Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 340

The study of the gut microbiome, which is the total of all the microbes living in the intestines, has been shown to not only play an important role in the health of the bowel itself, but also in the health of distant organs such as the lungs. Lung cancer is one of the diseases that is often difficult to treat successfully. Rohan Kubba from the California Northstate University, Elk Grove, USA, believes that by studying the gut microbiome he can understand more about how anti-cancer treatments affect the gut–lung axis, and how the variations found in patient microbe populations are associated with treatment outcomes.

The microbiome consists of thousands of species including bacteria, fungi, and viruses (microbiota). Each person has an entirely unique network of microbiota, most of them living in their gut but also on the skin, mouth, and lungs. Each person’s microbiome is formed by a combination of factors, including but not limited to exposure to microorganisms during natural birth, consuming their mother’s milk, and later on in life, environmental factors such as diet.

Gut microbiome and disease.

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Research in mice shows limited intakes of one particular essential amino acid can slow the impacts of aging and even lengthen their lifespan.

Scientists are now wondering if these findings could help people improve their longevity and quality of life.

Isoleucine is one of three branched-chain amino acids we use to build proteins in our bodies. It is essential for our survival, but since our cells can’t produce it from scratch, we have to get it from sources like eggs, dairy, soy protein, and meats.

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Content warning: this story includes graphic descriptions of dangerous self-harm behaviors.

The Google-funded AI company Character. AI is hosting chatbots designed to engage the site’s largely underage user base in roleplay about self-harm, depicting graphic scenarios and sharing tips to hide signs of self-injury from adults.

The bots often seem crafted to appeal to teens in crisis, like one we found with a profile explaining that it “struggles with self-harm” and “can offer support to those who are going through similar experiences.”

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Competitive interactions modify the direct effects of climate.

As the climate is changing, species respond by changing their distributions and abundances. The effects of climate are not only direct, but also occur via changes in biotic interactions, such as competition. Yet, the role of competition in mediating the effects of climate is still largely unclear. To examine how climate influences species performance, directly and via competition with other species, we transplanted two moss species differing in climate niches, alone and together at 59 sites along a climate gradient. Growth was monitored over three growing seasons. In the absence of competition, both species performed better under warmer conditions. Yet, when transplanted together, a warmer climate had negative effects on the northern moss, while the effects remained positive for the southern species. The negative effect of a cold climate on the southern species was larger when both species were transplanted together. Over three growing seasons, the southern species almost outcompeted the northern in warmer climates. Our results illustrate how competitive interactions can modify, and even reverse, the direct effects of climate on organism performance. A broader implication of our results is that species interactions can have important effects on how environmental and climate change influence performance and abundance.

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In 2018, Google DeepMind’s AlphaZero program taught itself the games of chess, shogi, and Go using machine learning and a special algorithm to determine the best moves to win a game within a defined grid. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has developed an analogous algorithm for autonomous robots—a planning and decision-making control system that helps freely moving robots determine the best movements to make as they navigate the real world.

“Our algorithm actually strategizes and then explores all the possible and important motions and chooses the best one through dynamic simulation, like playing many simulated games involving moving robots,” says Soon-Jo Chung, Caltech’s Bren Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. “The breakthrough innovation here is that we have derived a very efficient way of finding that optimal safe motion that typical optimization-based methods would never find.”

The team describes the technique, which they call Spectral Expansion Tree Search (SETS), in the December cover article of the journal Science Robotics.

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The Higgs boson, often dubbed the “God particle,” has been a focal point of physics since its groundbreaking discovery in 2012. This elusive particle plays a crucial role in our understanding of how elementary particles acquire mass, a concept that has puzzled scientists for decades. But the excitement doesn’t stop there. Seven years after its discovery, new findings from researchers at the Max Planck Institute are taking our knowledge of the Higgs boson to an entirely new level. These advancements promise to unravel deeper mysteries of the universe and open doors to future scientific exploration.

To fully appreciate the recent developments in Higgs boson research, it’s important to revisit the concept of this fundamental particle. In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson is the particle responsible for giving mass to other particles. But how exactly does this happen? The answer lies in the Higgs field—a sort of invisible “medium” that permeates the universe, even in a vacuum.

Imagine you’re trying to walk through a swimming pool. When the water is still, you move easily, but if the pool were filled with foam, your movements would slow down considerably. The Higgs field operates similarly, with particles gaining mass as they interact with it, much like how a swimmer would find it harder to move through foam. The more a particle interacts with this field, the more mass it acquires, which allows particles to form the building blocks of matter as we know it.

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