Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, scientists have discovered that a small region of our brain shuts down to take microsecond-long naps while we’re awake. What’s more, these same areas ‘flicker’ awake while we’re asleep. These new findings could offer pivotal insights into neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, which are linked to sleep dysregulation.

Scientists from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) and the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) made these findings by accident, noticing how brain waves in one tiny area of the brain shut down suddenly for just milliseconds when we’re awake. And in this same region, those brain waves jolt suddenly, for the same amount of time, when we’re asleep.

“With powerful tools and new computational methods, there’s so much to be gained by challenging our most basic assumptions and revisiting the question of ‘what is a state?’” said Keith Hengen, Assistant Professor of Biology at WashU. “Sleep or wake is the single greatest determinant of your behavior, and then everything else falls out from there. So if we don’t understand what sleep and wake actually are, it seems like we’ve missed the boat.”

Successfully innovating optoelectronic semiconductor devices depends a lot on moving charges and excitons—electron-hole pairs—in specified directions for the purpose of creating fuels or electricity.

The expansion rate of the universe, measured by the Hubble constant, has been one of the most controversial numbers in cosmology for years, and we seem at last to be close to nailing it down.

By Leah Crane

Turning off inflammatory protein extends healthy lifespan in mice.

A protein that promotes inflammation could hold the key to a longer, healthier life.

Humans also have the protein, called IL-11, offering hope for a future longevity treatment.

Continue reading “Mice live longer when inflammation-boosting protein is blocked” »

Large language models trained on religious texts claim to offer spiritual insights on demand. What could go wrong?

By Webb Wright

Just before midnight on the first day of Ramadan last year, Raihan Khan—a 20-year-old Muslim student living in Kolkata—announced in a LinkedIn post that he had launched QuranGPT, an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot he had designed to answer questions and provide advice based on Islam’s holiest text. Then he went to sleep. He awoke seven hours later to find it had crashed because of an overflow of traffic. A lot of the comments were positive, but others were not. Some were flat-out threatening.

Poe is an animated talking teddy bear toy that uses ChatGPT to generate children’s stories. I took it for an early test run and bedtime got strange.

Lucid says new updates make the Air Pure electric sedan beat Tesla and everybody else when it comes to powertrain efficiency.

According to a report by KPRC and the Texas General Land Office, officials are watching condensate leaking from an offshore drilling platform.

Stunt marks Elton John’s appearance as Glastonbury.