Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2918

Published: August 8, 2023 8.29am EDT

Alexis souchet, university of southern california.

The big idea.

Some employers are excited about swapping out computer monitors for virtual reality headsets, but the side effects of using VR are not completely understood. In a recent study, my colleagues and I propose 90 factors that could influence VR side effects in the workplace. In another study, we suggest guidelines to reduce these negative symptoms.

-In defense everything has negative syptoms. Nothing is perfect, and everything has negative things in it. If things were perfect we would be living in a much better world. Take religion for example, and they pay no tax.

Continue reading “Virtual reality has negative side effects — new research shows that can be a problem in the workplace” | >

This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

Many artificial intelligence tools use public data to train their large language models, but now large social media sites are looking for ways to defend against data scraping. The problem is that scraping isn’t currently illegal.

According to Cybernews, data scraping refers to a computer program extracting data from the output generated from another program, and it is becoming a big problem for large social media sites like Twitter or Reddit.

Read more | >

What if “looking your age” refers not to your face, but to your chest? Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model that utilizes chest radiographs to accurately estimate a patient’s chronological age. More importantly, when there is a disparity, it can signal a correlation with chronic disease.

These findings mark a leap in , paving the way for improved early disease detection and intervention. The results are published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.

The research team, led by graduate student Yasuhito Mitsuyama and Dr. Daiju Ueda from the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka Metropolitan University, first constructed a deep learning-based AI model to estimate age from chest radiographs of healthy individuals.

Read more | >

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have found that molecules in vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower help to maintain a healthy barrier in the lung and ease infection.

The AHR—aryl hydrocarbon receptor—is a protein found at barrier sites like the gut and the lung. Natural molecules in cruciferous vegetables—for example, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, or cabbage—are dietary ‘ligands’ for AHR, which means, once eaten, they activate AHR to target a number of genes. Some of the genes targeted switch off the AHR system, allowing it to self-regulate.

The effect of AHR on is well understood, but this research, published in Nature, now shows that AHR is also highly active in lining in the lung.

Read more | >

Remember when eggs were so high? A vaccine for birds, now that can make money. 🤔

In the past two years, a viral disease has swept across much of the planet — not Covid but a type of avian flu. It’s devastated the poultry industry in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, sickening millions of farmed birds, which either die from infection or are killed by farmers seeking to stem the spread.

The ongoing outbreak of avian flu has killed hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of wild birds, including endangered species like the California condor. It’s one of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks in history. Having now spread across five continents and hundreds of wildlife species, scientists call the current outbreak a panzootic, meaning a pandemic among animals.

“What we’re seeing right now is uncharted territory,” said Andrew Ramey, a wildlife geneticist at the US Geological Survey, one of the federal agencies involved in testing wild birds for the virus.

Continue reading “A frightening virus is killing a massive number of wild birds” | >

Scientists have found that bubbles secreted by embryonic stem cells counter cellular senescence, in large part due to just two tiny snippets of RNA [1].

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-bound tiny bubbles that are loaded with various molecular cargo, such as proteins, DNA, or RNA, that cells secrete as a method of intercellular communication. According to numerous studies, EVs can recapitulate many effects of cellular therapies, such as stem cell treatments [2].

In this new study, the researchers used EVs derived from human embryonic stem cells (ESC) against cellular senescence. ESCs are considered a potent therapeutic, tool but, as the study’s authors note in the introduction, their use “is limited by immune rejection, tumorigenicity and ethical issues”. If we could culture ESCs and use EVs secreted by them to the same effect, this would solve many problems.

Read more | >

Researchers have found a way to control the interaction of light and quantum ‘spin’ in organic semiconductors, that works even at room temperature.

Spin is the term for the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons, which is referred to as up or down. Using the up/down spin states of electrons instead of the 0 and 1 in conventional computer logic could transform the way in which computers process information. And sensors based on quantum principles could vastly improve our abilities to measure and study the world around us.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, has found a way to use particles of light as a ‘switch’ that can connect and control the spin of electrons, making them behave like tiny magnets that could be used for quantum applications.

Read more | >

Research is underway around the world to find alternatives to our current electronic computing technology, as great, electron-based systems have limitations. A new way of transmitting information is emerging from the field of magnonics. Instead of electron exchange, the waves generated in magnetic media could be used for transmission, but magnonics-based computing has been (too) slow to date.

Scientists at the University of Vienna have now discovered a significant new method. When the intensity is increased, the spin become shorter and faster—another step towards magnon computing. The results are published in the journal Science Advances.

Magnonics is a relatively new field of research in magnetism in which spin waves play a central role. A local disturbance in the magnetic order of a magnet can propagate as waves through a material. These waves are called spin waves, and the associated quasiparticles are called magnons. They carry information in the form of angular momentum pulses. Because of this property, they can be used as low-power data carriers in smaller and more energy-efficient computers of the future.

Read more | >

Researchers have developed a fluorescence microscope that uses structured illumination for fast super-resolution imaging over a wide field of view. The new microscope was designed to image multiple living cells simultaneously with a very high resolution to study the effects of various drugs and mixtures of drugs on the body.

“Polypharmacy—the effect of the many combinations of drugs typically prescribed to the chronically sick or elderly—can lead to dangerous interactions and is becoming a major issue,” said Henning Ortkrass from Bielefeld University in Germany. “We developed this microscope as part of the EIC Pathfinder OpenProject DeLIVERy, which aims to develop a platform that can investigate polypharmacy in individual patients.”

In the journal Optics Express, the researchers describe their new microscope, which uses optical fiber delivery of excitation light to enable very high image quality over a very large field of view with multicolor and high-speed capability. They show that the instrument can be used to image , achieving a field of view up to 150 × 150 μm2 and imaging rates up to 44 Hz while maintaining a spatiotemporal resolution of less than 100 nm.

Read more | >