Lifeboat Foundation

So why not sidestep this conundrum and use neural tissue directly as a biocomputer?

This month, a team from Johns Hopkins University laid out a daring blueprint for a new field of computing: organoid intelligence (OI). Don’t worry—they’re not talking about using living human brain tissue hooked up to wires in jars. Rather, as in the name, the focus is on a surrogate: brain organoids, better known as “mini-brains.” These pea-sized nuggets roughly resemble the early fetal human brain in their gene expression, wide variety of brain cells, and organization. Their neural circuits spark with spontaneous activity, ripple with brain waves, and can even detect light and control muscle movement.

Continue reading “Biocomputing With Mini-Brains as Processors Could Be More Powerful Than Silicon-Based AI” »

Recently, Scientists have outlined a plan for a potentially revolutionary new area of research called “organoid intelligence”, which aims to create “biocomputers”, where brain cultures grown in the lab are coupled to real-world sensors and input/output devices.

The term now covers all types of technology and innovation designed to address health issues that solely, or disproportionately, impact women’s health, from menstrual cycle tracking apps and sexual wellness products to cardiovascular medical devices and mental health therapies.

Giving FemTech its own name helped the community of people working in the sector to find each other, but also gave investors reassurance about where they were putting their money, Tin said.

“It’s a little easier to say you’re invested in FemTech than, you know, a company that helps women not pee their pants … It kind of bridged the gap over to men as well, which was important, still is important, because so many investors are men.”

Europe was covered in thick ice sheets around the time of the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, during which time sea levels were more than a hundred metres lower than today.

Shielding themselves from the frigid conditions in western Europe, cave-dwelling humans occupied rock shelters and caverns and in one site near Granada in Spain, archaeologists have unearthed remains providing the oldest human genome recorded in the region.

This 23,000-year-old genome from Cueva del Malalmuerzo is the oldest found in the Andalusian region and one of the oldest recorded. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have connected these genetic remains to those of a 35,000-year-old Belgian specimen found in 2016.

A team of biologists has discovered how to awaken neural stem cells and reactivate them in adult mice.

Some areas of the adult brain contain quiescent, or dormant, neural stem cells that can potentially be reactivated to form new neurons. However, the transition from quiescence to proliferation is still poorly understood. A team led by scientists from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL) has discovered the importance of cell metabolism in this process and identified how to wake up these neural stem cells and reactivate them. Biologists succeeded in increasing the number of new neurons in the brain of adult and even elderly mice. These results, promising for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, are to be discovered in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

From Google’s Bard to Microsoft’s new Bing, here are all the major contenders in the AI chatbot space.

Quantum bits inspired by Schrödinger’s cat could allow quantum computers to make fewer mistakes and more efficiently crack algorithms used for encryption.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Researchers claimed to have found a way to build a spacecraft that can travel at one-fifth of the speed of light, making traveling to another solar system a reality. Read the article to learn how this could be possible.

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) transport small molecules into the body. The most well-known LNP cargo is mRNA, the key constituent of some of the early vaccines against COVID-19. But that is just one application: LNPs can carry many different types of payload, and have applications beyond vaccines.

Barbara Mui has been working on LNPs (and their predecessors, liposomes) since she was a PhD student in Pieter Cullis’s group in the 1990s. “In those days, LNPs encapsulated anti-cancer drugs,” says Mui, who is currently a senior scientist at Acuitas, the company that developed the LNPs used in the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. She says it soon became clear that LNPs worked even better as carriers of polynucleotides. “The first one that worked really well was encapsulating small RNAs,” Mui recalls.

But it was mRNA where LNPs proved most effective, primarily because LNPs are comprised of positively charged lipid nanoparticles that encapsulate negatively charged mRNA. Once in the body, LNPs enter cells via endocytosis into endosomes and are released into the cytoplasm. “Without the specially designed chemistry, the LNP and mRNA would be degraded in the endosome,” says Kathryn Whitehead, professor in the departments of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.