Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Almost half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with chemicals known as “forever chemicals,” according to a new study from the US Geological Survey.

The number of people drinking contaminated water may be even higher than what the study found, however, because the researchers weren’t able to test for all of these per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, chemicals that are considered dangerous to human health. There are more than 12,000 types of PFAS, according to the National Institutes of Health, but this study looked at only 32 of the compounds.

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In an interview with GQ, 54-year-old David Sinclair says his lifestyle changes got him back to his “20-year-old brain.”

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An object lurking in the foggy dawn of the Universe has given astronomers a big surprise.

Observations collected through the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed an active supermassive black hole 9 million times the mass of the Sun – one that is actively growing as it slurps up matter from the space around it.

At around just 570 million years after the Big Bang, this is the earliest growing supermassive black hole detected yet, although scientists are hoping it won’t remain the record-holder for long.

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OpenAI is forming a new team led by Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, to develop ways to steer and control “superintelligent” AI systems.

In a blog post published today, Sutskever and Jan Leike, a lead on the alignment team at OpenAI, predict that AI with intelligence exceeding that of humans could arrive within the decade. This AI — assuming it does, indeed, arrive eventually — won’t necessarily be benevolent, necessitating research into ways to control and restrict it, Sutskever and Leike say.

“Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue,” they write. “Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us.”

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New X-ray capability could find wide application in environmental and medical research, as well as the development of batteries and microelectronic devices.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and various universities have successfully used X-ray beams to analyze a single atom.

An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus.

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Health care professionals are overcoming these obstacles with a new treatment called hepatic artery infusion pump chemotherapy that shrinks liver tumors, giving more people a chance for surgery. This treatment also can shrink tumors in the bile ducts inside the liver, called intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.

“Our goal is to expand the number of patients who could be offered curative treatment,” says Dr. Thiels. “We are also aiming to reduce the risk of cancer recurring in people with high-risk liver tumors.”

The hepatic artery carries oxygen-rich blood to the liver. A hepatic artery pump delivers chemotherapy directly into the liver’s blood supply. Because chemotherapy from the pump only reaches the liver, the approach can use higher doses to shrink liver tumors more effectively. “We can often achieve a higher response rate than conventional chemotherapy,” says Dr. Thiels.

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A study conducted by researchers from the Department of Neurology at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna has demonstrated for the first time that the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) can be significantly improved by additionally measuring the thickness of retinal layers in the eye.

Use of the procedure, which is already available at the Departments of MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna, helps to detect the condition at an earlier stage and predict its progression more accurately. This can lead to a decisive increase in the chance of improved patient outcomes. The findings have been published in the journal Neurology.

As part of their investigation, the research team headed by Gabriel Bsteh and Thomas Berger of the Department of Neurology at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna collaborated with colleagues from MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna’s Department of Ophthalmology and Optometrics to examine 267 MS patients over a period of five years.

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In a recent article published in Nature communications*, researchers described a technique of capturing two-dimensional (2D) light patterns into deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and using high-throughput next-generation sequencing to retrieve recorded images.

Study: A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA. Image Credit: BillionPhotos/Shutterstock.com.

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Scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have used bacteria for recording, storing, and retrieving images in DNA. This biological analog to a digital camera, which the authors have named “BacCam,” is a crucial step for DNA data storage techniques and the merging of biological and electronic systems.

The article, “A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA,” was published in Nature Communications.

Prior to this publication, there were two landmark papers that addressed either the use of cells to capture light or the storage of images into DNA, but not the two together. In May 2017, researchers from the lab of Christopher Voigt, PhD, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a system to produce ‘color photographs’ on bacterial culture plates by controlling pigment production and to redirect metabolic flux by expressing CRISPRi guide RNAs. Two months later, researchers in the lab of George Church, PhD, at Harvard Medical School demonstrated a method for encoding images via de novo DNA synthesis before insertion into the bacterial genome.

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