Lifeboat Foundation

Expensive blank baseball caps and boring camel jackets are in vogue with the 1%.

EGenesis has started transplanting gene-edited pigs’ hearts into infant baboons—and humans may be next.

AI startup Stability AI continues to refine its generative AI models in the face of increasing competition — and ethical challenges.

Today, Stability AI announced the launch of Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, a text-to-image model that the company describes as its “most advanced” release to date. Available in open source on GitHub in addition to Stability’s API and consumer apps, ClipDrop and DreamStudio, Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 delivers “more vibrant” and “accurate” colors and better contrast, shadows and lighting compared to its predecessor, Stability claims.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Joe Penna, Stability AI’s head of applied machine learning, noted that Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, which contains 3.5 billion parameters, can yield full 1-megapixel resolution images “in seconds” in multiple aspect ratios. “Parameters” are the parts of a model learned from training data and essentially define the skill of the model on a problem, in this case generating images.

Suumit Shah, a 31-year-old CEO of an e-commerce platform called Dukaan based in India, is getting torn to shreds online for firing 90 percent of the company’s customer support staff after arguing that an AI chatbot had outperformed them.

It was an unusually callous announcement that clearly didn’t sit well with plenty of netizens, as Insider reports.

“We had to layoff [sic] 90 percent of our support team because of this AI chatbot,” he tweeted. “Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.”

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China has long been touted as a revolutionary when it comes to wind power. Earlier this year, it was reported that the country had begun construction of a wind farm using what were then hailed as the largest turbines ever seen, each with a capacity of 16 megawatts. Now, a new milestone has been reached, with the successful switch-on of a turbine with a rotor diameter over twice the length of a football field.

China Three Gorges Corporation announced that the 16-megawatt MySE 16–260 turbine had been successfully installed at the company’s offshore wind farm near Fujian Province on July 19. The behemoth is 152 meters (500 feet) tall, and each single blade is 123 meters (403 feet) and weighs 54 tons. This means that the sweep of the blades as they rotate covers an area of 50,000 square meters (nearly 540,000 square feet).

It’s the first time such a large turbine has been hooked up to a commercial grid.

Early on, every stem cell faces a fateful choice. During skin development, for instance, the embryonic epidermis begins as a single layer of epidermal progenitor cells. Their choice is to become a mature epidermal cell or switch to becoming a hair follicle cell. This so-called fate switch is governed by the transcription factor SOX9. If the progenitor cell expresses SOX9, hair follicle cells develop. If it doesn’t, epidermal cells do.

But there is a dark side to SOX9, as it’s implicated in many of the deadliest cancers worldwide, including lung, skin, head and neck, and bone cancer. In skin, some aberrant adult epidermal stem cells later turn on SOX9 despite their chosen path—and never turn it off, kickstarting a process that ultimately activates cancer genes.

Scientists have never fully understood how this doomed outcome ensues at a molecular level. But now Rockefeller researchers have revealed the mechanisms behind this malignant turn of events. SOX9, it turns out, belongs to a special class of proteins that govern the transfer of genetic information from DNA to mRNA. That means it has the ability to pry open sealed pockets of genetic material, bind to previously silent genes within, and activate them. They published their results in Nature Cell Biology.

Researchers at NYU College of Dentistry’s Pain Research Center have developed a gene therapy that treats chronic pain by indirectly regulating a specific sodium ion channel, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The innovative therapy, tested in cells and animals, is made possible by the discovery of the precise region where a regulatory protein binds to the NaV1.7 sodium ion channel to control its activity.

“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 Rajesh Khanna, director of the NYU Pain Research Center and professor of molecular pathobiology at NYU Dentistry.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will get closer than ever before to Jupiter’s fiery moon, Io, this weekend.

On Sunday (July 30), the solar-powered mission will come within 13,700 miles (22,000 km) of Io’s volcanic surface. This Jovian satellite is just slightly larger than Earth’s moon, making it the fourth largest moon in our solar system.