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Jul 31, 2023

Oxidative Stress in Cancer Cell Metabolism

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are important in regulating normal cellular processes whereas deregulated ROS leads to the development of a diseased state in humans including cancers. Several studies have been found to be marked with increased ROS production which activates pro-tumorigenic signaling, enhances cell survival and proliferation and drives DNA damage and genetic instability. However, higher ROS levels have been found to promote anti-tumorigenic signaling by initiating oxidative stress-induced tumor cell death. Tumor cells develop a mechanism where they adjust to the high ROS by expressing elevated levels of antioxidant proteins to detoxify them while maintaining pro-tumorigenic signaling and resistance to apoptosis.

Jul 31, 2023

Bone Density Test Can Gauge Heart Attack Risk

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

A routine osteoporosis screening bone density test can also detect increased risk for a heart attack because of the presence of calcium in the aorta. But reading these images requires expertise and can be time-consuming.

Now, research from a multi-institution collaboration, including Harvard Medical School and Hebrew SeniorLife, reports that this calcification test score can be calculated quickly by using machine learning, without the need for a person to grade the scans.

Jul 31, 2023

OpenAI Quietly Shuts Down Its AI Detection Tool

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Dashing the hopes of liberal arts professors and teachers, OpenAI decommissions its AI content detector due to poor accuracy.

Jul 31, 2023

Microsoft warns of service disruptions if it can’t get enough A.I. chips for its data centers

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, supercomputing

Those efforts and the interest in ChatGPT have led Microsoft to seek more GPUs than it had expected.

“I am thrilled that Microsoft announced Azure is opening private previews to their H100 AI supercomputer,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, said at his company’s GTC developer conference in March.

Microsoft has begun looking outside its own data centers to secure enough capacity, signing an agreement with Nvidia-backed CoreWeave, which rents out GPUs to third-party developers as a cloud service.

Jul 31, 2023

Intel’s stock surges after better-than-expected Q2 results

Posted by in categories: computing, finance

Despite that drop, the company did better than expected. Wall Street had forecast it would lose 3 cents a share on an adjusted basis on sales of $12.1 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.

“Our overall position is strengthening,” CEO Pat Gelsinger told analysts, adding later, “simply put, it was a very good quarter.”

Still, he and Chief Financial Officer Dave Zinsner noted that the selling environment was improving only slowly, particularly for server chips.

Jul 30, 2023

A Black Gable Farmhouse Harvests its Own Electricity, Heat, and Water

Posted by in category: futurism

Built of prefabricated cross-laminated timber panels, this barn-inspired home blends into the rural landscape.

Jul 30, 2023

What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn’t optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others.

Jul 30, 2023

New Gene Therapy Takes Aim at Chronic Pain

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

It’s estimated that as many as one-third of Americans suffer from chronic pain, and many medications that have been developed to treat pain pose serious risks. Scientists have now created a gene therapy that can manipulate a specific channel that sodium ions move through, called NaV1.7. In tests using cells in culture and animal models, this approach successfully relieved chronic pain. The work has been reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Our study represents a major step forward in understanding the underlying biology of the NaV1.7 sodium ion channel, which can be harnessed to provide relief from chronic pain,” said senior study author Rajesh Khanna, director of the NYU Pain Research Center and professor of molecular pathobiology at NYU Dentistry.

Jul 30, 2023

New research clarifies connection between autism and the microbiome

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, genetics, neuroscience

The biological roots of autism continue to perplex researchers, despite a growing body of studies looking at an increasing array of genetic, cellular and microbial data. Recently, scientists have homed in on a new and promising area of focus: the microbiome. This collection of microbes that inhabit the human gut has been shown to play a role in autism, but the mechanics of this link have remained awash in ambiguity.

Taking a fresh computational approach to the problem, a study published today, June 26, in Nature Neuroscience sheds new light on the relationship between the microbiome and . This research—which originated at the Simons Foundation’s Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) and involved an innovative reanalysis of dozens of previously published datasets—aligns with a recent, long-term study of autistic individuals that centered on a microbiome-focused treatment intervention. These findings also underscore the importance of longitudinal studies in elucidating the interplay between the microbiome and complex conditions such as autism.

“We were able to harmonize seemingly disparate data from different studies and find a common language with which to unite them. With this, we were able to identify a microbial signature that distinguishes autistic from neurotypical individuals across many studies,” says Jamie Morton, one of the study’s corresponding authors, who began this work while a postdoctoral researcher at the Simons Foundation and is now an independent consultant. “But the bigger point is that going forward, we need robust long-term studies that look at as many datasets as possible and understand how they change when there is a [therapeutic] intervention.”

Jul 30, 2023

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome: How Your Ovaries Can Affect Your Heart

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

As if all that isn’t enough, now doctors are saying women with PCOS need to think about their heart health as well, says Erin Michos, M.D., associate director of preventive cardiology at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease.

“Women worry about infertility, acne and weight gain but might not be thinking of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. It’s important to know that they’re at an increased risk and how important diet and exercise is,” says Michos.