Lifeboat Foundation

A new study has revealed that the size of human brains is getting larger, which means increased brain reserve and decreased chances of developing dementia. The researchers at UC Davis Health reached the conclusion by comparing the size of the brains of people born in the 1930s with those of people born in the 1970s. They noticed that the latter had 6.6 per cent larger brains. The study was published in JAMA Neurology.

“The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health,” said Charles DeCarli, first author of the study.

He further adds that genetics may also play a major role in determining the size of the brain. “Genetics plays a major role in determining brain size, but our findings indicate external influences — such as health, social, cultural and educational factors — may also play a role,” he said.

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In a recent study published in the journal Nature Aging, researchers assessed the added predictive value of integrating polygenic risk scores (PRSs) and gut microbiome scores with conventional risk factors for common diseases in a long-term cohort study.

Analysis: Integration of polygenic and gut metagenomic risk prediction for common diseases. Image Credit: remotevfx.com / Shutterstock.

Continue reading “Multiomic approach boosts disease prediction accuracy beyond traditional methods” »

Patients being treated for B-cell non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) who are part of minority populations may not have equal access to cutting-edge CAR T cell therapies, according to a new analysis led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and published today in NEJM Evidence.

The first human recipient of a Neuralink brain implant has shared new details on his recovery and experience of living with the experimental assistive tech, which has allowed him a greater level of freedom and autonomy, including the ability to pull an all-nighter playing Sid Meier’s Civilization 6.

Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk took to X/Twitter in January to reveal that the company had implanted its first brain-computer interface in the head of a human patient, who was “recovering well” following the surgery. The billionaire also hinted at the time that the implant was functioning well and had detected a “promising neuron spike”. In a subsequent February update, Musk commented that the unnamed patient had seemingly made a full recovery, and was even able to use the implant to manipulate a computer cursor with thought alone.

Finally, on March 20, Neuralink posted its own update to X in the form of a nine-minute livestream in which 29-year-old implant recipient Noland Arbaugh used the technology to play a digital version of chess, while discussing how living with the experimental aide had changed his life.

💡Can LLMs like GPT-4 reason creatively?

On #AI and #creativity.

📝Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09682.pdf 🛠️Code and Data: https://github.com/allenai/MacGyver.

Continue reading “MacGyver: Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?” »

Artificial intelligence is poised to transform the practice of medicine through the design and deployment of AI models that can detect, diagnose, and render prognosis for a disease more rapidly than most human physicians can, and with similar or superior accuracy.

So-called foundation models — trained on vast amounts of unlabeled data and usable in multiple clinical contexts for different purposes with minimal tweaking — offer a particularly tantalizing promise to reshape diagnosis and treatment.

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Now Flinders University researchers have discovered a light-responsive, inexpensive sulfur-derived polymer receptive to low power, visible light lasers—which promises a more affordable and safer production method in nanotech, chemical science and patterning surfaces in biological applications.

Details of the novel system have just been published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, featuring a laser-etched version of the famous “Mona Lisa” painting and micro-Braille printing even smaller than a pin head.

“This could be a way to reduce the need for expensive, specialized equipment, including high-power lasers with hazardous radiation risk, while also using more sustainable materials. For instance, the key polymer is made from low-cost elemental sulfur, an industrial byproduct, and either cyclopentadiene or dicyclopentadiene,” says Matthew Flinders Professor of Chemistry Justin Chalker, from the Flinders University.

Mode-locked lasers are advanced lasers that produce very short pulses of light, with durations ranging from femtoseconds to picoseconds. These lasers are widely used to study ultrafast and nonlinear optical phenomena, but they have also proved useful for various technological applications.

Researchers at California Institute of Technology have recently been exploring the potential of mode-locked lasers as platforms to study topological phenomena. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, outlines the potential of these lasers for studying and realizing new non-Hermitian topological physics, with various potential applications.

“The idea of utilizing topological robustness and topological protection for photonic devices has attracted substantial attention in the past decade, yet whether such behaviors can provide substantial practical benefits remains unclear,” Alireza Marandi, lead author of the paper, told Phys.org.

In a talk at the ongoing Rencontres de Moriond conference, the ATLAS collaboration presented the result of its latest test of a key principle of the Standard Model of particle physics known as lepton flavor universality. The precision of the result is the best yet achieved by a single experiment in decays of the W boson and surpasses that of the current experimental average.