Lifeboat Foundation

Wtf… How is this possible? Scientists have developed an AI system called ProGen that can generate artificial enzymes from scratch. The technology was developed by Salesforce Research and uses natural language processing and next-token prediction to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins. In laboratory tests, some of these enzymes worked as well as those found in nature, even when their artificially generated amino acid sequences The new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, a Nobel-prize-winning protein design technology, and will speed up the development of new proteins for use in various fields, including therapeutics and degrading plastic.

The high profile race to enhance their search products has underscored the importance of artificial intelligence to Google and Microsoft – and the rest of the economy, too. Two of the world’s largest tech companies announced plans for AI-enhanced search this month, ratcheting up a tussle for supremacy in the artificial intelligence space. However, the debut of Google’s new chatbot, Bard, was scuppered when an error appeared, knocking $163bn (£137bn) off the parent company Alphabet’s share price. The stock’s plunge showed how crucial investors think AI could be to Google’s future.

However, the increasing prominence of AI has implications for every corner of the economy. From retail to transport, here’s how AI promises to usher in a wave of change across industries.

The Butlerian Jihad war against the machines abd the Cymecks.

Dune.

Glioblastomas are the most common malignant tumors of the adult brain. They resist conventional treatment, including surgery, followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy. Despite this armamentarium, glioblastomas inexorably recur.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, Isabelle Le Roux (CNRS) and her colleagues from the “Genetics and development of brain tumors” team at Paris Brain Institute have shown that the elimination of senescent cells, i.e., cells that have stopped dividing, can modify the tumor ecosystem and slow its progression. These results open up new avenues for treatment.

Glioblastoma, the most common adult brain cancer, affects 2 to 5 in 100,000 individuals. While the incidence of the disease is highest in those between 55 and 85 years old, it is increasing in all age groups. This effect can’t be attributed to improved diagnostic techniques alone, suggesting the influence of environmental factors hitherto unidentified.

Protect yourself and your organization from the threat of unknown malware. Check out this guide to detecting suspicious behavior.

CISA has updated its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with three new vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited.

An open source command-and-control (C2) framework known as Havoc is being adopted by threat actors as an alternative to other well-known legitimate toolkits like Cobalt Strike, Sliver, and Brute Ratel.

Cybersecurity firm Zscaler said it observed a new campaign in the beginning of January 2023 targeting an unnamed government organization that utilized Havoc.

“While C2 frameworks are prolific, the open-source Havoc framework is an advanced post-exploitation command-and-control framework capable of bypassing the most current and updated version of Windows 11 defender due to the implementation of advanced evasion techniques such as indirect syscalls and sleep obfuscation,” researchers Niraj Shivtarkar and Niraj Shivtarkar said.

Two decades of monitoring from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaiʻi reveals a peculiar cloud dubbed X7 being pulled apart as it accelerates toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers from the UCLA Galactic Center Orbits Initiative (GCOI) and Keck Observatory have been tracking the evolution of this dusty gas filament since 2002; high-angular resolution near-infrared images captured with Keck Observatory’s powerful adaptive optics system show X7 has become so elongated that it now has a length of 3,000 times the distance between the Earth and sun (or 3,000 astronomical units).

Continue reading “The swan song of a cloud approaching the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole” »

When two black holes collide into each other to form a new bigger black hole, they violently roil spacetime around them, sending ripples, called gravitational waves, outward in all directions. Previous studies of black hole collisions modeled the behavior of the gravitational waves using what is known as linear math, which means that the gravitational waves rippling outward did not influence, or interact, with each other. Now, a new analysis has modeled the same collisions in more detail and revealed so-called nonlinear effects.

“Nonlinear effects are what happens when waves on the beach crest and crash,” says Keefe Mitman, a Caltech graduate student who works with Saul Teukolsky (Ph. D. ‘74), the Robinson Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech with a joint appointment at Cornell University.

“The waves interact and influence each other rather than ride along by themselves. With something as violent as a black hole merger, we expected these effects but had not seen them in our models until now. New methods for extracting the waveforms from our simulations have made it possible to see the nonlinearities.”