Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Consumers discard or possess disused electronic goods containing raw materials critical for the green energy transition and worth almost $10 billion every year, the United Nations said on Thursday.

Toys, cables, , tools, electric toothbrushes, shavers, headphones and other domestic gadgets contain metals like lithium, gold, silver and copper.

Demand is expected to soar for these materials due to their crucial role in rapidly growing green industries such as electric vehicle battery production.

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DARPA has contracted Raytheon to develop a practical version of a revolutionary air-breathing rotating detonation engine called Gambit, which would have no moving parts and could lead to lighter missiles with longer ranges at lower cost.

Gas turbines are remarkable power plants that have made possible modern air travel and many weapon systems, but they suffer from a number of disadvantages. They are complex machines that are heavy, have many moving parts that are costly to assemble and maintain, and they require exotic materials and special processing to handle the tremendous temperatures they operate at.

It’s bad enough when such an engine is installed in an aircraft, but when it’s part of a throwaway weapon like a cruise missile, this not only limits the payload, it runs into some serious money.

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An Australian first biobank will be established to improve and discover new treatments for children with genetic muscle diseases.

The National Muscle Disease Bio-databank, co-led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Monash University and The Alfred, will advance research into our understanding of why children develop genetic muscle diseases.

These diseases, spanning dystrophies and myopathies, are characterised by severe muscle weakness, usually from infancy, that can impact swallowing, breathing and lead to eye problems and learning difficulties.

Housed at Murdoch Children’s, the biobank will store blood test and skin biopsy samples from children across Australia with genetic muscle disease.

Murdoch Children’s Dr Peter Houweling said the project aimed to develop new and better treatments and fast-track discoveries into clinical trials.

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Summary: A groundbreaking suite of 21 papers has unveiled a momentous leap in our understanding of the brain, spotlighting the intricate cellular composition of human and primate brains through a consortium led by the BRAIN Initiative.

Utilizing innovative single-cell transcriptomics, researchers illuminated a stunning array of over 3,000 different brain cells and their distinctive functionalities. This extensive research not only dives into the distinctiveness of the human brain but also pioneers a suite of scalable techniques that offer an unparalleled, detailed organization view of the brain.

This pivotal moment in neuroscience sets a promising stage for the next phase in cellular census efforts, propelling towards a more profound understanding of the brain’s complexity and functionality.

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So many ways. But one crucial use is to help understand the basis of brain diseases. A reference human brain atlas that describes a normal or neurotypical brain could help researchers understand depression or schizophrenia or many other kinds of diseases, Lein says. Take Alzheimer’s as an example. You could apply these same methods to characterize the brains of people with differing levels of severity of Alzheimer’s, and then compare those brain maps with the reference atlas. “And now you can start to ask questions like, ‘Are certain kinds of cells vulnerable in disease, or are certain kinds of cells causal,” Lein says. (He’s part of a team that’s already working on this.) Rather than investigating plaques and tangles, researchers can ask questions about “very specific kinds of neurons that are the real circuit elements that are likely to be perturbed and have functional consequences,” he says.

What’s the next step?

Better resolution. “The next phase is really moving into very comprehensive coverage of the human and non-human primate brain in adults and development.” In fact, that work has already begun with the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network, a five-year, $500 million project. The aim is to generate a complete reference atlas of cell types in the human brain across the lifespan, and also to map cell interactions that underlie a wide range of brain disorders.

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Australian researchers have designed an algorithm that can intercept a man-in-the-middle (MitM) cyberattack on an unmanned military robot and shut it down in seconds.

In an experiment using deep learning to simulate the behavior of the human brain, artificial intelligence experts from Charles Sturt University and the University of South Australia (UniSA) trained the robot’s operating system to learn the signature of a MitM eavesdropping cyberattack. This is where attackers interrupt an existing conversation or .

The algorithm, tested in real time on a replica of a United States army combat ground vehicle, was 99% successful in preventing a malicious attack. False positive rates of less than 2% validated the system, demonstrating its effectiveness.

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