Lifeboat Foundation

Fungi are everywhere—in our lawns and forests, in and on our bodies, and even lurking in that forgotten Tupperware container in the back of the fridge. While some fungi are harmful, the vast majority are beneficial to their environments and serve important ecological roles.

Some fungi act as parasites, infecting their hosts and sickening or even killing them. Common human ailments such as ringworm and athlete’s foot are caused by fungi. Pathogenic fungi like rusts and mildews regularly cause costly damage to important agricultural crops. Chestnut blight, Cryphonectria parasitica, was inadvertently introduced to North America from Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century and in a few short decades wiped out billions of chestnut trees in the United States, nearly causing their extinction. Fungi even attack other fungi. Hypomyces lactifluorum parasitizes species of Lactarius and Russula, transforming them into the choice edible known as the lobster mushroom.

Hands down, though, the fungal parasites that infect insects have to be among the most bizarre. These fungi keep their insect hosts alive but take complete control of their actions, using them as zombie minions to spread their spores for them.

Researchers at Empa, ETH Zurich and the Politecnico di Milano are developing a new type of computer component that is more powerful and easier to manufacture than its predecessors. Inspired by the human brain, it is designed to process large amounts of data fast and in an energy-efficient way.

In many respects, the human brain is still superior to modern computers. Although most people can’t do math as fast as a computer, we can effortlessly process complex sensory information and learn from experiences, while a computer cannot—at least not yet. And, the brain does all this by consuming less than half as much energy as a laptop.

One of the reasons for the brain’s energy efficiency is its structure. The individual brain cells—the neurons and their connections, the synapses—can both store and process information. In computers, however, the memory is separate from the processor, and data must be transported back and forth between these two components. The speed of this transfer is limited, which can slow down the whole computer when working with large amounts of data.

This week, AI researchers at Google have revealed PaLM-E, an embodied multimodal language model with 562 billion parameters.

Kinetic batteries are not your traditional chemical-based storage solutions.

Alternatives to chemical batteries can help fill the power generation drops caused by a grid largely using solar and wind sources.

Scientists working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough in understanding what goes wrong in our bodies during the progression of inflammatory diseases and—in doing so—unearthed a potential new therapeutic target.

The scientists have found that an enzyme called fumarate hydratase is repressed in macrophages, a frontline inflammatory cell type implicated in a range of diseases including lupus, arthritis, sepsis and COVID-19.

Professor Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity, is the lead author of the research article that has just been published in the journal, Nature. He said, “No one has made a link from fumarate hydratase to inflammatory macrophages before and we feel that this process might be targetable to treat debilitating diseases like lupus, which is a nasty autoimmune disease that damages several parts of the body including the skin, kidneys and joints.”

Summary: As the brain ages, microglia adopt dysfunctional states that increase the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: TCD

Scientists from the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI) have shed new light on aging processes in the brain. By linking the increased presence of specialised immune cells to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury for the first time, they have unearthed a possible new target for therapies aimed at treating age-related neurological diseases.

Nearly 270,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer each year.

According to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, about 70%–80% of these individuals experience estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, where cancer cells need estrogen to grow. In terms of treatment, this presence of hormone receptors provides a nice handle for targeting tumors, say with therapies that knock out the tumor cell’s ability to bind to estrogen and prevent remaining breast cancer cells from growing.

However, even if treated successfully, on average, one in five individuals with ER+ breast cancer experience a late recurrence when dormant tumor cells in distant parts of the body, such as the bone marrow, reactivate anywhere from five to over 20 years after initial treatment.

Roboticists have developed many advanced systems over the past decade or so, yet most of these systems still require some degree of human supervision. Ideally, future robots should explore unknown environments autonomously and independently, continuously collecting data and learning from this data.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently created ALAN, a robotic agent that can autonomously explore unfamiliar environments. This robot, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), was found to successfully complete tasks in the real-world after a brief number of exploration trials.

Continue reading “A robot that can autonomously explore real-world environments” »

FallenKingdomReads’ Beginner’s Guide to The Dark Tower by Stephen King

The Dark Tower is a series of novels written by the American author Stephen King. The series is a blend of several genres, including dark fantasy, horror, and western. The series follows the journey of the protagonist, Roland Deschain, as he seeks the Dark Tower, a mythical structure that is said to be the center of all universes.