Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A new tapered flow channel design for electrodes improves the efficiency of battery-based seawater desalination, potentially reducing energy use compared to reverse osmosis. This breakthrough may benefit other electrochemical devices, but manufacturing challenges need to be addressed.

Engineers have developed a solution to eliminate fluid flow “dead zones” in electrodes used for battery-based seawater desalination. This breakthrough involves a physics-driven tapered flow channel design within the electrodes, enabling faster and more efficient fluid movement. This design has the potential to consume less energy compared to conventional reverse osmosis techniques.

Continue reading “Desalination Breakthrough: Engineers Solve “Dead Zone” Problem” | >

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Callum said, looking down at his hands as he wrung them together in his lap. “It’s just that everything feels like a dream. I know I’m not dreaming – I mean – I think I’m really here, but at the same time I’m not sure. Everything feels off somehow.”

A deep sigh. “No one gets what I mean.”

The slim 18-year-old across from me looks defeated, dejected and thoroughly fed up. This is typical in my line of work. Not just because I’m a mental health professional, so I rarely get to meet people who are in the middle of the best time of their lives, but because I specialize in dissociation and depersonalization.

Continue reading “Depersonalization Disorder: What We Know About Mysterious Condition” | >

The campaign is unique for its focus on the Chinese-speaking demographic and the use of software-related lures to activate the attack chain.

“Equally striking is the attackers’ sophisticated use of legitimate software as a delivery mechanism for malware, seamlessly blending malicious activities with seemingly benign applications,” Fishbein said.

“The adaptability of the PNGPlug loader further elevates the threat, as its modular design allows it to be tailored for multiple campaigns.”

Continue reading “PNGPlug Loader Delivers ValleyRAT Malware Through Fake Software Installers” | >

Gould’s thesis has sparked widespread debate ever since, with some advocating for determinism and others supporting contingency. In his 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, science fiction author Ray Bradbury recounted how a time traveler’s simple act of stepping on a butterfly in the age of the dinosaurs changed the course of the future. Gould made a similar point: “Alter any early event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.”

Scientists have been exploring this problem through experiments designed to recreate evolution in the lab or in nature, or by comparing species that have emerged under similar conditions. Today, a new avenue has opened up: AI. In New York, a group of former researchers from Meta — the parent company of social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — founded EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology. The EvolutionaryScale Model 3 (ESM3) system created by the company is a generative language model — the same kind of platform that powers ChatGPT. However, while ChatGPT generates text, ESM3 generates proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life.

ESM3 feeds on sequence, structure, and function data from existing proteins to learn the biological language of these molecules and create new ones. Its creators have trained it with 771 billion data packets derived from 3.15 billion sequences, 236 million structures, and 539 million functional traits. This adds up to more than one trillion teraflops (a measure of computational performance) — the most computing power ever used in biology, according to the company.

Continue reading “AI simulates 500 million years of evolution to discover artificial fluorescent protein” | >

HERSHEY, Pa. — Immunotherapies that mobilize a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer have become a treatment pillar. These therapies, including CAR T-cell therapy, have performed well in cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, but the results have been less promising in solid tumors.

A team led by researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine has re-engineered immune cells so that they can penetrate and kill solid tumors grown in the lab. They created a light-activated switch that controls protein function associated with cell structure and shape and incorporated it into natural killer cells, a type of immune cell that fights infections and tumors. When these cells are exposed to blue light, they morph and can then migrate into tumor spheroids — 3D tumors grown in the lab from either mouse or human cell lines — and kill tumor cells. This novel approach could improve cell-based immunotherapies, the researchers said.

The findings were published today (Oct 23) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also filed a provisional application to patent the technology described in the paper.

Continue reading “Re-engineered, blue light-activated immune cells penetrate and kill solid tumors” | >

On a broader level, by pushing AI toward more human-like processing, Titans could mean AI that thinks more deeply than humans — challenging our understanding of human uniqueness and our role in an AI-augmented world.

At the heart of Titans’ design is a concerted effort to more closely emulate the functioning of the human brain. While previous models like Transformers introduced the concept of attention—allowing AI to focus on specific, relevant information—Titans takes this several steps further. The new architecture incorporates analogs to human cognitive processes, including short-term memory, long-term memory, and even the ability to “forget” less relevant information. Perhaps most intriguingly, Titans introduces a concept that’s surprisingly human: the ability to prioritize surprising or unexpected information. This mimics the human tendency to more easily remember events that violate our expectations, a feature that could lead to more nuanced and context-aware AI systems.

The key technical innovation in Titans is the introduction of a neural long-term memory module. This component learns to memorize historical context and works in tandem with the attention mechanisms that have become standard in modern AI models. The result is a system that can effectively utilize both immediate context (akin to short-term memory) and broader historical information (long-term memory) when processing data or generating responses.

Continue reading “Google’s Titans Give AI Human-Like Memory” | >