Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 13

A small clinical trial, published in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, suggests that melatonin supplementation may help counteract DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

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UT Austin researchers have developed a biodegradable, biomass-based hydrogel that efficiently extracts drinkable water from the air, offering a scalable, sustainable solution for water access in off-grid communities, emergency relief, and agriculture.

Discarded food scraps, stray branches, seashells, and other natural materials serve as key ingredients in a new system developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin that can extract drinkable water from thin air.

This innovative system, called “molecularly functionalized biomass hydrogels,” transforms a wide range of natural products into sorbents—materials that absorb liquids. By pairing these sorbents with mild heat, the researchers can extract gallons of drinkable water from the atmosphere, even in arid conditions.

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We speak with Sakana AI, who are building nature-inspired methods that could fundamentally transform how we develop AI systems.

The guests include Chris Lu, a researcher who recently completed his DPhil at Oxford University under Prof. Jakob Foerster’s supervision, where he focused on meta-learning and multi-agent systems. Chris is the first author of the DiscoPOP paper, which demonstrates how language models can discover and design better training algorithms. Also joining is Robert Tjarko Lange, a founding member of Sakana AI who specializes in evolutionary algorithms and large language models. Robert leads research at the intersection of evolutionary computation and foundation models, and is completing his PhD at TU Berlin on evolutionary meta-learning. The discussion also features Cong Lu, currently a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind’s Open-Endedness team, who previously helped develop The AI Scientist and Intelligent Go-Explore.

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Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on o-series style reasoning and AGI. They are hiring a Chief Engineer and ML engineers. Events in Zurich.

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Shen et al. investigate the use of Lactobacillus plantarum, a commensal bacterial strain, as a chassis for targeting the olfactory mucosa to facilitate precise nose-to-brain delivery of therapeutic molecules. When engineered to secrete appetite-regulating hormones, intranasal delivery of L. plantarum alleviates obesity-related symptoms in a mouse model.

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“Can you hand me the… you know… the thingy? It’s right there next to that other doohickey!” Struggling to find the right word happens to all of us. In fact, it even has a name; lethologica, and it tends to become more common as we get older.

Forgetting words now and then isn’t a big deal, but if it starts happening frequently, it could be an early sign of changes in the brain linked to Alzheimer’s disease —long before more obvious symptoms appear. But here’s the twist: A recent University of Toronto study suggests that how fast you speak might be a better clue about brain health than the occasional word mix-up.

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