Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The Microsoft-Mistral agreement draws the scrutiny of the European Commission.

Microsoft has inked a multi-year partnership with French startup Mistral AI to make its artificial intelligence (AI) models, like ‘Le Chat,’ available through the Azure cloud computing platform.

Essentially, Microsoft’s investment will be used to purchase equity in Mistral. The valuation of Mistral AI remains the same even after Microsoft’s investment.

This move comes amidst regulatory scrutiny faced by Microsoft in Europe and the US over its significant investment in OpenAI.

And the ink hadn’t even dried on the agreement signed by Microsoft and Mistral AI when it attracted the scrutiny of the European Commission.

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One of the immune system’s primary roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to evade this surveillance and develop into more advanced tumors.

A new study from MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one strategy that helps these avoid immune detection. The researchers found that early in colon cancer development, cells that turn on a gene called SOX17 can become essentially invisible to the immune system.

If scientists could find a way to block SOX17 function or the pathway that it activates, this may offer a new way to treat early-stage cancers before they grow into larger tumors, the researchers say.

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Most cancers are thought to evade the immune system. These cancers don’t carry very many mutations, and they aren’t infiltrated by cancer-fighting immune cells. Scientists call these cancers immunologically “cold.”

Now new research suggests such cancers aren’t as “cold” as once thought. Researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, and UC San Diego, have found that patients with “cold” tumors actually do make cancer-fighting T cells.

This discovery opens the door to developing vaccines or therapies to increase T cell numbers and treat many more types of cancer than currently thought possible.

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Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus studying interactions between nerves and tumor microenvironments have found that commonly used drugs like botox may stop or slow the progression of certain head and neck cancers.

The study, published online today in the journal Med, examined how nerves within the tumor environment impact the immune system and cancer growth.

“We have long known that the intensity of nerve interactions within the are associated with worse outcomes in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma,” said the study’s lead author Laurel Darragh, an MD/Ph. D. student focused on radiation oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “This prompted us to investigate how these nerve interactions impact the adaptive immune system and tumor growth.”

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Eyes with lower pigment (blue or grey eyes) don’t need to absorb as much light as brown or dark eyes before this information reaches the retinal cells. This might provide light-eyed people with some resilience to SAD.

Other theories propose it happens due to an imbalance in serotonin and melatonin in the body. Serotonin makes us feel energetic, while the release of melatonin makes us feel sleepy. Since melatonin is made from serotonin, people with SAD may potentially produce too much melatonin during the winter months, leaving them feeling lethargic or down.

All these studies are inconsistent and, in some cases, contradictory. But because SAD is likely due to a combination of many biological and physiological factors working together, these different explanations for what causes SAD may well be interconnected.

We have uncovered evidence that a person’s eye colour can have a direct effect on how susceptible they are to SAD.

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