Lifeboat Foundation

JP Morgan presents FlowMind.

Automatic Workflow Generation with LLMs https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

The rapidly evolving field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has made significant strides in automating repetitive processes, yet its effectiveness diminishes in scenarios requiring…

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The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don’t just affect reproductive anatomy. They also reshape the brain, and a study has given us insight into how this happens.

Led by neuroscientists Elizabeth Rizor and Viktoriya Babenko of the University of California Santa Barbara, a team of researchers tracked 30 women who menstruate over their cycles, documenting in detail the structural changes that take place in the brain as hormonal profiles fluctuate.

The results, which are yet to be peer-reviewed but can be found on preprint server bioRxiv, suggest that structural changes in the brain during menstruation may not be limited to those regions associated with the menstrual cycle.

The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared to a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.

While the preliminary findings are far from confirmed, if they hold up it would further deepen the mystery of dark energy—and likely mean there is something important missing in our understanding of the cosmos.

These signals of our universe’s changing speeds were spotted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is perched atop a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the US state of Arizona.

A team of computer engineers from quantum computer maker Quantinuum, working with computer scientists from Microsoft, has found a way to greatly reduce errors when running experiments on a quantum computer. The combined group has published a paper describing their work and results on the arXiv preprint server.

Computer scientists have been working for several years to build a truly useful quantum computer that could achieve quantum supremacy. Research has come a long way, most of which has involved adding more qubits.

But such research has been held up by one main problem—quantum computers make a lot of errors. To overcome this problem, researchers have been looking for ways to reduce the number of errors or to correct those that are made before results are produced.

SpaceX is making rapid progress in the development of their Starship, with improvements in heat shield tiles, construction of a second launch tower, and multiple successful launches, showcasing their commitment to innovation and progress in space exploration.

Questions to inspire discussion.

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Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you’re up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe.

Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security.

As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community’s research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden’s senior adviser on technology and national security issues. And then, in July of last year, he became CEO and president of Rand, the oldest nonprofit think tank in the US, which has shaped government policy on nuclear strategy, the Vietnam War, and the development of the internet.

National clinical guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19 vary significantly around the world, with under-resourced countries the most likely to diverge from gold standard (World Health Organization; WHO) treatment recommendations, finds a comparative analysis published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health.

And nearly every national guideline recommends at least one treatment proven not to work, the analysis shows.

Significant variations in national COVID-19 treatment recommendations have been suspected since the advent of the pandemic, but these haven’t been formally quantified or studied in depth, note the researchers.

Healthy cells respond appropriately to changes in their environment. They do this by sensing what’s happening outside and relaying a command to the precise biomolecule in the precise domain that can carry out the necessary response.

Granular materials, those made up of individual pieces, whether grains of sand or coffee beans or pebbles, are the most abundant form of solid matter on Earth. The way these materials move and react to external forces can determine when landslides or earthquakes happen, as well as more mundane events such as how cereal gets clogged coming out of the box.

Yet, analyzing the way these flow events take place and what determines their outcomes has been a real challenge, and most research has been confined to two-dimensional experiments that don’t reveal the full picture of how these materials behave.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method that allows for detailed 3D experiments that can reveal exactly how forces are transmitted through granular materials, and how the shapes of the grains can dramatically change the outcomes. The new work may lead to better ways of understanding how landslides are triggered, as well as how to control the flow of granular materials in industrial processes. The findings are described in the journal PNAS in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Ruben Juanes and Wei Li SM ’14, PhD ’19, who is now on the faculty at Stony Brook University.