AI-powered research on one of the largest eye studies to date has created the most detailed maps of the retina ever produced.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 146
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Clinical trials are underway for a drug that could potentially prevent Alzheimer’s long before it kicks in. Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine are studying the effects of an experimental antibody called remternetug.
The drug was developed by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. It is designed for genetically predisposed people to develop Alzheimer’s and its study focuses on young people aged 18 and up.
Remternetug targets amyloid beta, a protein that forms plaque in the brain. The presence of plaque is one of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Other recently approved drugs, like donanemab, also target amyloid plaque, since that seems to be what you attack if you want to chip away at Alzheimer’s.
A 2020 assessment of IKN by the National Planning and Development Agency highlighted the risks, citing data including the abundance of disease-carrying mosquitoes. At least two construction workers caught malaria in 2022 while at the site, according to the Ministry of Health. Last year, 54 cases were reported there, but the ministry claimed the patients were infected elsewhere. Although the construction authority has taken some control measures, such as handing out mosquito nets to workers, it’s not well-equipped for the job, says Mirza Buana, a legal scholar at Lambung Mangkurat University in South Kalimantan: “It has all the authorities but no capabilities.” The agency has shifted most of the tasks—such as vector control and screening workers entering or leaving IKN—to district health officials, who have struggled to keep up.
Surendra is particularly worried about the potential spread of P. knowlesi, a parasite first discovered in the 1930s. It emerged as a public health threat in the early 2000s, in areas in the Malaysian part of Borneo where forests were cleared for oil palm plantations. It has since been identified in many Southeast Asian countries.
P. knowlesi primarily infects long-tailed macaques, highly adaptable monkeys that thrive at the forest edge, and is spread by forest-dwelling Anopheles mosquitoes that occasionally bite humans as well. People working in or near the forest, including hunters and loggers, are at the highest risk. Because it has an animal reservoir, the disease is impossible to eliminate completely. Mosquitoes don’t transmit P. knowlesi between people—or very poorly—but some scientists worry that could change.
Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism—a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon—using a cellular platform that they developed enabling the production of new classes of synthetic proteins. These synthetic proteins, researchers say, offer the promise of innumerable medical and industrial applications that can benefit society and human health.
The creation of the landmark GRO, known as “Ochre”—which fully compresses redundant, or “degenerate” codons, into a single codon—is described in a new study published in the journal Nature. A codon is a sequence of three nucleotides in DNA or RNA that codes for a specific amino acid, which serves as the biochemical building blocks for proteins.
“This research allows us to ask fundamental questions about the malleability of genetic codes,” said Farren Isaacs, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale School of Medicine and of biomedical engineering at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who is co-senior author of the paper. “It also demonstrates the ability to engineer the genetic code to endow multi-functionality into proteins and usher in a new era of programmable biotherapeutics and biomaterials.”
Every cell in the body normally has its fixed place as part of a tissue structure. Except for a few cell types, such as blood or immune cells. But cancer cells also cross established boundaries, grow into the surrounding tissue and multiply. And they can detach from the cell structure and spread via the blood or lymphatic vessels to other areas of the body, where they attach to new cells and form metastases.
The changes that cancer cells undergo to metastasize are not yet fully understood. Rho (Ras-homologous) GTPases apparently play an important role. These proteins process signals within cells and regulate, among other things, growth, differentiation into the genetically predetermined cell type and cell migration.
Rho GTPases are molecular switches that switch between an active and an inactive state by binding to the phosphate compounds GTP and GDP. GTP corresponds to the ‘on’ position of the switch and starts the molecular biological processes, while GDP corresponds to the ‘off’ position and stops them.
In this video, Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, TrueAGI and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI Alliance), analyzes DeepSeek LLM as an efficiency advancement rather than an AGI breakthrough. The model’s open-source implementation and technical architecture (mixture of experts and multi-token training) improve accessibility while maintaining performance. This development demonstrates the continued democratization of AI capabilities and may redirect industry focus toward alternative computing architectures and decentralized systems.
0:00 Intro.
00:33 Initial Thoughts on DeepSeek.
01:25 Efficiency Gains and Their Implications.
02:58 Technological Singularity and Rapid Advances.
04:07 DeepSeek’s Underlying Technology.
07:27 Open Source Approach and Its Benefits.
09:58 China’s Role in AI and Open Source.
12:20 Broader Implications for AI and AGI
15:42 Conclusion: The Path to Technological Singularity.
#AGI #Deepseek #AI
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SingularityNET was founded by Dr. Ben Goertzel with the mission of creating a decentralized, democratic, inclusive, and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). An AGI is not dependent on any central entity, is open to anyone, and is not restricted to the narrow goals of a single corporation or even a single country.
The SingularityNET team includes seasoned engineers, scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, and marketers. Our core platform and AI teams are further complemented by specialized teams devoted to application areas such as finance, robotics, biomedical AI, media, arts, and entertainment.
Website: https://singularitynet.io.
Vincent Danen is the Vice President of Product Security at Red Hat.
Cyber threats are an everyday reality. Attackers exploit the unwitting, stealing confidential and sensitive information through online scam campaigns. Data breach prevention is only as strong as the weakest link, and, in most cases, that link is human. As I mentioned in a previous article, it is reported that 74% of data breaches are caused by human error.
According to a 2020 FBI report, there was a 400% spike in cyberattacks during the Covid-19 pandemic. The human element is a significant vulnerability in cybersecurity, often overlooked in favor of technological solutions. Many organizations focus on addressing software vulnerabilities when employees remain the weakest link in the organization’s security program. Even the most secure software, with all vendor security patches applied, is in danger if the human aspect of risk management is neglected.
Cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM) patients treated with oral drug, REC-994, showed reduction in total cerebral and brainstem lesion volume.
Rice University researchers have revealed novel sequence-structure-property relationships for customizing engineered living materials (ELMs), enabling more precise control over their structure and how they respond to deformation forces like stretching or compression.
The study, published in a special issue of ACS Synthetic Biology, focuses on altering protein matrices, which are the networks of proteins that provide structure to ELMs. By introducing small genetic changes, the team discovered they could make a substantial difference in how these materials behaved. These findings could open doors for advancements in tissue engineering, drug delivery and even 3D printing of living devices.
“We are engineering cells to create customizable materials with unique properties,” said Caroline Ajo-Franklin, professor of biosciences and the study’s corresponding author. “While synthetic biology has given us tools to tweak these properties, the connection between genetic sequence, material structure and behavior has been largely unexplored until now.”
This engineered genome will help experts tailor organisms to fit the needs of their ever-changing environments.