Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: 15 newly discovered “hotspots” in the genome that either speed up or slow down brain aging could be new targets for the development of Alzheimer’s medications and therapies for other brain disorders.

Source: USC

Researchers from a USC-led consortium have discovered 15 “hotspots” in the genome that either speed up brain aging or slow it down—a finding that could provide new drug targets to resist Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative brain disorders, as well as developmental delays.

Tweaking it may delay development of the disease | Science & technology.

Artificial intelligence is a target for every existing industry Or is it just another hyped innovation? It comes with no surprise how AI today becomes a catchall term that is said out loud in the job market. The US and China are in nip and tuck in the AI race for supremacy. Although China aims to be the technology leader by 2030, the economy is still at a struggle phase with a slowdown and trade war with the US. Emerging trends in artificial intelligence (AI) significantly points toward having a geopolitical disruption in the foreseeable future. As much as the fourth industrial revolution augmented the rise of advanced economies, so will machine learning and artificial intelligence transform the world.

The air-purifying headphones are designed to address the growing issue of pollution.

In machine learning, understanding why a model makes certain decisions is often just as important as whether those decisions are correct. For instance, a machine-learning model might correctly predict that a skin lesion is cancerous, but it could have done so using an unrelated blip on a clinical photo.

While tools exist to help experts make sense of a model’s reasoning, often these methods only provide insights on one decision at a time, and each must be manually evaluated. Models are commonly trained using millions of data inputs, making it almost impossible for a human to evaluate enough decisions to identify patterns.

Now, researchers at MIT and IBM Research have created a method that enables a user to aggregate, sort, and rank these individual explanations to rapidly analyze a machine-learning model’s behavior. Their technique, called Shared Interest, incorporates quantifiable metrics that compare how well a model’s reasoning matches that of a human.

The 2021 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap has identified priorities for future investment in Australia’s national research infrastructure.

To rid an indigenous tribe’s land of toxic forever chemicals, scientists are having hemp plants pull the contaminants straight from the soil.

AI research group OpenAI has announced a new version of its DALL-E text-to-image generation system that includes editing, high-resolution images, and a test program that could see it added to the OpenAI API toolbox.

Throughout the past decade, several metaphors and labels have evolved to describe the software that curates the data storage. Some were called warehouses; they generally offered stronger structure and compliance, but they were often unable to manage the larger volumes of information from modern web applications. Another term, the “data lake,” referred to less structured collections that were engineered to scale easily, in part because they enforced fewer rules. Google wants BigLake to offer the control of the best data warehouses with the seemingly endless availability of cloud storage.

“All of these organizations who try to innovate on top of the data lake found it to be, at the end of the day, just a data swamp,” said Kazmaier. “Our innovation at Google Cloud is that we take BigQuery and its unique architecture, its unique Serverless model, its unique storage architecture and a unique compute architecture and [integrate it] with open-source file formats and open-source processing engines.”

The open-source architecture is intended to allow customers to adopt Google’s tools slowly through integration with existing data infrastructure. These open formats simplify sharing information, making it a more welcoming environment.