Lifeboat Foundation

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed an executive order to make cutting-edge gene and cell therapies more affordable and accessible. The order’s primary focus is on treatments for sickle cell disease, a condition that disproportionately affects Black Americans.

Addressing Cost Barriers to Innovation

The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) will spearhead efforts to develop new payment models for these transformative but expensive treatments. A newly formed Advisory Council will recommend creating sustainable financing structures, emphasizing models that reward positive health outcomes.

Eight reactions could connect ancient Earth to modern day. Here’s how.

Explore the transformative potential of CRISPR in medicine, agriculture, and beyond, and delve into the ethical debates surrounding this technology.

As machine learning models are becoming mainstream tools for molecular and materials research, there is an urgent need to improve the nature, quality, and accessibility of atomistic data. In turn, there are opportunities for a new generation of generally applicable datasets and distillable models.

Several branches of modern physics, including quantum theory and cosmology, suggest our universe may be just one of many.

By Sarah Scoles

Humans live in a universe; that is a fact. Up for debate, though, is whether that universe lives in a sea of other universes— a multiverse.

Some scientists speculate that the strange happenings in this microscopic realm may hold the key to understanding consciousness. But scant evidence has left the majority skeptical.

That includes Christof Koch, Ph.D., meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute. As he wrote in his recent book, Then I am myself the world, “the brain is wet and warm, hardly conducive to subtle quantum interactions.”

Continue reading “Quantum mechanics and the puzzle of human consciousness” »

AI and crypto combined could add a total of $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030, the report said. Bitwise notes that bitcoin miners have all the resources that AI firms need. Crypto and AI have the potential to intersect in other areas other than mining such as information validation and virtual assistants.

The two industries could add a collective $20 trillion to global GDP by 2030, the report said.

In a study appearing in Nature, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reconstructed the evolutionary history and global spread of malaria over the past 5,500 years, identifying trade, warfare, and colonialism as major catalysts for its dispersal.

Scientists refer to this phenomenon as the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE for short. But the initial accumulation of O₂ on Earth was not nearly as straightforward as that moniker suggests, according to new research led by a University of Utah geochemist.

This “event” lasted at least 200 million years. And tracking the accumulation of O₂ in the oceans has been very difficult until now, said Chadlin Ostrander, an assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

“Emerging data suggest that the initial rise of O₂ in Earth’s atmosphere was dynamic, unfolding in fits-and-starts until perhaps 2.2. billion years ago,” said Ostrander, lead author on the study published June 12 in the journal Nature. “Our data validate this hypothesis, even going one step further by extending these dynamics to the ocean.”