Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 626

The current crop of AI robots has made giant leaps when it comes to tiny activities.

There are robots performing colonoscopies, conducting microsurgeries on and nerve cells, designing , constructing delicate timepieces and conducting fine touch-up operations on fading, aging classical paintings by the masters.

Robots are able to handle delicate objects thanks to what researchers call passive compliance. That is the ability to change their state in response to .

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Other questions to the experts in this canvassing invited their views on the hopeful things that will occur in the next decade and for examples of specific applications that might emerge. What will human-technology co-evolution look like by 2030? Participants in this canvassing expect the rate of change to fall in a range anywhere from incremental to extremely impactful. Generally, they expect AI to continue to be targeted toward efficiencies in workplaces and other activities, and they say it is likely to be embedded in most human endeavors.

The greatest share of participants in this canvassing said automated systems driven by artificial intelligence are already improving many dimensions of their work, play and home lives and they expect this to continue over the next decade. While they worry over the accompanying negatives of human-AI advances, they hope for broad changes for the better as networked, intelligent systems are revolutionizing everything, from the most pressing professional work to hundreds of the little “everyday” aspects of existence.

One respondent’s answer covered many of the improvements experts expect as machines sit alongside humans as their assistants and enhancers. An associate professor at a major university in Israel wrote, “In the coming 12 years AI will enable all sorts of professions to do their work more efficiently, especially those involving ‘saving life’: individualized medicine, policing, even warfare (where attacks will focus on disabling infrastructure and less in killing enemy combatants and civilians). In other professions, AI will enable greater individualization, e.g., education based on the needs and intellectual abilities of each pupil/student. Of course, there will be some downsides: greater unemployment in certain ‘rote’ jobs (e.g., transportation drivers, food service, robots and automation, etc.).”

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Graphene-based two-dimensional materials have recently emerged as a focus of scientific exploration due to their exceptional structural, mechanical, electrical, optical, and thermal properties. Among them, nanosheets based on graphene-oxide (GO), an oxidized derivative of graphene, with ultrathin and extra wide dimensions and oxygen-rich surfaces are quite promising.

Functional groups containing oxygen, such as carboxy and acidic hydroxy groups, generate dense negative charges, making GO nanosheets colloidally stable in water. As a result, they are valuable building blocks for next-generation functional soft materials.

In particular, thermoresponsive GO nanosheets have garnered much attention for their wide-ranging applications, from smart membranes and surfaces and recyclable systems to hydrogel actuators and biomedical platforms. However, the prevailing synthetic strategies for generating thermoresponsive behaviors entail modifying GO surfaces with thermoresponsive polymers such as poly (N-isopropylacrylamide). This process is complex and has potential limitations in subsequent functionalization efforts.

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A comprehensive review in the journal Cell outlines a unified framework for classifying and validating aging biomarkers, aiming to streamline their integration into clinical research and practice. The study categorizes biomarkers into types like molecular, functional, and clinical, and sets criteria for their feasibility, validity, and applicability, all with the goal of better understanding and intervening in the aging process.

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A new blood-based diagnostic test could be a major advancement for the treatment of Parkinson’s, a disease that afflicts 10 million people worldwide and is the second-most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s.

Building on the knowledge that mitochondrial dysfunction plays a prominent role in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s a team of researchers, led by neuroscientists at Duke Health, have developed an assay that enables the accurate, real-time quantification of mitochondrial DNA damage in a scalable platform [1]. The results of the study, which received support in part from The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

“Currently, Parkinson’s disease is diagnosed largely based on clinical symptoms after significant neurological damage has already occurred,” said senior author Laurie Sanders, PhD, an associate professor in Duke School of Medicine’s departments of Neurology and Pathology and member of the Duke Center for Neurodegeneration and Neurotherapeutics.

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Organometallic compounds, molecules made up of metal atoms and organic molecules, are often used to accelerate chemical reactions and have played a significant role in advancing the field of chemistry.

Metallocenes, a type of organometallic compound, are known for their versatility and special “sandwich” structure. Their discovery was a significant contribution to the field of organometallic chemistry and led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1973 to the scientists who discovered and explained their sandwich structure.

The versatility of metallocenes is due to their ability to “sandwich” many different elements to form a variety of compounds. They can be used in various applications, including the production of polymers, glucometers—used to measure the amount of glucose in the blood, perovskite , and as a catalyst, a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without being consumed or changed by the reaction itself.

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Metastasis is one of the main obstacles in treating cancer. Studying circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and CTC clusters at the single-cell level can help us understand the underlying mechanisms and develop better therapeutic strategies for patients. Automated solutions can vastly simplify protocols for CTC isolation for molecular characterization at the single-cell level.

What are circulating tumor cells?

CTCs are cells that break away from the primary tumor and enter the bloodstream. Once in the blood, CTCs can adapt to the microenvironment of additional sites, forming a new tumor. This process, called metastasis, is responsible for over 90% of cancer-related deaths and is an active area of research.

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A study led by researchers at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center sheds new light on why tumors that have spread to the brain from other parts of the body respond to immunotherapy while glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer that originates in the brain, does not.

In people with tumors that originated in other parts of the body but spread to the , treatment with a type of immunotherapy called appears to elicit a significant increase in both active and exhausted T cells—signs that the T cells have been triggered to fight the cancer. The reason the same thing doesn’t occur in people with glioblastoma is that anti-tumor immune responses are best initiated in draining lymph nodes outside of the brain, and that process does not occur very effectively in glioblastoma cases.

To date, immunotherapy has not been effective in treating glioblastoma, but it has been shown to slow or even eradicate other types of cancer, such as melanoma, which frequently metastasizes to the brain.

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