Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Analysis of human brain tissue reveals differences in how immune cells behave in brains with Alzheimer’s disease compared to healthy brains, indicating a potential new treatment target.

University of Washington-led research, published in August, discovered microglia in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease were in a pre-inflammatory state more frequently, making them less likely to be protective.

Microglia are immune cells that help keep our brains healthy by clearing waste and preserving normal brain function.

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Step back 54,000 years to a remarkable discovery that rewrites our understanding of early human society.

In the depths of Siberia’s Chagyrskaya Cave, scientists have uncovered the lives of a Neanderthal family, offering an unprecedented glimpse into our closest ancient human relatives.

This discovery isn’t just about finding bones; it’s a portal into the daily life, social structures, and even the hearts and minds of a species that walked the Earth alongside us.

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Prehistoric insects, with their delicate and soft bodies, are challenging to preserve as fossils. While wings are more commonly fossilized, the bodies of these insects are often fragmented or incomplete, posing difficulties for scientific study. Paleontologists often rely on trace fossils to learn about these ancient insects, which are almost exclusively found as traces on fossil plants.

“We have a great fossil plant record,” said Richard J. Knecht, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. “Further back in time, it’s the trace fossils that tell us more about the evolution and behavior of insects than the body fossils because plants and the trace fossils on them preserve very well. And the trace, as opposed to a body, won’t move over time and is always found where it was made.”

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Dark matter may be more vibrant than previously thought, UC Riverside study reports.

Thought to make up 85% of matter in the universe, dark matter is nonluminous and its nature is not well understood. While normal matter absorbs, reflects, and emits light, dark matter cannot be seen directly, making it harder to detect. A theory called “self-interacting dark matter,” or SIDM, proposes that dark matter particles self-interact through a dark force, strongly colliding with one another close to the center of a galaxy.

In work published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team led by Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, reports that SIDM simultaneously can explain two astrophysics puzzles in opposite extremes.

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Our research at Vertex is built upon two strong pillars: biology and therapeutic innovation. We continue to fill our drug discovery toolbox with cutting-edge tools and technologies. One of these tools is CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. Watch this video to learn about how CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing works and how it can be used in therapeutic development.\

For company updates and to learn more about Vertex Pharmaceuticals, follow us on Twitter (/ vertexpharma, YouTube (/ @vertexpharmaceuticalsglobal) and LinkedIn (/ vertex-pharmaceuticals, or visit our website at www.vrtx.com.

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Several women have filed medical malpractice lawsuits against a southern California plastic surgeon well known on Instagram, alleging that they endured botched surgeries, unexpected scarring and serious infections.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the series of lawsuits allege that Dr. Arian Mowlavi degraded the women by requiring them to take off all of their clothes during an examination, touching their bodies without consent and attempting to sell them additional procedures like breast augmentations and body sculpting.

Mowlavi, who was based in Laguna Beach, called himself “Dr. Laguna” and a “renowned body sculptor” while charging 10s of thousands for procedures that his patients allege were done sloppily or, in some cases, not by Mowlavi at all.

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Electronics that mimic the treelike branches that form the network neurons use to communicate with each other could lead to artificial intelligence that no longer requires the megawatts of power available in the cloud. AI will then be able to run on the watts that can be drawn from the battery in a smartphone, a new study suggests.

As the brain-imitating AI systems known as neural networks grow in size and power, they are becoming more expensive and energy-hungry. For instance, to train its state-of-the-art neural network GPT-3, OpenAI spent US $4.6 million to run 9,200 GPUs for two weeks. Generating the energy that GPT-3 consumed during training released as much carbon as 1,300 cars would have spewed from their tailpipes over the same time, says study author Kwabena Boahen, a neuromorphic engineer at Stanford University, in California.

Now Boahen proposes a way for AI systems to boost the amount of information conveyed in each signal they transmit. This could reduce both the energy and space they currently demand, he says.

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