Lifeboat Foundation

Coming from a long line of educators all the way back to her great-grandmother, Toysha Mayer, D.H.Sc., swore she’d choose a different career.

“I didn’t want to teach, but after becoming a histotechnologist, I ended up working in teaching hospitals. It was a natural progression for me to work with new technicians, residents and fellows,” says the assistant professor and associate program director for Histotechnology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center School of Health Professions (SHP). Histotechnologists prepare patients’ tissues so our pathologists can make precise diagnoses for diseases like cancer.

In this online immunology course, you’ll learn about processes that enable our immune systems to respond to threats, and understand emerging treatments.

A recent crop of AI systems claiming to detect AI-generated text perform poorly—and it doesn’t take much to get past them.

Within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch, there were fears that students would be using the chatbot to spin up passable essays in seconds. In response to those fears, startups started making products that promise to spot whether text was written by a human or a machine.

The problem is that it’s relatively simple to trick these tools and avoid detection, according to new research that has not yet been peer reviewed.

The announcement last week of the discovery of the gravitational wave background has rocked astronomy, but work has already begun on how this new window to the universe can be used to tease apart how the universe works.

At this week’s National Astronomy Meeting 2023 at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, an international team of cosmologists revealed that observations of gravitational waves from merging black holes may reveal the true nature of “dark matter.”

Observations of gravitational waves from merging black holes—and their absence—may unveil the true nature of dark matter, according to new research.

Continue reading “Gravitational Waves Will Help Us Find ‘Dark Matter,’ Say Scientists” »

Scientists have found a group of ancient stars orbiting close to the center of our galaxy that may have formed in just the first billion years of the universe. That’s news because old stars are generally only found around the very edges of the Milky Way within the 150+ globular clusters—also called “galactic wanderers”—which may be linked to supermassive stars.

The Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS), which reported their results at this week’s National Astronomy Meeting 2023 at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, were looking near the galaxy’s center because galaxy formation models suggest that there ought to be ancient stars there—though very few have ever been seen before.

Most ancient stars we know of are found around the halo of our Milky Way galaxy, but a new study has discovered many close to the galaxy’s heart.

Continue reading “Found: Stars Over 12 Billion Years At The Heart Of Our Galaxy” »

Earlier this year, on the eve of Chicago’s mayoral election, a video of moderate Democrat candidate Paul Vallas appeared online. Tweeted by “Chicago Lakefront News,” it appeared to showcase Vallas railing against lawlessness in Chicago and suggesting that there was a time when “no one would bat an eye” at fatal police shootings.

The video, which appeared authentic, was widely shared before the Vallas campaign denounced it as an AI-generated fake and the two-day old Twitter account that posted it disappeared. And while it’s impossible to say if it had any impact on Vallas’s loss against progressive Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer, it is a lower stakes glimpse at the high stakes AI deceptions that will potentially muddy the public discourse during the upcoming presidential election. And it raises a key question: How will platforms like Facebook and Twitter mitigate them?

That’s a daunting challenge. With no actual laws to regulate how AI can be used in political campaigns, it is on the platforms to determine what deep fakes users will see on their feeds, and right now, most are struggling to address how to self-regulate. “These are threats to our very democracies,” Hany Farid, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at UC Berkeley, told Forbes. “I don’t see the platforms taking this seriously.”

Finding new drugs – called “drug discovery” – is an expensive and time-consuming task. But a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning can massively accelerate the process and do the job for a fraction of the price.

My colleagues and I recently used this technology to find three promising candidates for senolytic drugs – drugs that slow ageing and prevent age-related diseases.

Senolytics work by killing senescent cells. These are cells that are “alive” (metabolically active), but which can no longer replicate, hence their nickname: zombie cells.

DISCLOSURE: Longevity. Technology (a brand of First Longevity Limited) has been contracted by the company featured in this article to support its current funding round. Qualifying investors can find out more via the Longevity. Technology investor portal.

British regenerative medicine company Videregen is on a mission to cure chronic diseases and is targeting the human immune system through its work to regenerate the thymus. Building on groundbreaking work conducted at the Francis Crick Institute, Videregen believes its technology holds the potential to restore the function of the aging immune system. The company is already approved for initial clinical trials of its technology in respiratory disease and is working towards trials of its regenerative thymus technology within three years.

Longevity Technology: The thymus is a small but important organ in the immune system and is responsible for the development and maturation of critical T cells. It plays a key role in our early development, but declines significantly as we age, along with the functionality of our immune system, and its decline is linked to several age-related and chronic diseases. Videregen is betting that its technology can help restore the thymus, potentially rejuvenating our immune system in the process. To learn more, we spoke to the company’s CEO, Dr Steve Bloor.

A stem cell therapy treatment developed by Duke-NUS Medical School researchers for heart failure has shown promising results in preclinical trials. These cells, when transplanted into an injured heart, are able to repair damaged tissue and improve heart function, according to a study published in the journal npj Regenerative Medicine.

Longevity. Technology: The most common cause of death worldwide is ischemic heart disease, which is caused by diminished blood flow to the heart. When blood flow to the heart is blocked, the heart muscle cells die – a condition termed myocardial infarction or heart attack, something that happens to 805,000 people a year in the US [1].

In the Duke-NUS study, a unique new protocol was used where pluripotent stem cells were cultivated in the laboratory in order to grow into heart muscle precursor cells – these cardiomyocyte progenitors can develop into various types of heart cells, through a process called cell differentiation in which dividing cells gain specialised functions. During preclinical trials, the precursor cells were injected into the area of the heart damaged by myocardial infarction, where they were able to grow into new heart muscle cells, restoring damaged tissue and improving heart function.