Lifeboat Foundation

Starlink, the internet connectivity constellation currently under construction, is embarking on a beta test.

There is no question that motivation is one of the hardest and yet important factors in life. It’s the difference between success and failure, goal-setting and aimlessness, well-being and unhappiness. And yet, why is it so hard to get motivated — or even if we do, to keep it up?

That is the question that scientists led by Professor Carmen Sandi at EPFL and Dr Gedi Luksys at the University of Edinburgh have sought to answer. The researchers worked off previous knowledge that told them two things: First, that people differ a lot in their capacity to engage in motivated behavior and that motivational problems like apathy are common in neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. Second, to target an area of the brain called the “nucleus accumbens”.

Sitting close to the bottom of brain, the nucleus accumbens has been the subject of a lot of research. The reason is that it was quickly found to be a major player in functions like aversion, reward, reinforcement, and motivation.

AI the single most important tool humanity has conceived.

A White House proposal for the 2021 budget would raise funding for AI and quantum computing by 30 percent.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed artificial intelligence software for powder bed 3D printers that assesses the quality of parts in real time, without the need for expensive characterization equipment.

The software, named Peregrine, supports the advanced manufacturing “digital thread” being developed at ORNL that collects and analyzes data through every step of the manufacturing process, from design to feedstock selection to the print build to material testing.

“Capturing that information creates a digital ‘clone’ for each part, providing a trove of data from the raw material to the operational component,” said Vincent Paquit, who leads advanced manufacturing data analytics research as part of ORNL’s Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning group. “We then use that data to qualify the part and to inform future builds across multiple part geometries and with multiple materials, achieving new levels of automation and manufacturing quality assurance.”

“These findings reveal how the immune system goes awry during coronavirus infections, leading to severe disease, and point to potential therapeutic targets,” said Bali Pulendran, Ph.D., professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology and the senior author of the study, which will be published Aug. 11 in Science.

Lead authorship is shared by Stanford postdoctoral scholars Prabhu Arnunachalam, Ph.D., and Florian Wimmers, Ph.D.; and Chris Ka Pun Mok, Ph.D., and Mahen Perera, Ph.D., both assistant professors of public health laboratory sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

A Stanford study shows that in severely ill COVID-19 patients, “first-responder” immune cells, which should react immediately to signs of viruses or bacteria in the body, instead respond sluggishly.

Continue reading “Study reveals immune-system paralysis in severe COVID-19 cases” »

Circa 2014

A Silicon Valley startup run by old-school technologists has invented an energy storage device that could take an entire neighborhood off the grid.

What would it take to build this state-of-the-art space habitat?

Instead of recruiting whole phages into phage therapy armies, antibacterial campaigns may simply requisition the organisms’ battle-tested cell-wall-breaching enzymes.

It was 1917 when Felix d’Herelle, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, first proposed using bacteriophages (or phages)—viruses that infect bacteria—as a therapy for human bacterial infections. Although used for decades in parts of Europe, notably Russia, Poland, and the Republic of Georgia, phage therapy is only permitted in the United States under the “compassionate use” umbrella—when there is nothing else available.

The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria that defy traditional antibiotics has forced clinicians to seek alternative measures to curb deadly infections. Two cases made headlines in recent years. In 2016, the life of Thomas Patterson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, was saved by phage therapy after he developed a deadly Acinetobacter baumannii infection. (The story is recounted in The Perfect Predator, the book that Patterson co-authored with his wife, epidemiologist Steffanie A. Strathdee, PhD.) Last year, the life of an English teenager was saved after she developed an infection following a lung transplant for cystic fibrosis.

Continue reading “Lysins Unlimited: Phages’ Secret Weapon” »