Lifeboat Foundation

A former Twitter executive said she slept on the office floor because Elon Musk gave her a “nearly impossible deadline.”

Esther Crawford, the former director of product management at the social-media giant, which rebranded as X this week, retweeted a photo of her wrapped up in a sleeping bag on the floor of one of Twitter’s conference rooms in November. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” Crawford wrote in the caption.

The photo of her lying on the floor and wearing an eye mask went viral.

Now fast forward 10 more years. That same man and his peers will have counted 70 circles round the sun. But John will remain biologically 60. At the same time, someone who is 30 years old in the year 2033 could theoretically begin the therapy at age 30, and stick at a biological age of 30 for the next 30 years, when their calendar would call them 60. That’s what gene therapies for longevity could do.

Longevity startups are riding high as a wave of gene therapies advance through clinical trials. Can they actually turn back the clock?

So far, gene therapy has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for only a couple of applications like rare inherited diseases and blood cancer. That said, more than 2,000 clinical trials are taking place in 2023, with 200 of them having already reached phase 3 clinical trials. A slew of upcoming gene therapies could be approved—possibly in the months to come—in the United States and Europe, targeting everything from sickle cell disease and hemophilia to metastatic skin cancer. In this future, gene therapy will be approved for everything we can imagine—and many things we can’t.

On Wednesday, Meta announced it is open-sourcing AudioCraft, a suite of generative AI tools for creating music and audio from text prompts. With the tools, content creators can input simple text descriptions to generate complex audio landscapes, compose melodies, or even simulate entire virtual orchestras.

AudioCraft consists of three core components: AudioGen, a tool for generating various audio effects and soundscapes; MusicGen, which can create musical compositions and melodies from descriptions; and EnCodec, a neural network-based audio compression codec.

It could send humans to Mars in half the time.

Electronic devices typically use the charge of electrons, but spin — their other degree of freedom — is starting to be exploited. Spin defects make crystalline materials highly useful for quantum-based devices such as ultrasensitive quantum sensors, quantum memory devices, or systems for simulating the physics of quantum effects. Varying the spin density in semiconductors can lead to new properties in a material — something researchers have long wanted to explore — but this density is usually fleeting and elusive, thus hard to measure and control locally.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has found a way to tune the spin density in diamond, changing it by a factor of two, by… More.

MIT researchers found a way to tune the spin density in diamond by applying an external laser or microwave beam. The finding could open new possibilities for advanced quantum devices.

Mayo Clinic scientists are building an expansive library of DNA blueprints of disease-causing bacterial species. The unique collection of genomic sequences is serving as a reference database to help doctors provide rapid and precise diagnoses and pinpoint targeted treatments to potentially improve patient outcomes.

The vast data set is also being studied by researchers in an effort to develop new individualized treatments to combat bacteria-related diseases.

Bacterial infections were linked to more than 7 million global deaths in 2019. Of those, nearly 1.3 million were the direct result of drug-resistant bacteria, according to the National Institutes of Health.

A new palliative care model provides early intervention to improve the quality of life for advanced cancer patients, says University of Melbourne expert.

Updated 19 seconds ago.

It appears that a professor from the University of Virginia has figured out how to construct a freeze gun, similar to the one wielded by Batman‘s adversary, Mr. Freeze, in the 1997 movie Batman and Robin. According to Futurism, however, the professor’s discovery is not meant to be used to create a weapon. The goal of Patrick Hopkins, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering, is to develop on-demand surface cooling systems for electronics in spacecraft and high-altitude jets.

A number of military leaders around the world have expressed concerns to US officials over the dominance and control of SpaceX founder Elon Musk over satellite internet, according to a new report.

Over the past decade Musk’s SpaceX has changed the launch industry with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The company has pressed this advantage to establish itself as the leading player in satellite internet through Starlink.