Lifeboat Foundation

Malaria is a possibly fatal disease caused by a parasite transferred by mosquitos to humans. Common symptoms include fever, chills, and flu-like traits. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), around 2,000 cases of malaria are diagnosed in the United States per year. The diagnosis is common in individuals coming back from Africa or Asia. On a global scale, about 700,000 people die from malaria, and most are children. However, death from malaria can usually be prevented with early detection and proper medical care. Researchers are trying to proactively target malaria by developing a new vaccine using genetic material.

Researchers from the Victoria University of Wellington’s Ferrier Research Institute, the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity have all worked together to develop a vaccine that can effectively stimulate cells in the immune system against malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium. The vaccine, described in Nature Immunology, is designed to generate resident memory cells in the liver to combat Plasmodium. Resident memory cells are a type of immune cell that reside in tissues throughout the body to target invading pathogens that enter those tissues.

The vaccine is made with messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), as opposed to peptides or proteins. The difference between the two is the type of material delivered by the vaccine. Peptide-based vaccines use peptides from the virus to elicit an immune response. Alternatively, mRNA vaccines use mRNA extracted from the virus. In this study, the researchers originally used a peptide-based vaccine but recently found mRNA improves the activation of resident immune cells to kill malaria-based pathogens. The treatment result was significant between the two types of vaccines because the peptide-based vaccine had small fragments of protein and could not stimulate the immune system effectively, while the mRNA could encode for an entire malaria protein.

A recent study posted to the medRxiv preprint server investigates the association between the circulating proteome and brain health.

Study: The circulating proteome and brain health: Mendelian randomisation and cross-sectional analyses. Image Credit: Abduramanova Elena / Shutterstock.com.

*Important notice: medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.

Generative AI, in particular, is placing new demands on IT teams across nearly every industry. The GPUs required for generative AI are expensive and power-hungry, and you may need many. Aligning storage to keep those data-hungry GPUs fed requires adopting new technologies, such as NVIDIA’s GPUDirect, that enable applications to transfer data from primary storage directly into the GPU’s memory. The software stack looks unlike nearly anything else in enterprise IT. The list goes on and on.

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are working together to reduce the complexity of building and deploying infrastructure for Generative AI. The two companies announced Project Helix earlier this year at Dell Technologies World, which Dell described as delivering full-stack solutions with technical expertise and pre-built tools based on Dell and NVIDIA infrastructure and software.

Will they replace human cosmetics workers?

A report by CBS News.

The article outlined several AI firms that have entered the industry and shared their point of view on its progress.

Continue reading “AI robots can now do manicures and other beauty treatments” »

It turns out robots have a ‘U-shaped’ effect on profits.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have found that investment in robots can cause a firm’s profits to first decline before rising again, resulting in a so-called ‘U-shaped’ effect on profits.

This is according to a report by TechXplore published on Thursday.

Continue reading “Adopting robots will cause a business’s profits to decline at first” »

The machines have been tested and found more than competent.

China will soon allow intelligent robotic systems and platforms to provide maintenance services for the nation’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), dubbed as the ‘China Sky Eye’ and known as the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, the China Media Group (CMG)

The news was reported by CGTN after the robotic systems passed several tests ensuring they were ready for this lofty task.

A new robotic headgear allows mice to move freely while being attached to heavy and cumbersome brain-recording machinery, allowing scientists to track their brain activity in motion, according to a new report by Spectrum published on Thursday. The development could have major implications in neuropathy and other sciences of the brain.

Under normal circumstances, researchers analyze brain activity in an awake mouse by fixing the animal’s head in a stiff unmovable position beneath a microscope. This however severely limits the mouse’s range of motion and therefore does not produce accurate results.

As Ted Abel, chair of neuroscience and pharmacology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved in the study, explained to Spectrum, this approach is not conducive to usable outcomes.

A study observes a triple protostar system with spiral arms of gas that feed material to baby stars and finds a new mechanism for multiple star formation.

A team of international researchers has discovered how three baby stars are being fed by spiral arms of gas in a triple protostar system. The team, led by Professor Jeong-Eun Lee from Seoul National University, used the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescopes to observe the system called IRAS 04239+2436, located about 460 light-years away from Earth.

Continue reading “Research finds three baby stars fed by spiral arms of gas” »

SpaceX set a new record and did a launch at the same tower only 3 days, 22 hours, and 33 minutes after the last launch there. And this was after the launch was rescheduled due to bad weather.

If SpaceX could maintain a pace of once every 4 days for all 3 towers, they would be doing about 274 launches/year! While they clearly won’t launch that fast in the near future, they are gaining steam. And they are working on activating a fourth tower!

Continue reading “Starlink-96 (6-8) Mission (Falcon 9)” »