Lifeboat Foundation

Lecture from the 2nd mini-series (Is “God” Explanatory) from the “Philosophy of Cosmology” project. A University of Oxford and Cambridge Collaboration.

The rising prevalence of antibiotic resistant microbial pathogens presents an ominous health and economic challenge to modern society. The discovery and large-scale development of antibiotic drugs in previous decades was transformational, providing cheap, effective treatment for what would previously have been a lethal infection. As microbial strains resistant to many or even all antibiotic drug treatments have evolved, there is an urgent need for new drugs or antimicrobial treatments to control these pathogens. The ability to sequence and mine the genomes of an increasing number of microbial strains from previously unexplored environments has the potential to identify new natural product antibiotic biosynthesis pathways. This coupled with the power of synthetic biology to generate new production chassis, biosensors and “weaponized” live cell therapeutics may provide new means to combat the rapidly evolving threat of drug resistant microbial pathogens. This review focuses on the application of synthetic biology to construct probiotic strains that have been endowed with functionalities allowing them to identify, compete with and in some cases kill microbial pathogens as well as stimulate host immunity. Weaponized probiotics may have the greatest potential for use against pathogens that infect the gastrointestinal tract: Vibrio cholerae, Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium perfringens and Clostridioides difficile. The potential benefits of engineered probiotics are highlighted along with the challenges that must still be met before these intriguing and exciting new therapeutic tools can be widely deployed.

The discovery and application of antibiotic drugs is among the most significant accomplishments of medical science. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin (Fleming, 1929) and subsequent discovery and development of multiple classes of natural product antibiotics have been transformational to modern society. These compounds have yielded cheap and effective treatments for diseases caused by common bacterial infections that would previously have proven fatal. The advent of effective antibiotic drugs has made it possible to survive complex surgical procedures like open heart surgery and organ transplants and extended the average human life-span (Riley, 2005; Kaviani et al., 2020). The benefits of readily available antibiotic drugs have extended into agriculture and aquaculture, making it possible to increase productivity of farmed animals (Park et al., 1994; Patel et al., 2020).

Researchers discovered how to control the anomalous Hall effect and Berry curvature to create flexible quantum magnets for use in computers, robotics, and sensors.

QUT researchers have developed a new approach for designing molecular ON-OFF switches based on proteins which can be used in a multitude of biotechnological, biomedical and bioengineering applications.

The research team demonstrated that this novel approach allows them to design and build faster and more accurate diagnostic tests for detecting diseases, monitoring water quality and detecting environmental pollutants.

Professor Kirill Alexandrov, of the QUT School of Biology and Environmental Science, lead scientist on the CSIRO-QUT Synthetic Biology Alliance and a researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, said that the new technique published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology demonstrated that protein switches could be engineered in a predictable way.

One of the key challenges in TDA is to distinguish between “signal”—meaningful structures underlying the data, and “noise”—features that arise from the local randomness and inaccuracies within the data^15,16,17. The most prominent solution developed in TDA to address this issue is persistent homology. Briefly, it identifies structures such as holes and cavities (“air pockets”) formed by the data, and records the scales at which they are created and terminated (birth and death, respectively). The common practice in TDA has been to use this birth-death information to assess the statistical significance of topological features^18,19,20,21. However, research so far has yet to provide an approach which is generic, robust, and theoretically justified. A parallel line of research has been the theoretical probabilistic analysis of persistent homology generated by random data, as means to establish a null-distribution. While this direction has been fruitful^22,23,24,25, its use in practice has been limited. The main gap between theory and practice is that these studies indicate that the distribution of noise in persistent homology: (a) does not have a simple closed-form description, and (b) strongly depends on the model generating the point-cloud.

Our main goal in this paper is to refute the last premise, and to make the case that the distribution of noise in persistent homology of random point-clouds is in fact universal. Specifically, we claim that the limiting distribution of persistence values (measured using the death/birth ratio) is independent of the model generating the point-cloud. This result is loosely analogous to the central limit theorem, where sums of many different types of random variables always converge to the normal distribution. The emergence of such universal ity for persistence diagrams is highly surprising.

We support our universal ity statements by an extensive body of experiments, including point-clouds generated by different geometries, topologies, and probability distributions. These include simulated data as well as data from real-world applications (image processing, signal processing, and natural language processing). Our main goal here is to introduce the unexpected behavior of statistical universal ity in persistence diagrams, in order to initiate a shift of paradigm in stochastic topology that will lead to the development of a new theory. Developing this new theory, and proving the conjectures made here, is anticipated to be an exciting yet a challenging long journey, and is outside the scope of this paper. Based on our universal ity conjectures, we develop a powerful hypothesis testing framework for persistence diagrams, allowing us to compute numerical significance measures for individual features using very few assumptions on the underlying model.

Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, is set to launch an internet connection service in Bangladesh to connect geographically isolated (hard to reach) or disaster-affected populations with uninterrupted high-speed Internet.

Starlink provided two devices for a three-month test run, State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak told Dhaka Tribune after the meeting.

One of the devices will be installed on a bus while another device will be installed on a remote island in Bangladesh to test the compatibility of this internet service.

Elon Musk has announced a new venture called xAI that plans to “understand the true nature of the universe”. Here’s what we know so far.

By Chris Stokel-Walker

The company hopes that making LLaMA 2 open source might give it the edge over rivals like OpenAI.

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