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Blog – Page 1693

Whether it’s a powered prosthesis to assist a person who has lost a limb or an independent robot navigating the outside world, we are asking machines to perform increasingly complex, dynamic tasks. But the standard electric motor was designed for steady, ongoing activities like running a compressor or spinning a conveyor belt – even updated designs waste a lot of energy when making more complicated movements.

Researchers at Stanford University have invented a way to augment electric motors to make them much more efficient at performing dynamic movements through a new type of actuator, a device that uses energy to make things move. Their actuator, published March 20 in Science Robotics, uses springs and clutches to accomplish a variety of tasks with a fraction of the energy usage of a typical electric motor.

“Rather than wasting lots of electricity to just sit there humming away and generating heat, our actuator uses these clutches to achieve the very high levels of efficiency that we see from electric motors in continuous processes, without giving up on controllability and other features that make electric motors attractive,” said Steve Collins, associate professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of the paper.

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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.

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Plasma exchange human trials.

TPE Treatment, is an FDA-approved treatment for many autoimmune diseases, shows age reversal identified by multiple biological clocks. It improved both physical strength and mental health in human clinical trial(unpublished data) presented by Dr. Kiprov.

TPE Treatment remove certain harmful substances circulating in plasma to nourish cellular habitat and support regenerative factors. A special machine separates the polluted plasma from blood cells. The aged, polluted plasma is discarded and replaced with clean, individualized, plasma-like replacement fluids, albumin, immunoglobins and other regeneration promoting factors. The new solution of freshly-cleaned blood is infused back to the body.

Continue reading “Anti-Aging Breakthrough? This FDA-Approved Procedure Reversed Aging in Multiple Clocks In Human Trial” | >

A lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can have close connections to bacteria in the human gastrointestinal tract, according to new research published in the journal Gut. COPD is a chronic lung disease in which patients have difficulty breathing. It is usually attributed to the inhalation of toxins like long-term cigarette use or exposure to air pollution, for example. Worldwide, COPD is the third leading cause of death. Now we can add it to the long list of conditions that have been associated with the vast community of microbes in the GI tract, called the gut microbiome.

Researchers have shown that specific types of gut bacteria are linked to the development of COPD. While this does not show a cause and effect relationship, the investigators also determined that when fecal bacteria were transferred from healthy mice to mice with COPD, symptoms of COPD were relieved in the recipient mice.

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A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford has challenged previously held views that brain preservation in the archaeological record is extremely rare. The team carried out the largest study to date of the global archaeological literature about preserved human brains to compile an archive that exceeds 20-fold the number of brains previously compiled. The findings have been published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Researchers from U of T Medicine pinpoint issue that could be hampering common chemotherapy drug ➡️

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research have found two enzymes that work against the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine, preventing it from effectively treating pancreatic cancer.

The enzymes – APOBEC3C and APOBEC3D – increase during gemcitabine treatment and promote resistance to DNA replication stress in pancreatic cancer cells.

This, in turn, counteracts the effects of gemcitabine and allows for the growth of cancer cells.

Continue reading “Researchers pinpoint issue that could be hampering common chemotherapy drug” | >

The term “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) has become ubiquitous in current discourse around AI. OpenAI states that its mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” DeepMind’s company vision statement notes that “artificial general intelligence…has the potential to drive one of the greatest transformations in history.” AGI is mentioned prominently in the UK government’s National AI Strategy and in US government AI documents. Microsoft researchers recently claimed evidence of “sparks of AGI” in the large language model GPT-4, and current and former Google executives proclaimed that “AGI is already here.” The question of whether GPT-4 is an “AGI algorithm” is at the center of a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against OpenAI.

Given the pervasiveness of AGI talk in business, government, and the media, one could not be blamed for assuming that the meaning of the term is established and agreed upon. However, the opposite is true: What AGI means, or whether it means anything coherent at all, is hotly debated in the AI community. And the meaning and likely consequences of AGI have become more than just an academic dispute over an arcane term. The world’s biggest tech companies and entire governments are making important decisions on the basis of what they think AGI will entail. But a deep dive into speculations about AGI reveals that many AI practitioners have starkly different views on the nature of intelligence than do those who study human and animal cognition—differences that matter for understanding the present and predicting the likely future of machine intelligence.

The original goal of the AI field was to create machines with general intelligence comparable to that of humans. Early AI pioneers were optimistic: In 1965, Herbert Simon predicted in his book The Shape of Automation for Men and Management that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do,” and, in a 1970 issue of Life magazine, Marvin Minsky is quoted as declaring that, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight.”

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