Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Our bodies divest themselves of 60 billion cells every day through a natural process of cell culling and turnover called apoptosis.

These cells — mainly blood and gut cells — are all replaced with new ones, but the way our bodies rid themselves of material could have profound implications for cancer therapies in a new approach developed by Stanford Medicine researchers.

They aim to use this natural method of cell death to trick cancer cells into disposing of themselves. Their method accomplishes this by artificially bringing together two proteins in such a way that the new compound switches on a set of cell death genes, ultimately driving tumor cells to turn on themselves. The researchers describe their latest such compound in a paper published Oct. 4 in Science.

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Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 89 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. November’s patch batch includes fixes for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited by attackers, as well as two other flaws that were publicly disclosed prior to today.

The zero-day flaw tracked as CVE-2024–49039 is a bug in the Windows Task Scheduler that allows an attacker to increase their privileges on a Windows machine. Microsoft credits Google’s Threat Analysis Group with reporting the flaw.

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Sometimes there are slightly different versions, or sequences of genes. There are several versions of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, for example. One of them, called APOE4, has been linked to a much higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, and carriers often have worse forms of the disease compared to carriers of other forms like APOE3. There are immune cells in the brain called microglia that help protect the brain from damage and harm. But when APOE4 is expressed, microglia seem to start to cause inflammation, and misfolded proteins to form in the brain, which can lead to serious problems. The findings have been reported in Cell Stem Cell.

In this work, the researchers developed a mouse model that could generate the human APOE4 protein in their brains. Next, the investigators eliminated microglia from these mouse brains. The formation of two misfolded proteins that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s diseases: amyloid and tau, was halted.

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Originally published on Towards AI.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), opinions run the gamut. Some see AI as a miraculous tool that could revolutionize every aspect of our lives, while others fear it as a force that could upend society and replace human ingenuity. Among these diverse perspectives lies a growing fascination with the cognitive abilities of AI: Can machines truly “understand” us? Recent research suggests that advanced language models like ChatGPT-4 may be more socially perceptive than we imagined.

A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals that advanced language models can now match a six-year-old child’s performance in theory of mind (ToM) tasks, challenging our assumptions about machine intelligence.

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There are many processes and proteins that help the body fight a flu infection. One of them is known as IFITM3. Researchers have now shown that this protein can help prevent viruses from mutating after they have infected a new host. But some people are deficient in IFITM3, which can raise their risk of a severe flu infection. That deficiency is not unusual in some groups. For example, around twenty percent of Chinese people and four percent of people with European ancestry carry variants in IFITM3 that can interfere with the protein’s expression. This study has shown that these genetic variants can allow flu viruses to establish infections even when the virus is present at very low levels that would not usually cause infection. The findings have been reported in Nature Communications.

The IFITM3 (interferon-induced transmembrane protein 3) protein is part of the innate immune system, and is generated at high levels after the detection of a flu infection. It can sequester viral particles so that they are not able to replicate, which reduces the severity of flu infections. Mouse models that are IFITM3 deficient are extremely vulnerable to the flu.

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As our collective nervousness over AI grows each day, “The Wild Robot” emerges from the woods with a completely different take on a man-made being with the ability to learn.

“I love the messaging of the story, the idea that kindness is a survival tactic,” says star Lupita Nyong’o. “It’s just so pure and sweet and needed.”

In the DreamWorks animated feature, a domestic helper robot, a ROZZUM 7,134 (Nyong’o), is lost on a wooded island and activated without human guidance. As the ingeniously designed “Roz” searches for a mission in a vernal bower that looks designed by an Impressionist painter, she learns to communicate with the animal residents and finds purpose in raising an orphaned gosling, Brightbill.

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During ritual ceremonies, the ancient Aztec civilization used a “death whistle” — a haunting instrument shaped like a human skull.

Its eerie, high-pitched scream is not just a product of its unique design, but a deliberate attempt to manipulate the human mind.

The Aztecs may have intentionally used this effect to enhance the terror of their sacrificial rituals.

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