Lifeboat Foundation

Fields medalist Cédric Villani explains some of John Nash’s most amazing theorems.

Fields medal winner Cédric Villani takes us through the very special world of mathematical creation of John Nash, who founded several new chapters of game theory and geometric analysis in just a few revolutionary contributions that seemed to come from nowhere.
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Australian researchers have worked out how to fix a defect that causes lupus, and hope their world-first discovery will offer effective long-term treatment.

Published in Nature Communications, the Monash University-led study found a way to reprogram the defective cells of lupus patients with protective molecules from healthy people.

Using human cells, the new treatment restores the protective side of the immune system that prevents autoimmunity, which is when the immune system attacks its own cells. The findings relate to the autoimmune disease lupus, a debilitating disease with no cure and limited treatments.

Patients with recurrent Escherichia coli bacteremia can harbor strains with mutations that promote multidrug antibiotic resistance:

Certain patients with gram-negative bacterial bloodstream infections (GNB-BSIs) are well-known to experience recurrent bacteremia after receiving antimicrobial therapy — but is this phenomenon due to microbial factors? Researchers have analyzed isolates from patients with relapsed GNB-BSIs in which the initial and subsequent strains were nearly identical genetically.

Paired bacteremic isolates of E. coli, Klebsiella species, Serratia marcescens, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were identified for a detailed analysis of the E. coli strains. Time-kill studies found that 4 of the 11 recurrent isolates had a higher number of bacterial colony-forming units persisting through 24 hours of exposure to meropenem. The recurrent strain with the greatest number of persisting cells had a loss-of-function mutation in the ptsI gene (involved in the phosphoenolpyruvate phosphotransferase system and shown in vitro to be important to the effects of bactericidal antibiotics). Challenging mice with the initial and ptsI mutant recurrent strains in a bacteremia model showed that both variants were equally virulent, but the recurrent strain was 10-fold less susceptible to treatment with ertapenem.

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Highly reducing or oxidizing photocatalysts are a fundamental challenge in photochemistry. Only a few transition metal complexes with Earth-abundant metal ions have so far advanced to excited state oxidants, including chromium, iron, and cobalt. All these photocatalysts require high energy light for excitation and their oxidizing power has not yet been fully exploited. Furthermore, precious and hence expensive metals are the decisive ingredients in most cases.

A team of researchers headed by Professor Katja Heinze of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now developed a new molecular system based on the element manganese. Manganese, as opposed to precious metals, is the third most abundant metal after iron and titanium and hence widely available and very cheap. The study is published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

When spacecraft re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, friction heats them up and creates a plasma sheath that stops communications – but SpaceX thinks its Starlink satellites could solve the problem.

By Mark Harris

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Panpsychism panprotopsychism and neutral monism.

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Natural language processing has been profoundly impacted by the advent of vast neural network models that display remarkable fluency and language comprehension abilities. However, as covered previously, these large language models also suffer from several key deficiencies: brittleness, opacity, and hallucination.

Google has introduced the market’s first native multimodal generative AI model capable of ingesting and providing content based on text, audio, images, and video.