Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A Norwegian Greentech company has recently unveiled its new 1,000-foot (324m) tall, floating wind turbine array. Called “Wind Catcher”, this innovation in renewable energy generation could be used to power as many as 80,000 homes.

The system has been developed by the Norwegian-based Wind Catching Systems (WCS), who declare that their new wind turbine setup could generate five times the annual energy of the world’s biggest standalone wind turbines. Not only that, but if scaled, it could reduce the costs of wind energy to be competitive with traditional grid-supplied electricity.

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The financial industry’s response to artificial intelligence has been all over the place. Now, Bank of America is weighing in very much on the side of the bots.

In a note to clients viewed by CNBC and other outlets, BofA equity strategist Haim Israel boasted that AI was one of its top trends to watch — and invest in — for the year, and used all kinds of hypey language to convince its clients.

“We are at a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s — where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is moving towards mass adoption,” the client note reads, “with large language models like ChatGPT finally enabling us to fully capitalize on the data revolution.”

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Superconductivity is an incredible property of certain materials with exciting consequences. Once reached, for example, said materials can conduct electricity without resistance, so no loss of energy. But most materials are superconductive at extremely low temperatures. The quest for a room-temperature superconductor is ongoing, and is not without a bit of scientific drama.

A few years ago, there was a claim of a room-temperature superconductor that became supercritical at a temperature of 15°C (59°F), but required a pressure of 2.5 million atmospheres. That’s on the order of the pressure you might find in the core of a rocky planet, and can be achieved by squeezing materials between two diamonds. Other scientists raised issues with the way the numbers were handled, including an accusation of the data used being fabricated.

The paper was retracted by the journal Nature last September, and the team claims they are ready to resubmit that work. They have also announced a brand-new material with even more extraordinary properties (if confirmed). The new substance is described as a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride that becomes superconductive up to 20.5°C (69°F) and at a much lower pressure, roughly 10,000 atmospheres. Quite the improvement.

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A pilot trial by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham health care system, tested the nasal administration of the drug Foralumab, an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody. Investigators found evidence that the drug dampened the inflammatory T cell response and decreased lung inflammation in patients with COVID-19. Further analysis showed the same gene expression modulation in patients with multiple sclerosis, who experienced decreased brain inflammation, suggesting that Foralumab could be used to treat other diseases. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We discovered a way to shut down inflammation not only seen in COVID-19, but also in a patient with multiple sclerosis as well as in healthy patients,” said lead author Thais Moreira, Ph.D., an assistant scientist at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH and an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. “This is very exciting because not only does our study suggest that this new monoclonal antibody drug is safe and can modulate the without major side effects, but it can also decrease inflammation in multiple realms, so it may be useful for treating other diseases.”

“Inflammation is a major cause of many diseases,” said senior author Howard Weiner, MD, founder and director of the Brigham Multiple Sclerosis Center and co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases. “Our center has spent decades looking for novel ways to treat disease where there is abnormal inflammation in a way that is safe and effective.”

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For the first time, a research team has identified and analyzed the steps by which immune cells “see” and respond to cancer cells, providing insights into reasons some treatments may be effective for certain patients but not others.

The UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center scientists leading the research believe their findings will lead to better, more personalized immunotherapies—even for patients whose immune systems currently do not appear to respond to treatment.

“This is an important step forward in our understanding of what the T-cell responses see in the tumor and how they change over time while they are in the tumor and in circulation in the blood, searching for new tumor cells to attack,” said Cristina Puig-Saus, Ph.D., a UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher, adjunct assistant professor of medicine at UCLA, and the first author of a study in Nature.

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