Lifeboat Foundation

No fossils necessary.

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough they’re comparing to the moon landing: sequencing a full ancient genome from soil samples.

How’s that on par with humans touching down on the lunar surface? Well, the research team from the University of Copenhagen found the entire genetic code of an ancient bear species without obtaining it from fossils, marking the very first time scientists have found genes outside the fossil record. And by gathering the DNA from the soil, these researchers gathered a bunch of examples, rather than just one single specimen’s genome.

Continue reading “In ‘Moon Landing of Genomics,’ Scientists Sequence Ancient DNA From Dirt” »

As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that require automatically detecting objects or text, is announcing a big round of funding.

Hive, which has built a training data trove based on crowdsourced contributions from some 2 million people globally, which then powers a set of APIs that can be used to identify automatically images of objects, words and phrases — a process used not just in content moderation platforms, but also in building algorithms for autonomous systems, back-office data processing, and more — has raised $85 million in a Series D round of funding that the startup has confirmed values it at $2 billion.

“At the heart of what we’re doing is building AI models that can help automate work that used to be manual,” said Kevin Guo, Hive’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve heard about RPA and other workflow automation, and that is important too but what that has also established is that there are certain things that humans should not have to do that is very structural, but those systems can’t actually address a lot of other work that is unstructured.” Hive’s models help bring structure to that other work, and Guo claims they provide “near human level accuracy.”

Summary: Betaine, a dietary supplement extracted from sweet beets, reduces behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia in mice with genetic risk factors for the disorder. The supplement may help protect proteins that build the cellular skeletons of neurons.

Source: University of Tokyo.

A simple dietary supplement reduces behavioral symptoms in mice with a genetic mutation that causes schizophrenia. After additional experiments, including visualizing the fluorescently stained dancing edge of immature brain cells, researchers concluded that the supplement likely protects proteins that build neurons’ cellular skeletons.

Cerebras Systems has unveiled its new Wafer Scale Engine 2 processor with a record-setting 2.6 trillion transistors and 850000 AI-optimized cores. It’s built for supercomputing tasks, and it’s the second time since 2019 that Los Altos, California-based Cerebras has unveiled a chip that is basically an entire wafer.

Chipmakers normally slice a wafer from a 12-inch-diameter ingot of silicon to process in a chip factory. Once processed, the wafer is sliced into hundreds of separate chips that can be used in electronic hardware.

But Cerebras, started by SeaMicro founder Andrew Feldman, takes that wafer and makes a single, massive chip out of it. Each piece of the chip, dubbed a core, is interconnected in a sophisticated way to other cores. The interconnections are designed to keep all the cores functioning at high speeds so the transistors can work together as one.

A CRISPR-based treatment to stop the replication of both the flu virus and the virus that causes COVID-19 in mice. Moreover, the new treatment is delivered to the lungs via a nebulizer, which could make it simple for patients to administer themselves at home.

The treatment uses a type of CRISPR to target viral RNA and appears to stop replication of both viruses in the lungs.

An electronic device called the memristor could be our best hope for making practical chips that borrow design points from the human brain.

One in 17 people will suffer from a rare disease at some time in their lives. Most of these rare diseases have a genetic cause and often affect children, but proving which gene change causes a disease is a huge challenge.

Scientists have discovered a new genetic disease, which causes some children’s brains to develop abnormally, resulting in delayed intellectual development and often early onset cataracts.

The majority of patients with the condition, which is so new it doesn’t have a name yet, were also microcephalic, a birth defect where a baby’s head is smaller than expected when compared to babies of the same sex and age.

Continue reading “Strange New Genetic Disease Discovered That Causes Children’s Brains to Develop Abnormally” »

As expected, various samples of fruits, nuts, and other foods revealed very faint traces of cesium-137 when measured with a gamma detector, but even Kaste wasn’t prepared for what happened when he ran the same test with a jar of honey from a North Carolina farmer’s market.

Traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s can still be found in American honey, new research reveals.

Continue reading “American Honey Still Contains Radioactive Fallout From Nuclear Tests Decades Ago” »

Any discussion of rejuvenation biotechnology almost certainly includes the subject of and the objection that medical advances that directly address the various processes of aging will lead to an overpopulated world. Such dire predictions are a common theme in many discussions involving advances in medicine that could increase human lifespans.

Overpopulation is a word that gives the simple fact of population growth a negative connotation. It implies that an increase in the number of people will harm our lives in different ways, such as famine, scarcity of resources, excessive population density, increased risks of infectious diseases, and harm to the environment.

Continue reading “Increased Longevity and Overpopulation” »