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Nov 9, 2023

Brain implant turns thoughts into speech with up to 84% accuracy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

The hope is that people who are unable to speak because of neurological conditions may one day be able to communicate again thanks to this modern technology.


Helping people with motor disorders

“There are many patients who suffer from debilitating motor disorders, like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or locked-in syndrome, that can impair their ability to speak,” said Gregory Cogan, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at Duke University’s School of Medicine and one of the lead researchers involved in the project.

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Nov 9, 2023

N. Korea’s BlueNoroff Blamed for Hacking macOS Machines with ObjCShellz Malware

Posted by in categories: blockchains, cybercrime/malcode

The development arrives days after Elastic Security Labs disclosed the Lazarus Group’s use of a new macOS malware called KANDYKORN to target blockchain engineers.

Also linked to the threat actor is a macOS malware referred to as RustBucket, an AppleScript-based backdoor that’s designed to retrieve a second-stage payload from an attacker-controlled server.

In these attacks, prospective targets are lured under the pretext of offering them investment advice or a job, only to kick-start the infection chain by means of a decoy document.

Nov 9, 2023

The FDA just approved rub-on gene therapy that helps “butterfly” children

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The first rub-on gene therapy shows how biotech companies are getting creative with how they deliver DNA fixes.

Nov 9, 2023

Synthetic yeast project unveils cells with 50% artificial DNA

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, evolution

Designer chromosomes enable new studies of genome organization and evolution.

Nov 9, 2023

Industrial robot crushes worker to death as he checks whether it was working properly

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Authorities say he was grabbed and pressed against a conveyor belt by the machine’s robotic arms in a vegetable packing plant.

Nov 9, 2023

First Partly Synthetic Eukaryote Genome Created in the Lab

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The synthesized yeast strain contains over 50% synthetic DNA and survives and replicates much like wild-type S. cerevisiae.

Nov 9, 2023

How Anesthesia Blocks Consciousness

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Summary: A new study reveals insights into how general anesthesia affects consciousness and sensory perception.

Using animal models, researchers found that while propofol anesthesia allows sensory information to reach the brain, it disrupts the spread of signals across the cortex. This suggests that consciousness requires synchronized communication throughout the brain, and propofol’s effect of limiting this interconnectivity could explain its role in inducing unconsciousness.

Nov 9, 2023

3D map plots human brain-cell ‘antennae’ in exquisite detail

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A new map of 56,000 cells in the outer layer of the human brain could inform research into a whole class of diseases.

Nov 9, 2023

Planetary Formation Dynamics Unveiled: Webb Telescope’s Surprising Findings

Posted by in category: space

A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters discusses a groundbreaking discovery using the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) onboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to reveal the processes responsible for planetary formation, specifically the transition of water from the colder, outer regions of a protoplanetary disk to the warmer, inner regions. This study was conducted by an international team of researchers and holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the complex processes behind planetary formation, which could also help us better understand how our own solar system formed billions of years ago.

“Webb finally revealed the connection between water vapor in the inner disk and the drift of icy pebbles from the outer disk,” said Dr. Andrea Banzatti, who is an assistant professor of physics at Texas State University and lead author of the study. “This finding opens up exciting prospects for studying rocky planet formation with Webb!”

Using MIRI, which is sensitive to water vapor in protoplanetary disks, the researchers analyzed four protoplanetary disks orbiting Sun-like stars, although much younger, at only 2–3 million years old, and the four disks analyzed consisted of two compact disks and two extended disks. The compact disks were hypothesized to deliver ice-covered pebbles to a distance equivalent to the orbit of Neptune in our solar system, and the extended disks were hypothesized to deliver ice-covered pebbles as far out as six times Neptune’s orbit. The goal of the study was to determine if the compact disks exhibited a greater amount of water in the inner regions of the disk where rocky planets would theoretically form.

Nov 9, 2023

Hugging Face has a two-person team developing ChatGPT-like AI models

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

AI startup Hugging Face offers a wide range of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like portal for AI code repositories, models and datasets, as well as web dashboards to demo AI-powered applications.

But some of Hugging Face’s most impressive — and capable — tools these days come from a two-person team that was formed just in January.

H4, as it’s called — “H4” being short for “helpful, honest, harmless and huggy” — aims to develop tools and “recipes” to enable the AI community to build AI-powered chatbots along the lines of ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s release was the catalyst for H4’s formation, in fact, according to Lewis Tunstall, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face and one of H4’s two members.