Lifeboat Foundation

Past neuroscience research consistently found a link between deviations from the “normal” iron metabolism, also known as iron dysregulation, and different neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Specifically, brain regions associated with these diseases have been found to be often populated by microglia (i.e., resident immune cells) packed with Iron.

While the association between iron dysregulation and neurodegenerative diseases is well documented, the ways in which iron accumulation affects the physiology of microglia and neurodegeneration are yet to be fully grasped. Researchers at global health care company Sanofi have recently carried out a study aimed at filling this gap in the literature, by better understanding how microglia respond to iron.

“For years it has been known that iron accumulates in affected brain regions in PD, MS and other neurodegenerative diseases,” Timothy Hammond, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told MedicalXpress. “This is something we can see in patients using MRI imaging, where it has been shown that iron levels increase over the course of the disease. We also had our own data from progressive MS patients showing iron dysregulation in brain microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain.”

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI progress, chimps, memes, and markets. Learn more about Connor’s work at https://conjecture.dev.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction.
01:00 Defining artificial general intelligence.
04:52 What makes humans more powerful than chimps?
17:23 Would AIs have to be social to be intelligent?
20:29 Importing humanity’s memes into AIs.
23:07 How do we measure progress in AI?
42:39 Gut feelings about AI progress.
47:29 Connor’s predictions about AGI
52:44 Is predicting AGI soon betting against the market?
57:43 How accurate are prediction markets about AGI?

A pair of scuba divers has captured rare video and photos of a 2.5-meter (eight-foot) giant squid swimming in the waters off Japan’s west coast.

Earlier this month, Yosuke Tanaka and his wife Miki, who operate a diving business in Toyooka city in the Hyogo region, were alerted to the squid by a fishing equipment vendor who had spotted it in a bay.

Continue reading “Couple Captures Rare Footage of a Giant Squid Swimming Off The Coast of Japan” »

A recent neuroimaging study has identified a link between respiration and neural activity changes in rats. The findings, which have been published in the journal eLife, suggest that breathing might modulate neural responses across the brain.

“Breathing is an essential physiologic process for a living organism,” said study author Nanyin Zhang, the Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Brain Imaging and director of the Center for Neurotechnology in Mental Health Research at Penn State.

“Scientists know that respiration is controlled by the brain stem, and the breathing process can modulate neural activity changes in several brain regions. However, people still do not have a comprehensive picture about brain-wide regions involved during breathing. This question can in principle be answered using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive neuroimage method that allows us to map neural activity in the whole brain.”

Researchers have developed an extremely thin chip with an integrated photonic circuit that could be used to exploit the so-called terahertz gap – lying between 0.3-30THz in the electromagnetic spectrum – for spectroscopy and imaging.

This gap is currently something of a technological dead zone, describing frequencies that are too fast for today’s electronics and telecommunications devices, but too slow for optics and imaging applications.

However, the scientists’ new chip now enables them to produce terahertz waves with tailored frequency, wavelength, amplitude and phase. Such precise control could enable terahertz radiation to be harnessed for next-generation applications in both the electronic and optical realms.

When it comes to star formation in interstellar clouds of gas and dust, there’s an ongoing tug-of-war between two cloud-shaping processes. Young, massive stars inject energy into their surroundings in a way that both disrupts star formation by shredding the surrounding medium and encourages it by collecting dense gas shells that are prone to gravitational collapse. Which of these feedback processes dominates has been unclear, but new observations by Lars Bonne of NASA’s Ames Research Center and his colleagues suggest that stellar feedback significantly suppresses star formation. These findings—presented earlier this month at the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomy Society in Seattle—provide a missing piece in understanding why proposed rapid star-formation rates have long misaligned with observations.

Recent observations suggest that the formation of high-mass stars—ones greater than 8 times the mass of the Sun—is associated with the gravitational collapse of the surrounding cloud of molecular gas. This collapse leads to a high concentration of material, which should induce further star formation. However, the expected high star-formation rates are not observed, with typically only a few percent of the molecular cloud’s mass becoming new stars. “If stellar feedback indeed disperses the collapsing molecular cloud on the same timescale that new stars form, it could prevent these proposed high star-formation rates,” Bonne says. But predicting the impact and role of stellar feedback on the surrounding molecular cloud remains extremely difficult.

Now with data from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA, now retired) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Bonne and his colleagues have tracked the process in real time. The first observation target was a star-forming complex called RCW 36, which is several light-years across and is located 2,900 light-years away in a molecular cloud within the constellation Vela. Like other star-forming complexes, RCW 36 consists of a large region of ionized atomic hydrogen (HII, pronounced “H-two”). This region includes a cluster of young stars and two low-density cavities that extend outward in opposite directions. A ring of gas forms a waist between the two cavities, resulting in an hourglass-like shape.

High-energy, short-pulse laser sources exist only in a limited number of colors. Researchers in the 1960s found that a liquid-filled cell, which had inadvertently been placed inside a laser’s cavity, shifted the laser’s wavelength. Now a team of scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), New York, show that synthetic, room-temperature liquid salts can also serve as effective laser-color-tuning media [1]. The finding could lead to a simple and energy-efficient tool for creating lasers with desired colors for medical and scientific applications.

In the 1960’s liquid technique, when a photon “hits” a liquid molecule, the photon loses energy, exiting the medium with less energy—and thus a different color—than it entered (see Focus: Holey Fibers Shed New Light). The BNL team reasoned that a salt solution could interact with photons in the same way while offering a high density of energy-swapping sites compared to either a gas or a standard liquid. The vast array of available artificial salts could also make it possible to precisely tune the energy loss caused by the salt–photon interaction, giving increased color control.

The researchers assembled their converter setup from a pulsed green laser and a 63-cm-long cell filled with a salt solution. Passing the laser through the cell, they observed that the light turned orange. The researchers measured a high color-conversion efficiency of the photons, which they attribute to the large interaction cross sections of the salt molecules and to the reduction of other forms of scattering that can inhibit wavelength conversion. The group is currently designing liquids to turn this and other lasers to myriad colors.

After the introduction of the fifth-generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks (5G), engineers worldwide are now working on systems that could further speed up communications. The next-generation wireless communication networks, from 6G onward, will require technologies that enable communications at sub-terahertz and terahertz frequency bands (i.e., from 100GHz to 10THz).

While several systems have been proposed for enabling communication at these frequency bands specifically for personal use and local area networks, some applications would benefit from longer communication distances. So far, generating high-power ultrabroadband signals that contain information and can travel long distances has been challenging.

Researchers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Northeastern University and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have recently developed a system that could enable multi-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) communications in the sub-terahertz frequency band over several kilometers. This system, presented in a paper in Nature Electronics, utilizes on-chip power-combining frequency multiplier designs based on Schottky diodes, semiconducting diodes formed by the junction of a semiconductor and a metal, developed at NASA JPL.