Lifeboat Foundation

Research carried out by a University academic has shed new light on the fundamentals of how, and why, we make the decisions we do.

In two separate studies, UKRI Future Leader Fellow and Lecturer in Psychology, Dr. Elsa Fouragnan has used her expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational analysis to discover exactly what happens in the brains of human and non-human primates when certain kinds of decisions are made in different contexts. Both pieces of work were carried out in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology.

The first, published in Nature Communications, explores how and where the brain encodes a memory of the general reward rate in an environment, what the team describes as the ‘richness’ of the context in which decisions are made.

Since antiquity, cultures on nearly every continent have discovered that certain plant leaves, when chewed or brewed or rubbed on the body, could relieve diverse ailments, inspire hallucinations or, in higher dosages, even cause death. Today, pharmaceutical companies import these once-rare plants from specialized farms and extract their active chemical compounds to make drugs like scopolamine for relieving motion sickness and postoperative nausea, and atropine, to curb the drooling associated with Parkinson’s disease or help maintain cardiac function when intubating COVID-19 patients and placing them on ventilators.

Now, Stanford engineers are recreating these ancient remedies in a thoroughly modern way by genetically reprogramming the cellular machinery of a special strain of yeast, effectively transforming them into microscopic factories that convert sugars and amino acids into these folkloric drugs, in much the same way that brewers’ yeast can naturally convert sugars into alcohol.

Unlike every other AM technology, their process prints the entire object at once. The researchers published the paper in the journal Nature Communications.

In a unanimous decision, a 17-judge panel said Myanmar must take steps to protect the Muslim minority Rohingya, who “remain extremely vulnerable” after a brutal 2017 crackdown by the military.

The California Independent System Operator warned rolling blackouts could hit 3 million customers Sunday. PG&E said 17 counties could see power outages Monday.

Winners will get four days off, a medal and the training school of their choice.

A second case of human plague has been reported in Colorado this summer and state health officials are urging residents to take precautions to prevent exposure.

A resident of a rural county in the state has been diagnosed with plague and the case was reported to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on Thursday, according to a news release. A southwest Colorado resident was diagnosed earlier this summer.

Grand County Public Health on Friday said the newly infected victim is a Grand County resident.

NASA released the highest-resolution panorama that the Mars Curiosity rover has ever taken, at close to 1.8 billion pixels.

Autonomous vessels may offer solution to pandemic struggles.