Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 26

Researchers at Cornell Tech have released a dataset extracted from more than 300,000 public Reddit communities, and a report detailing how Reddit communities are changing their policies to address a surge in AI-generated content.

The team collected metadata and community rules from the online communities, known as subreddits, during two periods in July 2023 and November 2024. The researchers will present a paper with their findings at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems being held April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan.

One of the researchers’ most striking discoveries is the rapid increase in subreddits with rules governing AI use. According to the research, the number of subreddits with AI rules more than doubled in 16 months, from July 2023 to November 2024.

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University of Warwick astronomers have discovered an extremely rare, high-mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away. These two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

Type 1a supernovae are a special class of cosmic explosion, famously used as “standard candles” to measure distances between Earth and their host galaxies. They occur when a white dwarf (the dense remnant core of a star) accumulates too much mass, is unable to withstand its own gravity, and explodes.

It has long been theoretically predicted that two orbiting white dwarfs are the cause of most type 1a supernova explosions. When in a close orbit, the heavier white dwarf of the pair gradually accumulates material from its partner, which leads to that star (or both stars) exploding.

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Training the brain’s immune system to recognize and clear toxic material is rapidly emerging as an promising way to put the brakes on Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately researchers haven’t been clear on how this method of protection operates on a cellular level.

An international team of researchers analyzed brain samples taken from people who had died with Alzheimer’s, some of whom had also received approved Alzheimer’s immunotherapy treatments. The therapies encourage cleaning cells called microglia to attack the clumps of amyloid-beta proteins that are thought to be involved in neurodegeneration.

Microglia responses to amyloid beta can lead to inflammation, which in turn risks damage to brain tissues. The researchers wanted to know why immunotherapy turned microglia into ruthless cleaning machines in some cases but not others.

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Xueli Bai & team report on the high level of lactate in pancreatic cancer metabolism, which changes tumor immune features by protein lactylation and results in immunotherapy resistance:

The figure shows lactylation labeling of metabolic proteins from paracancerous and tumor tissues.

1Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine and.

2Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Pancreatic Disease, The First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

3MOE Joint International Research Laboratory of Pancreatic Diseases, Hangzhou, China.

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R01 CA203108, R01 CA247234 (to ML), and by the William and Ella Owens Medical Research Foundation (to ML). It was also supported in part by the Department of Medicine, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

Address correspondence to: Michael S. Bronze, Department of Medicine, The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, 800 Stanton L. Young Blvd. AAT 6,400, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 73,104, USA. Phone: 405.271.5428; Email: [email protected]. Or to: Min Li, Department of Medicine, The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, 975 NE 10th Street, BRC 1262A, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 73,104, USA. Phone: 405.271.1796; Email: [email protected].

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Hedonic eating is defined as food consumption driven by palatability without physiological need. However, neural control of palatable food intake is poorly understood. We discovered that hedonic eating is controlled by a neural pathway from the peri–locus ceruleus to the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Using photometry-calibrated optogenetics, we found that VTA dopamine (VTADA) neurons encode palatability to bidirectionally regulate hedonic food consumption. VTADA neuron responsiveness was suppressed during food consumption by semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide receptor 1 (GLP-1R) agonist used as an antiobesity drug. Mice recovered palatable food appetite and VTADA neuron activity during repeated semaglutide treatment, which was reversed by consumption-triggered VTADA neuron inhibition.

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