Lifeboat Foundation

A huge solar power station in China is generating clean energy, producing salt from sunlight, and serving as a shrimp-breeding site.

State-owned China Huadian Corporation said the 1-gigawatt (GW) Huadian Tianjin Haijing power station will generate 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year – enough to power around 1.5 million households in China.

Continue reading “This 1 GW solar + salt + shrimp farm is a 3-in-1 power station” »

Like its viral cousins, a somewhat parasitic DNA sequence called a retrotransposon has been found borrowing the cell’s own machinery to achieve its goals.

In a new work appearing online Wednesday in the journal Nature, a Duke University team has determined that retrotransposons hijack a little-known piece of the cell’s DNA repair function to close themselves into a ring-like shape and then create a matching double strand.

The finding upends 40 years of conventional wisdom saying these rings were just a useless by-product of bad gene copying. It may also offer new insights into cancer, viral infections and immune responses.

For cellular agriculture—a technique that grows meat in bioreactors—to successfully feed millions, numerous technological hurdles must be conquered. The production of muscle cells from sources such as chicken, fish, cows, and more will need to increase to the point where millions of metric tons are yielded annually.

Researchers at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) have made strides toward this objective by developing immortalized bovine muscle stem cells (iBSCs). These cells possess a rapid growth rate and the ability to divide hundreds of times, potentially even indefinitely, furthering the potential for large-scale meat production.

This advance, described in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, means that researchers and companies around the globe can have access to and develop new products without having to source cells repeatedly from farm animal biopsies.

Abundant carbon-free energy from nuclear fusion has long been considered a holy grail. Recent technological advances and the emergence of startup companies have led to new optimism, but experts caution that the production of fusion power is still a long way off.

The scientific community has discovered a new planet. It is located 245 light-years away from Earth and has been named TOI-733b. Its size is slightly less than twice the radius of Earth. It has a unique feature: its atmosphere. For now, experts have presented two possibilities. The first is that it may have lost its atmosphere layer. The second is that it could be a “highly irradiated oceanic world.”

This is stated in a study published by the specialized astronomy journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. In the study, it is detailed that this new planet has a density of 3.98 grams per cubic centimeter. To give an idea, it is slightly lower than Earth’s density, which is 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter, but higher than that of our neighbor Mars.

Another point mentioned in the Astronomy & Astrophysics article is that this planet orbits a star slightly smaller than the Sun and completes its orbit in a total of 4.9 days. It is this proximity to the star that serves as an explanation for the first of the two scenarios that scientists have proposed regarding its atmosphere.

Sports teams spend millions of dollars on their players’ health and fitness and any injuries can be detrimental to their players’ careers. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly change the way that sports spine injuries are diagnosed, treated, and managed. Tools such as Spindle and SpindleX are making it easy to prevent long-term injuries or spinal issues by detecting even the minutest variations in time. However, AI has just begun its foray into the field of healthcare and more importantly radiology or spine imaging.

With AI-related radiology imaging, it is becoming easier to prevent and cure injuries we didn’t even know existed. AI-assisted reports are helping physicians and surgeons take better and more accurate decisions and treatment plans, saving millions of dollars in the healthcare industry. Here are a few examples of how AI is improving the treatment of sports-related spine injuries:

Initial staging of prostate cancer (PCa) is usually performed with conventional imaging (CI), involving computed tomography (CT) and bone scanning (BS). The aim of this study was to analyze the role of [18F]F-choline positron emission tomography (PET)/CT in the initial management and outcome prediction of PCa patients by analyzing data from a multidisciplinary approach. We retrospectively analyzed 82 patients who were discussed by the uro-oncology board of the University Hospital of Ferrara for primary staging newly diagnosed PCa (median age 72 (56–86) years; median baseline prostate specific antigen (PSA) equal to 8.73 ng/mL). Patients were divided into three groups based on the imaging performed: group A = only CI; group B = CI + [18F]F-choline PET/CT; group C = only [18F]F-choline PET/CT. All data on imaging findings, therapy decisions and patient outcomes were retrieved from hospital information systems. Moreover, we performed a sub-analysis of semiquantitative parameters extracted from [18F]F-choline PET/CT to search any correlation with patient outcomes. The number of patients included in each group was 35, 35 and 12, respectively. Patients with higher values of initial PSA were subjected to CI + PET/CT (p = 0.005). Moreover, the use of [18F]F-choline PET/CT was more frequent in patients with higher Gleason score (GS) or ISUP grade (p = 0.013). The type of treatment performed (surgery n = 33; radiation therapy n = 22; surveillance n = 6; multimodality therapy n = 6; systemic therapy n = 13; not available n = 2) did not show any relationship with the modality adopted to stage the disease. [18F]F-choline PET/CT induced a change of planned therapy in 5/35 patients in group B (14.3%). Moreover, patients investigated with [18F]F-choline PET/CT alone demonstrated longer biochemical recurrence (BCR)-free survival (30.8 months) in comparison to patients of groups A and B (15.5 and 23.5 months, respectively, p = 0.006), probably due to a more accurate selection of primary treatment. Finally, total lesion choline kinase activity (TLCKA) of the primary lesion, calculated by multiplying metabolic tumor volume and mean standardized uptake value (SUVmean), was able to more effectively discriminate patients who had recurrence after therapy compared to those without (p = 0.03). In our real-world experience [18F]F-choline PET/CT as a tool for the initial management of PCa had a relevant impact in terms of therapy selection and was associated with longer BCR-free survival. Moreover, TLCKA of the primary lesion looks a promising parameter for predicting recurrence after curative therapy.

The innate immune system is able to identify foreign invaders and immediately respond to them. This system is important in order to protect the body from harmful substances.

The response to an infection triggers the arrival of cells called neutrophils, which attack the infection, followed by macrophages that attack bacteria and viruses.

Macrophages release cytokines in order to communicate with other cells when they encounter an enemy. Cytokines are small proteins that carry information. The immune system is activated by cytokines, which give the immune cells direction to fight.

The chief executive of an Indian startup laid off 90% of his support staff after the firm built a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that he says can handle customer queries much faster than his employees.

Summit Shah, the founder and CEO of Dukaan, a Bangalore-based e-commerce company, said on Twitter Monday that the chatbot — built by one of the firm’s data scientists in two days — could respond to initial customer queries instantly, whereas his staff’s first responses were sent after an average of 1 minute and 44 seconds.

The average time taken to resolve a customer’s issue also dropped by almost 98% when they interacted with the chatbot, he tweeted.