Lifeboat Foundation

Cancer cells can shrink or super-size themselves to survive drug treatment or other challenges within their environment, researchers have discovered.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, combined biochemical profiling technologies with mathematical analyses to reveal how genetic changes lead to differences in the size of cancer cells—and how these changes could be exploited by new treatments.

The researchers believe smaller cells could be more vulnerable to DNA-damaging agents like chemotherapy combined with targeted drugs, while larger cancer cells might respond better to immunotherapy.

The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been shown to slow down aging in worms, an effect that in humans could hypothetically help us live longer and keep us healthier in our latter years.

Rilmenidine was picked for this latest study because past research has shown it mimics the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level. Reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition within the body has been shown to extend lifespans in several animal models.

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health, is a topic of ongoing debate. Finding ways to achieve the same benefits without the costs of extreme calorie cutting could lead to new ways to improve health in old age.

A robot made from magnetic particles and gallium can easily change states — making it useful for a broad range of applications in medicine and manufacturing.

https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/

In general, we tend to operate on a default assumption that other people are basically truthful and trustworthy. The growth in fake profiles and other artificial online content raises the question of how much their presence and our knowledge about them can alter this “truth default” state, eventually eroding social trust.

Changing Our Defaults

The transition to a world where what’s real is indistinguishable from what’s not could also shift the cultural landscape from being primarily truthful to being primarily artificial and deceptive.

Amazon employees are quickly discovering ChatGPT’s vast potential as a work assistant.

ChatGPT, the eerily intelligent chatbot that blew up since its November release, has been used in a number of different job functions at Amazon, according to internal Slack messages obtained by Insider. That includes answering job interview questions, writing software code, and creating training documents, as Insider previously reported.

One employee said in the Slack channel that the Amazon Web Services cloud unit has created a small working group to better understand AI’s impact on its business. Through testing, this team found ChatGPT does a “very good job” at answering AWS customer support questions, as most answers are based on public information. The AI tool was also “great” at creating training documents and “very strong” in corporate strategy questions.

A new neuroimaging study showed that people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exhibited increased activation in the amygdala region of the brain when shown surprised and neutral facial expressions. The same phenomenon was observed in identical twins of these individuals who did not suffer from PTSD.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, sheds new light on the neural mechanisms underlying the development of PTSD.

PTSD is a condition that develops in approximately 20% of individuals exposed to psychological trauma in their lifetime. It is defined by wide clusters of symptoms that include intrusive memories, negative alterations in mood, heightened levels of arousal, and other symptoms. Currently, there are many treatment options available for PTSD; however, for some patients, the treatments offered do not provide clinical relief.

Threat actors associated with the Roaming Mantis attack campaign have been observed delivering an updated variant of their patent mobile malware known as Wroba to infiltrate Wi-Fi routers and undertake Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking.

Kaspersky, which carried out an analysis of the malicious artifact, said the feature is designed to target specific Wi-Fi routers located in South Korea.

Roaming Mantis, also known as Shaoye, is a long-running financially motivated operation that singles out Android smartphone users with malware capable of stealing bank account credentials as well as harvesting other kinds of sensitive information.

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI safety, the fragility of the world, slowing down AI development, regulating AI, and the optimal funding model for AI safety research. Learn more about Connor’s work at https://conjecture.dev.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction.
00:47 What is the best way to understand AI safety?
09:50 Why is the world relatively stable?
15:18 Is the main worry human misuse of AI?
22:47 Can humanity solve AI safety?
30:06 Can we slow down AI development?
37:13 How should governments regulate AI?
41:09 How do we avoid misallocating AI safety government grants?
51:02 Should AI safety research be done by for-profit companies?

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