Lifeboat Foundation

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

Designer chromosomes enable new studies of genome organization and evolution.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It sounds like a smartphone without a screen, and it will have a $24 / month subscription on top of it.

Humane has been teasing its first device, the AI Pin, for most of this year.

Humane is trying to invent a new way to use your mobile devices.