Lifeboat Foundation

Three individuals with profoundly impaired vision who got stem-cell transplants have seen significant improvements in their eyesight that have lasted for more than a year, marking a significant advancement in the restoration of blind vision.

A fourth person with very compromised vision saw improvement, although it did not last.

These four are the first to receive transplants of reprogrammed stem cells to heal injured corneas, the eye’s clear outer surface.

Individuals born before 37 weeks of gestation, considered to be preterm infants, have, on average, lower employment income, university enrollment and educational attainment through age 28, according to a study publishing November 6, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Petros Pechlivanoglou of The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.

Preterm birth affects about 10% of all births worldwide and accounts for one in five deaths in children. Economic and lifestyle factors can affect a family’s access to therapies and supports, financial stability and quality of life.

This article explores how AI is revolutionizing digital companionship and why raising virtual pets together might be the future of social connection.

If you ever tried cramming all your learning in one night before the exam, you know it doesn’t usually work. Surprisingly, this has little to do with the brain.

You can pop this new version onto your backpack, which could be a game changer for travelers.

Year 2021 resharing This design could be used to put on a watch or smartphone.

This new device changes the function of cells by injecting them with synthetic DNA.

When things get tough in adulthood, it might seem appealing to return to simpler times.

One bizarre marine creature has taken this approach to dire situations quite literally, regressing its physical adult body to a juvenile stage once the stress of starvation or injury has subsided.

Continue reading “Wild Discovery Reveals That Comb Jellies Can Age in Reverse” »

Brain and Organoid Manifold Alignment. Contribute to daifengwanglab/BOMA development by creating an account on GitHub.

Wetware computing and organoid intelligence is an emerging research field at the intersection of electrophysiology and artificial intelligence. The core concept involves using living neurons to perform computations, similar to how Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are used today. However, unlike ANNs, where updating digital tensors (weights) can instantly modify network responses, entirely new methods must be developed for neural networks using biological neurons. Discovering these methods is challenging and requires a system capable of conducting numerous experiments, ideally accessible to researchers worldwide. For this reason, we developed a hardware and software system that allows for electrophysiological experiments on an unmatched scale. The Neuroplatform enables researchers to run experiments on neural organoids with a lifetime of even more than 100 days. To do so, we streamlined the experimental process to quickly produce new organoids, monitor action potentials 24/7, and provide electrical stimulations. We also designed a microfluidic system that allows for fully automated medium flow and change, thus reducing the disruptions by physical interventions in the incubator and ensuring stable environmental conditions. Over the past three years, the Neuroplatform was utilized with over 1,000 brain organoids, enabling the collection of more than 18 terabytes of data. A dedicated Application Programming Interface (API) has been developed to conduct remote research directly via our Python library or using interactive compute such as Jupyter Notebooks. In addition to electrophysiological operations, our API also controls pumps, digital cameras and UV lights for molecule uncaging. This allows for the execution of complex 24/7 experiments, including closed-loop strategies and processing using the latest deep learning or reinforcement learning libraries. Furthermore, the infrastructure supports entirely remote use. Currently in 2024, the system is freely available for research purposes, and numerous research groups have begun using it for their experiments. This article outlines the system’s architecture and provides specific examples of experiments and results.

The recent rise in wetware computing and consequently, artificial biological neural networks (BNNs), comes at a time when Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are more sophisticated than ever.

The latest generation of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Meta’s Llama 2 or OpenAI’s GPT-4, fundamentally rely on ANNs.