Lifeboat Foundation

Crabe-shape beings.

The joke—that everything will eventually look like a crab—comes from an actual truth. The crab shape has evolved so many times that scientists had to come up with a special term for it: carcinization.

While it’s probably not in the stars for humans to evolve into crabs, it is something that has happened multiple times in the crustacean family, where a creature may have started out looking like a lobster or a hermit crab and then eventually turning into the low, round, pinchy critters we all know and love. But before we dive into why this is, let’s first define the term “crab.”

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Annotation and analysis of sports videos is a time-consuming task that, once automated, will provide benefits to coaches, players, and spectators. American football, as the most watched sport in the United States, could especially benefit from this automation. Manual annotation and analysis of recorded videos of American football games is an inefficient and tedious process. Currently, most college football programs focus on annotating offensive formations to help them develop game plans for their upcoming games. As a first step to further research for this unique application, we use computer vision and deep learning to analyze an overhead image of a football play immediately before the play begins. This analysis consists of locating individual football players and labeling their position or roles, as well as identifying the formation of the offensive team.

Despite his recent criticism, Musk has at times seemed complimentary about OpenAI’s tech — in December, he called ChatGPT “scary good.”

Apitherapy is an emerging field with the potential to impact the economic aspects of cancer research globally, particularly in under-resourced communities. To date, however, studies are yet to fully investigate the molecular mechanism of action of honeybee venom and melittin, and their consequent optimum usage in the oncology arena is yet to be comprehensively investigated, particularly for the treatment of breast cancer, the most commonly occurring cancer in women worldwide². TNBCs and HER2-enriched tumors are highly aggressive breast cancer subtypes. TNBC is associated with the highest mortality and, despite frequent EGFR expression, commonly displays resistance to anti-EGFR therapies with high dependence on PI3K/Akt signaling for proliferation, survival, and chemotherapy resistance³⁴.

Anti-HER2 therapies have substantially improved long-term survival in early-stage HER2-positive cancers, but the majority of late-stage patients eventually develop resistance and succumb to the disease^33,35,36. Not only did we demonstrate selectivity of honeybee venom and melittin for malignant cells, but we also revealed higher potencies for these aggressive types of breast cancer.

Here, we show that honeybee venom and melittin suppress the ligand-induced phosphorylation of EGFR and HER2, dynamically modulating downstream signaling pathways in breast cancer cells. We propose that melittin directly or indirectly inhibits RTK dimerization. Melittin may also enter the cell to directly or indirectly modulate downstream signaling pathways^25,60. Previous work has shown that melittin can be targeted to HER2-overexpressing cell lines using immunoliposomes bearing trastuzumab⁶¹. Here, we demonstrate that melittin alone selectively targets HER2-and EGFR-overexpressing breast cancer cells. Interestingly, melittin was more potently toxic to breast cancer cells compared to honeybee venom, warranting further investigation.

One day after the US shot down a ‘cylindrical, silverish gray’ object in the northeast arctic region of Alaska, another unidentified airborne object was shot down by the US military over northern Canada on Saturday — making it the third time in just over a week that jets were deployed to neutralize foreign craft.

For a long time, scientists and engineers have drawn inspiration from the amazing abilities of animals and have sought to reverse engineer or reproduce these in robots and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. One of these behaviors is odor plume tracking, which is the ability of some animals, particularly insects, to home in on the source of specific odors of interest (e.g., food or mates), often over long distances.

A new study by researchers at University of Washington and University of Nevada, Reno has taken an innovative approach using artificial neural networks (ANNs) in understanding this remarkable ability of flying insects. Their work, recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence, exemplifies how artificial intelligence is driving groundbreaking new scientific insights.

“We were motivated to study a complex biological behavior, odor plume-tracking, that flying insects (and other animals) use to find food or mates,” Satpreet H. Singh, the lead author on the study, told Tech Xplore. “Biologists have experimentally studied many aspects of insect plume tracking in great detail, as it is a critical behavior for insect survival and reproduction. ”.

Scientists from the Micro, Nano and Molecular Systems Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and the Institute for Molecular Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials at Heidelberg University have created a new technology to assemble matter in 3D. Their concept uses multiple acoustic holograms to generate pressure fields with which solid particles, gel beads and even biological cells can be printed.

These results pave the way for novel 3D cell culture techniques with applications in biomedical engineering. The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances.

Additive manufacturing or 3D printing enables the fabrication of complex parts from functional or biological materials. Conventional 3D printing can be a slow process, where objects are constructed one line or one layer at a time. Researchers in Heidelberg and Tübingen now demonstrate how to form a 3D object from smaller building blocks in just a single step.

A pair of engineers at Delft University of Technology, working with a colleague at Aix-Marseille University, reports that applying ultrasound to the surface of a glass plate can mimic the feel of pressed button. Laurence Willemet, Michaël Wiertlewski and Jocelyn Monnoyer have published a paper in Journal of The Royal Society Interface describing the device they built to test the idea of using ultrasound as a haptic screen enhancer.

Currently, users pressing buttons on their smart phone screens do not receive much in the way of physical feedback—phone engineers would like to change that. In this new effort, the researchers looked into the idea of using ultrasound on a glass plate to mimic the sensations of pushing a physical button.

The researchers created the device by merging two modules. One used blue and red lights to optically track the movement of an approaching finger. The other monitored and responded to contact. Together, the modules controlled piezo actuators that generated ultrasound at a frequency of 28.85 kHz. The device was affixed to a glass plate, which in turn was held in place by an aluminum frame. When in use, the actuators were driven by a ±200 V carrier signal.

The metaverse was the next big thing and now it’s generative AI. We asked top tech executives to cut through the hype. They say this one’s for real.