Lifeboat Foundation

We all want to ‘age successfully’ with as few health issues as possible. A new study suggests getting more than seven hours of sleep a night could go a long way to achieving that goal.

The study involved 3,306 participants aged 45 and over, whose sleep habits were recorded in 2011, 2013, and 2015, followed by a health check five years later. The data, analyzed by a team from Wenzhou Medical University in China, showed that those who bank at least seven hours of sleep a night tend to have significantly better health later in life.

“Successful aging was evaluated in 2020 and was defined as being free of major chronic diseases, no physical impairment, high cognitive function, good mental health, and active engagement with life,” write the researchers in their published paper.

By 2027, Germany will be drawing clean energy from a renewable source in Lingen that provides 300 MW electricity capacity generated from green hydrogen.

We are dealing with very extreme events.

Uncover Zealandia, Earth’s hidden eighth continent. Discover its geological evolution from Gondwana to its present submerged state.

Novel magnetic nanodiscs could provide a much less invasive way of stimulating parts of the brain, paving the way for stimulation therapies without implants or genetic modification, MIT researchers report.

The scientists envision that the tiny discs, which are about 250 nanometers across (about 1/500 the width of a human hair), would be injected directly into the desired location in the brain. From there, they could be activated at any time simply by applying a magnetic field outside the body. The new particles could quickly find applications in biomedical research, and eventually, after sufficient testing, might be applied to clinical uses.

The development of these nanoparticles is described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, in a paper by Polina Anikeeva, a professor in MIT’s departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, graduate student Ye Ji Kim, and 17 others at MIT and in Germany.

Under the right circumstances, electrons can actually “freeze” into a bizarre solid form. Now, physicists at Berkeley Lab have created and taken the first ever direct images of this structure.

At low temperatures and densities, groups of electrons can crystallize into a solid form known as a Wigner crystal, named after theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner who first predicted their existence in the 1930s. It was only a few years ago that scientists first directly detected and imaged them.

Now, a team has for the first time imaged a new quantum phase of electrons – a related structure called a Wigner molecular crystal. Basically, it’s the same solid electron phase, except that groups of electrons settle in each place on a lattice instead of single electrons.

Virologist Beata Halassy says self-treatment worked and was a positive experience — but researchers warn that it is not something others should try.

A 100+ page detailed analysis on 18 LLMs for embodied decision making.

ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07166 Website: https://embodied-agent-interface.github.io.

The research focuses on evaluating how well Large Language Models (LLMs) can make decisions in environments where physical actions are…

Continue reading “Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making” »

New research into a chemical from a caterpillar fungus, known for its potential as a cancer treatment, has shown how it interacts with genes to disrupt cell growth signals. This finding marks a promising step toward developing new cancer drugs.

The chemical, called cordycepin, interrupts overactive cell growth signals common in cancer, potentially offering a treatment approach that could be gentler on healthy tissues compared to many existing therapies.

Caterpillar fungus: a potential cancer treatment.