Lifeboat Foundation

Team members at Adobe have built a new way to use artificial intelligence to automatically personalize a blog for different visitors.

This tool was built as part of the Adobe Sneaks program, where employees can create demos to show off new ideas, which are then showcased (virtually, this year) at the Adobe Summit. While the Sneaks start out as demos, Adobe Experience Cloud Senior Director Steve Hammond told me that 60% of Sneaks make it into a live product.

Hyman Chung, a senior product manager for Adobe Experience Cloud, said that this Sneak was designed for content creators and content marketers who are probably seeing more traffic during the coronavirus pandemic (Adobe says that in April, its own blog saw a 30% month-over-month increase), and who may be looking for ways to increase reader engagement while doing less work.

UK neurologists publish details of mildly affected or recovering Covid-19 patients with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions.

Look deep inside our cells, and you’ll find that each has an identical genome –a complete set of genes that provides the instructions for our cells’ form and function.

But if each blueprint is identical, why does an eye cell look and act differently than a skin cell or brain cell? How does a stem cell—the raw material with which our organ and tissue cells are made—know what to become?

In a study published July 8, University of Colorado Boulder researchers come one step closer to answering that fundamental question, concluding that the molecular messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) plays an indispensable role in cell differentiation, serving as a bridge between our genes and the so-called “epigenetic” machinery that turns them on and off.

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Quantum computers (QC) are poised to drive important advances in several domains, including medicine, material science and internet security. While current QC systems are small, several industry and academic efforts are underway to build large systems with many hundred qubits.

Towards this, computer scientists at Princeton University and physicists from Duke University collaborated to develop methods to design the next generation of quantum computers. Their study focused on QC systems built using trapped ion (TI) technology, which is one of the current front-running QC hardware technologies. By bringing together computer architecture techniques and device simulations, the team showed that co-designing near-term hardware with applications can potentially improve the reliability of TI systems by up to four orders of magnitude.

Continue reading “Examining trapped ion technology for next generation quantum computers” »

COVID-19 hospitalizations in Connecticut increased by 14 since Monday, but the state is reporting no new coronavirus-related deaths for the “first time in months,” Governor Ned Lamont announced at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m paid to worry,” the governor said when talking about the hospitalizations increasing. “I would worry if I saw our admissions in our hospitals going up and that’s why you saw hospitalizations going up. That’s not what happened. We’ve added between about 20 and 30 new COVID cases a day into our hospitals. That’s consistent. That’s been consistent for the last few weeks. What is happened is there are many fewer discharges. It’s not something I worry about, just something I note to you.”

According to the state Department of Health, 5,745 tests have been administered since yesterday, and just 57 new cases were reported. Lamont said the state’s positive test percentage remains around one percent.

Tessera Therapeutics is developing a new class of gene editors capable of precisely plugging in long stretches of DNA—something that Crispr can’t do.

A 36-year-old man in Brazil has seemingly cleared an HIV infection—making him the proof of principle in humans of a novel drug strategy designed to flush the AIDS virus out of all of its reservoirs in the body. But scientists caution that the success hasn’t been long or definitive enough to label it a cure…so granted it worked, not so fast.

Vitamin and antiviral drugs appear to clear AIDS virus, but it could still be hiding out in tissue reservoirs.

The Genome Aggregation Database has collected 15,708 genomes and 125,748 exomes (the protein-coding part of the genome) to help shed light on how genetic mutations can lead to disease. Dr Daniel MacArthur, scientific lead of the gnomAD Project, explains how the project started, how they collect the data and what they hope to achieve.

Having hypertension in midlife (ages 40 through 60) is associated with elevated risk of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia later in life, even more so than having the so-called Alzheimer’s gene.

“It is clear that cerebral vascular disease”—that is, hardening of the arteries inside our brain—“and cognitive decline travel hand in hand,” something I’ve addressed before. “However, the independent association of AD [Alzheimer’s disease] with multiple AVD [atherosclerotic vascular disease] risk factors suggests that cholesterol is not the sole culprit in dementia.”

As I discuss in my video Higher Blood Pressure May Lead to Brain Shrinkage, one of the most consistent findings is that elevated levels of blood pressure in midlife, ages 40 through 60, is associated with elevated risk of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia later in life—in fact, even more so than having the so-called Alzheimer’s gene.