Lifeboat Foundation

Ear infections in babies and toddlers are extremely common. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, five out of six children will experience an ear infection before their third birthday.

“Many parents are concerned that an ear infection will affect their child’s hearing irreversibly—or that an ear infection will go undetected and untreated,” says David Tunkel, M.D., Johns Hopkins Medicine pediatric otolaryngologist (ENT). “The good news is that most ear infections go away on their own, and those that don’t are typically easy to treat.”

Ear infections happen when there is inflammation— usually from trapped bacteria—in the middle ear, the part of the ear connects to the back of the nose and throat. The most common type of ear infection is otitis media, which results when fluid builds up behind the eardrum and parts of the middle ear become infected and swollen.

A gene that plays a key role in regulating how bodies change across the 24-hour day also influences memory formation, allowing mice to consolidate memories better during the day than at night. Researchers at Penn State tested the memory of mice during the day and at night, then identified genes whose activity fluctuated in a memory-related region of the brain in parallel with memory performance.

Experiments showed that the gene, Period 1, which is known to be involved in the body’s circadian clock, is crucial for improved daytime memory performance. A paper describing the research was published online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

The research demonstrates a link between the circadian system and memory formation and begins to piece together the molecular mechanisms that help form and keep memories. Understanding these mechanisms and the influence of time of day on memory formation could help researchers to determine how and when people learn best.

Credit: Hyundai Motor Group.

During a press conference held yesterday in Seoul, South Korea, Hyundai Motor Group revealed plans for a new generation of high-tech cars incorporating nanoscale features, which it hopes to begin mass producing by 2025–2026.

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Ageing is not an inevitable fact of life – many animals have already found ways to delay death. Their clues might help us all enjoy longer and healthier lives.

A synaptic-resolution map of the neural circuits of a Drosophila larval brain reveals its connection types, neuron types, and circuit motifs.

Human cerebral organoids are three-dimensional biological cultures grown in the laboratory to mimic as closely as possible the cellular composition, structure, and function of the corresponding organ, the brain. For now, cerebral organoids lack blood vessels and other characteristics of the human brain, but are also capable of having coordinated electrical activity. They have been usefully employed for the study of several diseases and the development of the nervous system in unprecedented ways. Research on human cerebral organoids is proceeding at a very fast pace and their complexity is bound to improve. This raises the question of whether cerebral organoids will also be able to develop the unique feature of the human brain, consciousness. If this is the case, some ethical issues would arise. In this article, we discuss the necessary neural correlates and constraints for the emergence of consciousness according to some of the most debated neuroscientific theories. Based on this, we consider what the moral status of a potentially conscious brain organoid might be, in light of ethical and ontological arguments. We conclude by proposing a precautionary principle and some leads for further investigation. In particular, we consider the outcomes of some very recent experiments as entities of a potential new kind.

To explore the trillions of worlds in our galaxy, we will need space probes far more sophisticated than any craft we’ve ever built, including the ability to…

It’s becoming increasingly clear that courts, not politicians, will be the first to determine the limits on how AI is developed and used in the US.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into whether OpenAI violated consumer protection laws by scraping people’s online data to train its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile, artists, authors, and the image company Getty are suing AI companies such as OpenAI, Stability AI, and Meta, alleging that they broke copyright laws by training their models on their work without providing any recognition or payment.

OpenAI is releasing the Android version of the app for ChatGPT next week after launching on iOS in May.

Since launching in November, OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool has reached a number of users at a rate that’s astounding for anything outside of Threads — now the company says it’s ready to release an app for Android.

The ChatGPT for Android app is launching a few months after the free iOS app brought the chatbot to iPhones and iPads.

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