Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 2786

A study has linked the development in kids of any of food allergy, asthma, eczema and rhinitis to a common factor – an unbalanced gut microbiome.

Researchers have long been intrigued by the gut microbiome in the development of allergic diseases. But this Canadian study is unique in identifying a common origin in infancy across the four separate allergic diseases. As well, it explored the composition of gut bacteria in children before and following allergic sensitization.

As each allergic disease has a separate list of symptoms, they are usually studied on their own. “But when you look at what is going wrong at a cellular level, they actually have a lot in common,” notes Dr. Charisse Petersen, co-senior author and a researcher at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and BC Children’s Hospital.

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Many people think of generative AI as a tool that allows them to use their own words to ask questions or generate copy and images—both of which it does remarkably well. However, it also has incredible potential to transform our personal and professional work—helping us access, consume, and utilize the untapped information that floods our inboxes and languishes in archives.

Adobe recently conducted research on digital workers’ perceptions of AI technologies, as well as their value in the workplace. We surveyed 6,049 digital workers across five countries—the U.S., UK, Australia, India, and Japan—including both rank-and-file employees and senior leaders who are using digital technologies (including digital documents) in their workplaces. The findings reveal their perceptions and aspirations around how AI can change the way we work. Following are the top three insights from the research:

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Google Deepmind will soon begin researching autonomous language agents such as Auto-GPT, potentially boosting the viable applications of LLMs such as Gemini.

Google DeepMind is looking for researchers and engineers to help build increasingly autonomous language agents, Edward Grefenstette, director of research at Google DeepMind, announced at X.

Such AI agents already exist in early stages, with Auto-GPT being one of the earliest examples. The basic idea is to create a system that autonomously achieves a given goal using a mix of prompt engineering, self-prompting, memory, and other system parts. While such agents are already showing promising results, they are still far from being able to achieve good results on their own and usually require human feedback and decision-making.

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Today’s retailers are faced with a clear opportunity for transformation. Consumer expectations are constantly evolving, challenging retailers to keep pace. A blend of online and in-person shopping forged during the pandemic persists, forcing retailers to deliver a highly personalized omnichannel experience. And retailers’ values are becoming as important to consumers as their products and services.

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The pharmaceutical industry operates under one of the highest failure rates of any business sector. The success rate for drug candidates entering capital Phase 1 trials—the earliest type of clinical testing, which can take 6 to 7 years —is anywhere between 9% and 12%, depending on the year, with costs to bring a drug from discovery to market ranging from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion, according to Science.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is best known for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, which was made by smashing together high-energy protons (see Collection: The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson). But protons are not the only particles accelerated by the collider, and some studies call for colliding much heavier objects. Now a team working on the LHC’s ALICE experiment has collided lead nuclei to study an exotic particle called a hypertriton [1]. The result could help researchers reduce errors in models of the structure of neutron stars.

A hypertriton is a tritium nucleus in which one neutron has been replaced with a lambda hyperon, a heavier particle with a quark configuration of up-down-strange rather than up-down-down. Researchers have long known the energy it takes to bind tritium’s proton and two neutrons. But it was unclear how that energy changed with the neutron–lambda hyperon switch.

The ALICE Collaboration turned to lead–lead collisions to answer this question because these collisions produce hypertritons in much greater numbers than proton–proton ones do. A hypertriton quickly decays into a helium-3 nucleus and a pion, with the decay time and the energy of the decay products depending on the binding energy between the lambda hyperon and the hypertriton core.

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