Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 3,910

This is according to a press release by the institutions published on Thursday.

“We’ve come up with an unprecedented principle. Yes, the wood transistor is slow and bulky, but it does work, and has huge development potential,” said Isak Engquist, senior associate professor at the Laboratory for Organic Electronics at Linköping University.

This isn’t the first time scientists have attempted to produce wooden transistors but previous trials resulted in versions that could regulate ion transport only. Making matters worse was the fact that when the ions ran out, the transistor stopped functioning.

Read more | >

To get an inside look at the heart, cardiologists often use electrocardiograms (ECGs) to trace its electrical activity and magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to map its structure. Because the two types of data reveal different details about the heart, physicians typically study them separately to diagnose heart conditions.

Now, in a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists in the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a that can learn patterns from ECGs and MRIs simultaneously, and based on those patterns, predict characteristics of a patient’s . Such a tool, with further development, could one day help doctors better detect and diagnose heart conditions from routine tests such as ECGs.

The researchers also showed that they could analyze ECG recordings, which are easy and cheap to acquire, and generate MRI movies of the same heart, which are much more expensive to capture. And their method could even be used to find new genetic markers of heart disease that existing approaches that look at individual data modalities might miss.

Read more | >

Worms can entangle themselves into a single, giant knot, only to quickly unravel themselves from the tightly wound mess within milliseconds. Now, math shows how they do it.

Researchers studied California blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) — thin worms that can grow to be 4 inches (10 centimeters) in length — in the lab, watching as the worms intertwined by the thousands. Even though it took the worms minutes to form into a ball-shaped blob akin to a snarled tangle of Christmas lights, they could untangle from the jumble in the blink of an eye when threatened, according to a study published April 28 in the journal Science (opens in new tab).

Read more | >

An artificial intelligence chatbot was able to outperform human doctors in responding to patient questions posted online, according to evaluators in a new study.

Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine found that a chatbot’s responses to patient questions, pulled from a social media platform, were rated “significantly higher for both quality and empathy.”

Read more | >

A report has found that AI chatbots have created dozens of news websites around the world that focus on “clickbait articles” to generate revenue.

The report published by the news-rating group NewsGuard identified 49 websites across seven different languages that appeared to be generated – or mostly generated – by AI language models. NewsGuard researchers found that these websites tended to use dull language and repeated phrases, which are trademarks of AI chatbots.

Read more | >

While Wilms tumor—also known as nephroblastoma—is rare, it is the most prevalent childhood kidney cancer. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles have now pinpointed a disruption in early kidney progenitor cell development that can be linked to the formation of Wilms tumor.

In a study published in Advanced Science, researchers at the GOFARR Laboratory in Urology compared kidney progenitor cells from a with from a healthy kidney. Normally, these precursor cells mature into kidney cells, but when their early development is dysregulated, they behave like .

While most children with Wilms tumor are successfully treated, current therapies are aggressive. A minority of these patients have unfavorable prognoses or relapses; for these children, there is no existing therapy. “By achieving a more precise understanding of how Wilms tumors develop, our goal is to find new treatments for all types of Wilms tumor,” says Laura Perin, Ph.D., Co-Director of the GOFARR laboratory and senior study co-author with Stefano Da Sacco, Ph.D., another researcher at the GOFARR Laboratory.

Read more | >