Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Therapeutic Granulomonocytapheresis as a Non-pharmacologic Treatment Option for Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Efficacy Reports on a Wide Age Range and Disease Profile

Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in biotech/medical

Nov 29
2023

The major phenotypes of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) include ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD), which cause debilitating symptoms, including bloody diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, and fever. Patients require life-long immunosuppressive medications, which cause adverse side effects as additional morbidity factors. However, IBD is initiated and perpetuated by inflammatory cytokines, and given that in patients with IBD myeloid lineage leukocytes are elevated with activation behavior and release inflammatory cytokines, selective depletion of elevated granulocytes and monocytes by granulomonocytapheresis is a relevant therapeutic option for IBD patients.

Therefore, a column filled with specially designed beads as granulomonocytapheresis carriers for selective adsorption of myeloid lineage leukocytes (Adacolumn) has been applied to treat patients with active IBD.

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Google DeepMind’s new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials

Posted by Shane Hinshaw in robotics/AI, solar power, sustainability

Nov 29
2023

Newly discovered materials can be used to make better solar cells, batteries, computer chips, and more.

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Six planets found in synchronized orbit may help solve cosmic puzzle

Posted by Arthur Brown in space

Nov 29
2023

They are the most common type of planet observed in our Milky Way galaxy — two to three times the diameter of Earth but smaller than Neptune, and orbiting closer to their stars than our solar system’s innermost planet Mercury does to the sun.

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Brain Implant Can Enable Communication Through Thoughts Alone

Posted by Arthur Brown in biotech/medical, computing, cyborgs, neuroscience

Nov 29
2023

A speech prosthetic developed by a collaborative team of Duke neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and engineers can translate a person’s brain signals into what they’re trying to say.

Appearing Nov. 6 in the journal Nature Communications, the new technology might one day help people unable to talk due to neurological disorders regain the ability to communicate through a brain-computer interface.

“There are many patients who suffer from debilitating motor disorders, like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or locked-in syndrome, that can impair their ability to speak,” said Gregory Cogan, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at Duke University’s School of Medicine and one of the lead researchers involved in the project. “But the current tools available to allow them to communicate are generally very slow and cumbersome.”

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Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning

Posted by Cecile G. Tamura in robotics/AI, solar power, sustainability

Nov 29
2023

An #AI tool that has discovered 2.2 million new materials, and helps to predict material stability.

AI tool GNoME finds 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies.

Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.

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