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Beaming Your Mind to a Starship or Colony

Can we travel the stars without a body? Explore the idea of uploading your mind and transmitting it at light speed to distant starships or colonies—becoming data instead of a passenger.

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Free Will, Quantum & Orchestrated Objective Reduction

An extended exploration of what science tells us about free will and consciousness in a quantum universe, including Sir Roger Penrose’s theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction.

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Episode 353a, June 30, 2024 Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.

Cambridge scientists created a gel that could end arthritis pain

Cambridge scientists have created a breakthrough material that can sense tiny chemical changes in the body, such as the increased acidity during an arthritis flare-up, and release drugs exactly when and where they’re needed. By mimicking cartilage while delivering medication, this smart gel could ease pain, reduce side effects, and provide continuous treatment for millions of arthritis sufferers.

Huntington’s progression slowed by experimental gene therapy

Even hearing the phrase “Huntington’s disease” will make a room suddenly somber. So the joy that accompanied a recent announcement of results of an experimental gene therapy for the deadly diseases signaled an unfamiliar sense of hope.

In a small clinical trial, brain injections of a virus that codes for a tiny segment of RNA may have prevented the formation of the rogue proteins that make Huntington’s so devastating. The early results, announced September 24 in a news release, show that over three years, the treatment slowed Huntington’s progression by up to 75 percent. While not a cure, the treatment could potentially give people living with Huntington’s disease, who might otherwise face early disability and death, the gift of many more years of life.

The surprising new particle that could finally explain dark matter

Physicists are eyeing charged gravitinos—ultra-heavy, stable particles from supergravity theory—as possible Dark Matter candidates. Unlike axions or WIMPs, these particles carry electric charge but remain undetectable due to their scarcity. With detectors like JUNO and DUNE, researchers now have a chance to spot their unique signal, a breakthrough that could link particle physics with gravity.

Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners

View recent discussion. Abstract: The remarkable zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled natural language processing from task-specific models to unified, generalist foundation models. This transformation emerged from simple primitives: large, generative models trained on web-scale data. Curiously, the same primitives apply to today’s generative video models. Could video models be on a trajectory towards general-purpose vision understanding, much like LLMs developed general-purpose language understanding? We demonstrate that Veo 3 can solve a broad variety of tasks it wasn’t explicitly trained for: segmenting objects, detecting edges, editing images, understanding physical properties, recognizing object affordances, simulating tool use, and more.

Timing of treatment with oral propranolol for infantile hemangioma

Early oral propranolol for infantile hemangioma (IH) can improve the success rate. However, few studies have been conducted on the specific age threshold for initiating treatment with propranolol. This study aimed to determine the cutoff value of treatment success for IH with oral propranolol.

This was a retrospective study involving 207 patients with IH and clinical data. The primary outcome measure was treatment success with oral propranolol at months 6 to 12.

Multivariate analysis showed that age at treatment initiation (P 0.001), high-risk IH (P = 0.002), and segmental IH (P = 0.012) were independent risk factors for treatment unsuccess with oral propranolol at months 6 to 12. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis indicated that the cutoff value for age at treatment initiation was 69.5 days for all patients, 65.5 days for patients with segmental IH or high-risk IH, and 93.5 days for patients with non-high-risk and nonsegmental IH. Patients who started treatment before 69.5 days had a success rate of 73.8%, which was higher than the 28.4% success rate of patients who started treatment after 69.5 days. The median time to treatment success for patients who started treatment before 69.5 days was 11.5 months, which was shorter than the 15 months for patients who started treatment after 69.5 days.

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