Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biological – Page 11

Might Artificial Intelligence be the ideal lab assistant? Stefan Harrer delves into the revolutionary role of generative AI in science. He reveals how AI agents are not just tools but transformative partners for scientists enabling them to achieve breakthroughs in biology and beyond, heralding a new era of scientific discovery and innovation. This inspiring talk highlights the potential for AI to redefine the boundaries of the scientific method and our understanding of life. Dr Stefan Harrer is the Director of AI for Science at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. He is on a mission to revolutionise scientific discovery by harnessing the power of AI agents. In senior leadership roles at IBM Research, he led groundbreaking work on AI-driven epilepsy management and developed the world’s first AI-powered wearable for seizure prediction. An inventor with 73 granted patents, a passionate advocate for ethical AI, and a mentor and advisor to startups and governments, Stefan inspires the next frontier of AI innovation and use. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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We work with a growing database of values-aligned specialists from across the world. These include scientific researchers, educators, thought-leaders, artists, companies, and nonprofits. Together, we co-create, accelerate, and amplify the impact of select projects. These projects are interdisciplinary in nature—often incorporating art, education, and research components to reach more diverse audiences, scale broader impacts, and deliver rapid change. These projects are frequently participatory, with the goal of democratizing the process of exploration and increasing the accessibility of findings, materials, and teachings. These projects are unique and may result in peer-reviewed research findings, open-source books, art exhibits, lesson plans, or innovative commercial products.

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It is pleasure for us to bring the ECFG conference to the island of Ireland from mainland Europe, we believe the conference will be a great scientific and social success.

We believe that Ireland is an ideal location which is accessible with low fare economic flights both from Europe and America and more than 20,000 hotel bed capacity for potential participants.

There will be a rich repertoire of research highlights from early, mid and advanced career researchers in the field of fungal genetics and biology. Our venue, the Convention Centre Dublin, is in a perfect location in the heart of Dublin city.

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A century ago, a scientist named Alexander Gurwitsch introduced a groundbreaking concept: living cells emit a faint ultraviolet light, invisible to the naked eye, which they use to communicate with each other and stimulate internal processes. At the time, his theory was dismissed due to lack of solid evidence. Today, thanks to advances in quantum physics, Gurwitsch’s ideas are resurfacing, providing a fascinating new perspective on cellular biology.

In the 1920s, Gurwitsch, a Russian biologist, conducted experiments that challenged the scientific thinking of his time. He observed a peculiar phenomenon when placing the tip of an onion root close to another root.

In detail, the researcher noticed that more cell divisions occurred on the side of the root that was exposed to the tip. This phenomenon seemed to suggest a form of communication between cells, stimulated by a specific type of light. However, this light was not visible like the everyday light we are used to. It was a very faint ultraviolet light, which could travel through air and certain materials like quartz, but was blocked by others, such as glass.

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In a new study published in PLOS Computational Biology, an international research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Cardiff University, and Google has reexamined Robert Axelrod’s groundbreaking work.

By simulating more than 195 strategies in thousands of tournaments, the study revealed that success in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma depends heavily on adaptation to diverse environments. Strategies that excelled in Axelrod’s controlled scenarios often failed when faced with a wider variety of opponents. Winning strategies are not only nice and reciprocal but also clever, slightly envious, and adaptable to the surrounding conditions.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic game in , presents players with the choice to cooperate or defect. Mutual cooperation results in moderate rewards for both players, while unilateral defection yields a high reward for the defector and a significant loss for the cooperator. If both players defect, they receive less than they would through . This tension between individual and collective benefit has made the game a model for decision-making in economics, politics, and biology.

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When a spider is spinning its web, its silk starts out as liquid and quickly turns into a solid that is, pound for pound, sturdier than steel. They manage to create these impressive materials at room temperature with biodegradable and environmentally friendly polymers. Materials scientists at Carnegie Mellon are studying these processes to better understand the ways biological systems manipulate polymers, and how we can borrow their techniques to improve industrial plastic processing.

One unique quality of polymers is that their molecules can have different shapes or “architectures,” and these shapes can have a big impact on their and recyclability. Polymer chains can form molecular strings, mesh-like networks, or even closed rings.

A new discovery about how ring-shaped polymers behave offers the potential to enable new ways for polymer scientists to design more sustainable materials. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has conducted the largest simulation to date on this type of polymer and confirmed theoretical predictions, finding that the ring polymers spontaneously solidify into glass when their chains become sufficiently long.

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Depth degradation is a problem biologists know all too well: The deeper you look into a sample, the fuzzier the image becomes. A worm embryo or a piece of tissue may only be tens of microns thick, but the bending of light causes microscopy images to lose their sharpness as the instruments peer beyond the top layer.

To deal with this problem, microscopists add technology to existing microscopes to cancel out these distortions. But this technique, called , requires time, money, and expertise, making it available to relatively few biology labs.

Now, researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus and collaborators have developed a way to make a similar correction, but without using adaptive optics, adding additional hardware, or taking more images. A team from the Shroff Lab has developed a new AI method that produces sharp microscopy images throughout a thick biological sample.

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