how mRNA vaccines evade cellular surveillance mechanisms but also emphasizes the importance of this modification in enhancing the therapeutic potential of mRNA-based treatments.

Additionally, the research highlighted the critical role of proton ions in this process. When the LNPs rupture the endosomal membrane, proton ions are released into the cytoplasm, which activates TRIM25. These proton ions act as a signal that alerts the cell to the invading foreign RNA, which in turn triggers a defense response. This is the first study to demonstrate that proton ions serve as immune signaling molecules, providing new insights into how cells protect themselves from foreign RNA.

A team of researchers has uncovered a key cellular mechanism that affects the function of mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. Their study, recently published in Science, provides the first comprehensive understanding of how mRNA vaccines are delivered, processed, and degraded within cells—a breakthrough that could pave the way for more effective vaccines and RNA-based treatments.

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Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have developed a machine-learning algorithm that could enhance our understanding of human biology and disease. The new method, Weighted Graph Anomalous Node Detection (WGAND), takes inspiration from social network analysis and is designed to identify proteins with significant roles in various human tissues.

Proteins are essential molecules in our bodies, and they interact with each other in , known as (PPI) networks. Studying these networks helps scientists understand how proteins function and how they contribute to health and disease.

Prof. Esti Yeger-Lotem, Dr. Michael Fire, Dr. Jubran Juman, and Dr. Dima Kagan developed the algorithm to analyze these PPI networks to detect “anomalous” proteins—those that stand out due to their unique pattern of weighted interactions. This implies that the amount of the protein and its protein interactors is greater in that particular network, allowing them to carry out more functions and drive more processes. This also indicates the great importance that these proteins have in a particular network, because the body will not waste energy on their production for no reason.

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