Lifeboat Foundation

A collaborative study by the UTokyo-KI LINK program, headed by Camilla Björkegren from Karolinska Institutet, Kristian Jeppsson and Katsuhiko Shirahige from The University of Tokyo shows that a protein complex named Smc5/6 binds DNA structures called positive supercoils. These form when the chromosomal DNA double helix folds onto itself due to overtwisting caused by transcription, which is the first step in gene expression.

The study presents in vivo data indicating that Smc5/6 binds to the base of chromosome loops in regions that contain high levels of transcription-induced positive supercoils. The complex is also shown to control the three-dimensional (3D) organization of these regions.

Computational machine learning provides additional results supporting that transcription-induced positive supercoils determine the chromosomal binding pattern of Smc5/6. Finally, in vitro single molecule analysis, performed by the team of Dr. Eugene Kim at Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, provides direct evidence that Smc5/6 preferentially binds positive DNA supercoils.

The attempt to resuscitate FTX is dead on arrival, and soon the defunct exchange will repay the people its convicted felon co-founder bilked out of money.

As The Guardian reports, company attorney Andrew Dietderich admitted that there will be no FTX comeback because, basically, nobody was dumb enough to try and rebuild it.

From the time one-time head Sam Bankman-Fried was first arrested back in November 2022 until now, there have been repeated and vague reports about a potential bounce-back for the shuttered brand.

“Soilless biofortification of vegetables has opened the door to the potential for adapting vegetable production to specific dietary requirements,” said Dr. Massimiliano Renna.

Can microgreen be customized based on dietary and medical needs? This is what a recent study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture hopes to address as a collaborative team of Italian researchers investigated the potential for customizing microgreens via soilless growing methods designed to suit specific dietary needs based on medical concerns. This study holds the potential to help scientists and patients better understand the available nutritional options, specifically for medical reasons.

“Propelled by an ever-growing awareness of the importance of following dietary recommendations, interest in personalized nutrition is on the rise. Soilless biofortification of vegetables has opened the door to the potential for adapting vegetable production to specific dietary requirements,” said Dr. Massimiliano Renna, who is a professor of agricultural and environmental science at the University of Bari Aldo Moro and a co-author on the study.

Continue reading “Customized Microgreens: A Breakthrough in Personalized Nutrition” »

Not all software is perfect—many apps, programs, and websites are released despite bugs. But the software behind critical systems like cryptographic protocols, medical devices, and space shuttles must be error-free, and ensuring the absence of bugs requires going beyond code reviews and testing. It requires formal verification.

Formal verification involves writing a mathematical proof of your code and is “one of the hardest but also most powerful ways of making sure your code is correct,” says Yuriy Brun, a professorat the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

To make formal verification easier, Brun and his colleagues devised a new AI-powered method called Baldur to automatically generate proofs. The accompanying paper, presented in December 2023 at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in San Francisco, won a Distinguished Paper award. The team includes Emily First, who completed the study as part of her doctoral dissertation at UMass Amherst; Markus Rabe, a former researcher at Google, where the study was conducted; and Talia Ringer, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), will be joined by policymakers and members of the health industry to consider how to prepare for the emergence of an unknown pathogen.

Michel Demaré, chair of the board of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, Brazilian health minister Nisia Trindade Lima and two other executives will also be on the panel, as will Shyam Bishen, a New York-based healthcare executive and member of the WEF’s executive committee.

He told CNBC on Monday that the forum had calculated that preparing the global health system for another pandemic would require “close to a trillion dollars,” describing the topic as a “big question.”

Jetsons made real. 😀 😍 Year 2023.

GPT Pilot is a dev tool that writes 95% of coding tasks.

Information is a valuable commodity. And thanks to technology, there are millions of terabytes of it online.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT are now managing this information on our behalf – collating it, summarising it, and presenting it back to us.

But this “outsourcing” of information management to AI – convenient as it is – comes with consequences. It can influence not only what we think, but potentially also how we think.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed lighter, safer artificial muscles that outshine their predecessors. These advanced actuators boast a unique shell structure and utilize high-permittivity ferroelectric material, storing significant electrical energy.

Operating at lower voltages, the new design offers enhanced safety, waterproofing, and durability. The team claims that the innovation marks a leap forward by enabling safer, more versatile artificial muscles that herald a new era in robotics and prosthetics.

Continue reading “Experts craft waterproof, low-voltage artificial muscles for bot motion” »

Experimental research conducted by a joint team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and D-Wave Quantum Systems examines the paradoxical role of fluctuations in inducing magnetic ordering on a network of qubits.

Using a D-Wave quantum annealing platform, the team found that fluctuations can lower the total energy of the interacting magnetic moments, an understanding that may help to reduce the cost of quantum processing in devices.

“In this research, rather than focusing on the pursuit of superior quantum computer performance over classical counterparts, we aimed at exploiting a dense network of interconnected qubits to observe and understand quantum behavior,” said Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla, a physicist in the Theoretical division at Los Alamos.