Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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BOSTON — Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a drug that potently neutralizes SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 coronavirus, and is equally effective against the Omicron variant and every other tested variant. The drug is designed in such a way that natural selection to maintain infectiousness of the virus should also maintain the drug’s activity against future variants.

The investigational drug, described in a report published today in Science Advances, is not an antibody, but a related molecule known as an ACE2 receptor decoy. Unlike antibodies, the ACE2 decoy is far more difficult for the SARS-CoV-2 virus to evade because mutations in the virus that would enable it to avoid the drug would also reduce the virus’s ability to infect cells. The Dana-Farber scientists found a way to make this type of drug neutralize coronaviruses more potently in animals infected with COVID-19 and to make it safe to give to patients.

This report comes at a time when antibody drugs used to treat COVID-19 have lost their effectiveness because the viral spike protein has mutated to escape being targeted by the antibodies.

Continue reading “New receptor “decoy” drug neutralizes COVID-19 virus and its variants” | >

Northwestern University researchers have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that drives aging.

In a new study, researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze data from a wide variety of tissues, collected from humans, mice, rats and killifish. They discovered that the length of genes can explain most molecular-level changes that occur during aging.

All cells must balance the activity of long and short genes. The researchers found that longer genes are linked to longer lifespans, and shorter genes are linked to shorter lifespans. They also found that aging genes change their activity according to length. More specifically, aging is accompanied by a shift in activity toward short genes. This causes the gene activity in cells to become unbalanced.

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If you’re one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.

Photographs have always been subject to falsifications—first in darkrooms with scissors and paste and then via Adobe Photoshop through pixels. But it took a great deal of skill to pull off convincingly. Today, creating convincing photorealistic fakes has become almost trivial.

Once an AI model learns how to render someone, their image becomes a software plaything. The AI can create images of them in infinite quantities. And the AI model can be shared, allowing other people to create images of that person as well.

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Summary: Researchers have identified a protein that could be leveraged to help microglia in the brain stave off Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Source: The Conversation.

Many neurodegenerative diseases, or conditions that result from the loss of function or death of brain cells, remain largely untreatable. Most available treatments target just one of the multiple processes that can lead to neurodegeneration, which may not be effective in completely addressing disease symptoms or progress, if at all.

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The drug, midazolam, is often used before surgery to make a patient feel more relaxed. According to a new study, it is associated with an increased risk of heart damage when surgeries are performed at night.

According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, a popular drug that makes patients sleepy and less anxious before surgery is associated with an increased risk of heart damage when surgeries are performed at night.

The results provide further proof that a drug’s effectiveness might vary depending on the time it is administered.

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Furstenberg’s Proof

Szemerédi had been examining sets that contain a “positive fraction” of all the integers. Take, for example, the set containing all multiples of 5. As you look at bigger and bigger swaths of the number line, multiples of 5 continue to appear regularly. Mathematicians say that the set containing all multiples of 5 has the fraction of a fifth of all the integers.

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Robots and AI are already real products and services. But will they take our jobs? Or even take over? In this video I discuss these questions in a pragmatic fashion, as well as how we may usefully define “artificial intelligence”. Also covered are cloud AI services, and the role AI in digital transformation.

REFERENCES & OTHER LINKS:

Alan Turing’s 1950 paper in “Mind” on ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’:
https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf.

IBM Watson (cloud AI):

Continue reading “AI, Robots & the Future” | >