Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Synchron on Monday plans to launch an online…

WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) — Synchron Inc, a rival to Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant startup, is preparing to recruit patients for a large-scale clinical trial required to seek commercial approval for its device, the company’s chief executive told Reuters.

Synchron on Monday plans to launch an online registry for patients interested in joining the trial meant to include dozens of participants, and has received interest from about 120 clinical trial centers to help run the study, CEO Thomas Oxley said in an interview.

“Part of this registry is to start to enable local physicians to speak to patients with motor impairment,” he said. “There’s a lot of interest so we don’t want it to come in a big bottleneck right before the study we’ll be doing.”

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Personalized vaccine + immunotherapy cuts advanced liver cancer in small trial.

There were no serious adverse reactions. The most common was mild injection site reactions.

This Geneos treatment is a DNA vaccine that delivers the genetic code of mutated proteins into cells through a small electrical impulse. Each vaccine can target up to 40 mutated genes.

Niranjan Sardesai, the president of Geneos said that despite the small size of this study, their results are important for the advancement of the field. “Our mechanism confirms every step, from vaccination to tumor reduction, required to explain the immunological basis for the observed clinical responses,” he said in the statement.

Continue reading “Geneos vaccine shows efficacy in reducing liver tumors in trial” | >

Could life be found in frozen sea spray from moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter? New research finds that life can be detected in a single ice grain containing one bacterial cell or portions of a cell. The results suggest that if life similar to that on Earth exists on these planetary bodies, that this life should be detectable by instruments launching in the fall.

The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Freie Universität Berlin shows that individual ice grains ejected from these planetary bodies may contain enough material for instruments headed there in the fall to detect signs of life, if such life exists.

“For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said lead author Fabian Klenner, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. “Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons.”

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Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the ‘Great Filter.’

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Apple presents Ferret-UI

Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

Recent advancements in #multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been noteworthy, yet, these general-domain MLLMs often fall short in their ability to #comprehend and interact…

Join the discussion on this paper page.

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That is, until we drop an egg, spill our coffee, or an expensive vase falls off a shelf in our homes, reminding us that even the weakest of the four fundamental interactions known to physics, while hidden in plain sight, still exerts a significant influence on everything around us.

Some 1029 times weaker than the appropriately named weak force, which governs the radioactive decay of atoms, gravity is so subtle that it has virtually no effect at the subatomic level. Yet at the scale where interactions between objects are observable to us, gravity is the force that literally commands the motions of planets, as well as that of stars and galaxies. Even light, which universal laws govern to be the fastest thing in existence, cannot escape the influence of gravity.

Despite its ubiquity, gravity also remains one of the great mysteries of modern physics. While there remains no complete or perfect theory as to how gravity works, the best description of it remains the one Einstein gave us in 1915 with the publication of his general theory of relativity. To Einstein, gravity can be thought of not so much as a force acting on objects, but instead as a way to observe the curvature of spacetime itself that results from variances in the distribution of mass throughout the universe.

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