Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Canada has found that obesity in young mice can lead to inflammatory disease later in life even if the mouse is no longer overweight. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes studying early life obesity in test mice and the development of age-related macular degeneration. Kevin Mangum and Katherine Gallagher with the University of Michigan have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the research.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in older people can lead to permanent blindness. Prior research has shown obesity plays a major role in its development. Other research has also shown that AMD is a neuroinflammatory condition. It is believed that the inflammation in the eyes is related to obesity, but the exact connection has not been identified. In this new effort, the researchers sought to find the connection by studying obesity and macular degeneration in mice.

The work involved feeding test mice a high-fat diet and studying the impact on adipose tissue macrophages (types of white blood cells that are part of the immune system). They found that obesity in mice led to epigenetic changes in the macrophages that resulted in an increase in expression of genes that incite an inflammatory response. They also found that the increased expression continued even after the test mice were put on a reduced diet that allowed them to return to their normal weight.

Needs work.

AN ultrarealistic AI robot has opinions about the afterlife and can even sense anxiety with her advanced technology, The U.S. Sun has learned.

Through a camera in her eyes, the amazing bot called “Xoxe” (pronounced Zo-zie) can detect if anybody in her presence has committed any illegal activities.

Continue reading “Creepy ultrarealistic AI Xoxe sensed my anxiety as we discussed end of the world” »

But for some industry leaders, chatbots and image-generators are far from the final robotic frontier. Next up? Consciousness.

“This topic was taboo,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

Consciousness is one of the longest standing, and most divisive, questions in the field of artificial intelligence. And while to some it’s science fiction — and indeed has been the plot of countless sci-fi books, comics, and films — to others, like Lipson, it’s a goal, one that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it for good.

Dan recently shared an article about Vall-E, and it reminded me of this free software anyone can use. You can even make yourself sound like Morgan Freeman with it:

Express yourself with our real-time AI Voice Changer and soundboard to be who you want, when you want in the metaverse. Build your sonic identity for platforms like Roblox, OBS, VRChat, Discord, and more.

Download now for FREE Voicemod a funny & scary voice changer app. A voice transformer and modifier with effects that makes you sound like a girl or a robot.

About one-third of individuals suffering from depression are at risk for treatment resistance. Whereas inhaled 50% nitrous oxide has early antidepressant effects on individuals with treatment-resistant major depression (TRMD), adverse effects can occur at this concentration. In this phase 2 clinical trial, Nagele et al. studied the effects of a single 1-hour treatment with 25% nitrous oxide on depression symptoms in those with TRMD, finding that this lower concentration had comparable efficacy to 50% nitrous oxide over several weeks but was associated with significantly fewer adverse effects. These results highlight that lower concentrations of nitrous oxide may be a useful treatment for TRMD.

Twenty-five percent inhaled nitrous oxide improves symptoms of treatment-resistant major depression with fewer adverse effects than the 50% concentration.

Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant.

-Sept 2020

MIT researchers have published seven papers outlining details of the physics behind the ambitious SPARC fusion research experiment being developed by MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Engineering student Priyanjali Gupta does not have tall tales of the inspiration behind her AI model that translates American Sign language (ASL) into English immediately.

Instead, the driving factor was her mum, who asked her “to do something now that she’s studying engineering”, a statement echoed by most Indian mums. Gupta is a third-year computer science student specializing in data science from the Vellore Institute of Technology, Tamil Nadu.

Humanity has taken yet another step toward the inevitable war against the machines (which we will lose) with the creation of Vall-E, an AI developed by a team of researchers at Microsoft that can produce high quality human voice replications with only a few seconds of audio training.

Vall-E isn’t the first AI-powered voice tool— xVASynth (opens in new tab), for instance, has been kicking around for a couple years now—but it promises to exceed them all in terms of pure capability. In a paper available at Cornell University (opens in new tab) (via Windows Central (opens in new tab) ), the Vall-E researchers say that most current text-to-speech systems are limited by their reliance on “high-quality clean data” in order to accurately synthesize high-quality speech.

A team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has found the missing puzzle piece in the mystery of how melanoma tumors control their mortality.

In a paper published in Science, they describe how they identified the specific genetic changes that allow tumors to grow rapidly while also preventing their own death. This discovery could have significant implications for the way melanoma is understood and treated by oncologists.