Lifeboat Foundation

‘These structures provide an unprecedented view into the breadth and diversity of nature,’ say the researchers.

In a world first, Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) has produced the structures of the metagenomic world at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins, according to a blog by the company published on Tuesday.

“Proteins are complex and dynamic molecules, encoded by our genes, that are responsible for many of the varied and fundamental processes of life. They have an astounding range of roles in biology,” wrote the Meta research team who also published a paper on the matter in the preprint database bioRxiv.

Continue reading “Meta AI creates first ever database of 600 million metagenomic structures” »

A new study by author Cícero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert, 3D artist, and designer, reveals how a warrior may have died in the Battle of Gotland that took place between Swedish farmers and the Danish army in 1361.

One of the oldest stars in the Milky Way has been located by astronomers from the University of Warwick.

The oldest rocky and icy planetary system identified is from the oldest white dwarf star in our galaxy and is accreting debris from circling planetesimals, according to a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Saturday.

It’s a small comparison percentage, however, it matters.

The big idea.

Simonkr/iStock.

Continue reading “Women get to speak less in TV debates than men, AI analyzes 625,409 dialogues” »

The Senmenti will continue to accelerate quickly up to a stated top speed of 124 mph.

Two “super-scooters” completely packed with technology and a second outlandish concept that seek to revolutionize conventional chassis design will be on display at this year’s EICMA motorcycle show in Milan, Italy.

Horwin, an Austrian-designed and China-manufactured electric motorbike company, will debut two wild concepts this year at the show, according to an initial review report published by News Atlas on Thursday.

Continue reading “Electric ‘super-scooters’ that go 0-62 mph in 2.8 seconds will soon be unveiled in Milan” »

Solar cells that are stretchable, flexible and wearable won the day and the best poster award from a pool of 215 at Research Expo 2016 April 14 at the University of California San Diego. The winning nanoengineering researchers aim to manufacture small, flexible devices that can power watches, LEDs and wearable sensors. The ultimate goal is to design and build much bigger flexible solar cells that could be used as power sources and shelter in natural disasters and other emergencies.

Research Expo is an annual showcase of top graduate research projects for the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. During the poster session, graduate students are judged on the quality of their work and how well they articulate the significance of their research to society. Judges from industry, who often are alumni, pick the winners for each department. A group of faculty judges picks the overall winner from the six department winners.

Continue reading “Stretchable, Flexible, Wearable Solar Cells Take Top Prize at Research Expo 2016” »

Traumatic brain injuries might have faded from the headlines since the NFL reached a $765 million settlement for concussion-related brain injuries, but professional football players aren’t the only ones impacted by these injuries. Each year, between 2 million and 3 million Americans suffer from traumatic brain injuries—from elderly people who fall and hit their head, to adolescents playing sports or falling out of trees, to people in motor vehicle accidents.

There are currently no treatments to stop the long-term effects of a traumatic brain injury (TBI), and accurate diagnosis requires a visit to a medical center for a CT scan or MRI, both of which involve large, expensive equipment.

UC San Diego bioengineering Professor Ester Kwon, who leads the Nanoscale Bioengineering research lab at the Jacobs School of Engineering, aims to change that. Kwon’s team is developing nanomaterials—materials with dimensions on the nanometer scale—that could be used to diagnose traumatic brain injury on the spot, be it a sports field, the scene of a car accident, or a clinical setting. They’re also engineering nanoparticles that could target the portion of the patient’s brain that was injured, delivering specific therapeutics to treat the injury and improve the patient’s long-term quality of life.

Using human brain organoids, an international team of researchers, led by scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Sanford Consortium, has shown how the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 infects cortical neurons and specifically destroys their synapses — the connections between brain cells that allow them to communicate with each other.

The findings, published in the November 3, 2022 issue of PLOS Biology, also report that the antiviral drug sofosbuvir, already an approved treatment for hepatitis C, effectively inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication and reversed neuronal alterations in infected brain organoids.

“Vaccines and emerging treatments have reduced the health consequences of COVID-19 in most patients,” said senior study author Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, professor in departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “But the phenomenon of Long COVID, characterized by persisting symptoms that include neurological impairment, remains poorly understood and without any specific remedy.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have developed a novel method for comparing neural networks that looks into the “black box” of artificial intelligence to help researchers comprehend neural network behavior. Neural networks identify patterns in datasets and are utilized in applications as diverse as virtual assistants, facial recognition systems, and self-driving vehicles.

“The artificial intelligence research community doesn’t necessarily have a complete understanding of what neural networks are doing; they give us good results, but we don’t know how or why,” said Haydn Jones, a researcher in the Advanced Research in Cyber Systems group at Los Alamos. “Our new method does a better job of comparing neural networks, which is a crucial step toward better understanding the mathematics behind AI.”