Lifeboat Foundation

Glass, rubber and plastics all belong to a class of matter called amorphous solids. And in spite of how common they are in our everyday lives, amorphous solids have long posed a challenge to scientists.

Since the 1910s, scientists have been able to map in 3D the atomic structures of crystals, the other major class of solids, which has led to myriad advances in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, geology, nanoscience, drug discovery and more. But because amorphous solids aren’t assembled in rigid, repetitive atomic structures like crystals are, they have defied researchers’ ability to determine their atomic structure with the same level of precision.

Until now, that is.

The team found that feeding mice a high fat diet disrupted the circuit, which led not only to weight gain but also to signs of anxiety and depression on standard behavioral tests.

When the researchers used genetic techniques to restore the normal functioning of nerve receptors in the circuit, this resulted in weight loss and eliminated the animals’ signs of anxiety and depression.

A recent study in mice has found that eating a high fat diet may disrupt a newly discovered neural circuit that affects both mood and appetite.

Continue reading “Faulty brain circuit helps explain obesity–depression link” »

This genetic connection caught many scientists off guard, and it remains “one of the most intriguing and poorly understood events in human history,” the researchers wrote in the new study.

To investigate the Y signal further, a team of scientists in Brazil and Spain dove into a large dataset containing the genetic data of 383 Indigenous people from different parts of South America. The team applied statistical methods to test whether any of the Native American populations had “excess” genetic similarity with a group they called the Australasians, or Indigenous peoples from Australia, Melanesia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.

In other words, the team was assessing whether “a given Native American population shared significantly more genetic variants with Australasians than other Native Americans do,” Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva said. South American groups that did have more genetic similarities with Australasians were interpreted by the new researchers as being descendants of the first Americans and Australasian ancestors, who coupled together at least 15000 years ago.

A team of researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology along with partners at the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, both in China, has developed a tiny robot that can ferry cancer drugs through the blood-brain barrier (BBB) without setting off an immune reaction. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their robot and tests with mice. Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, with the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have published a Focus piece in the same journal issue on the work done by the team in China.

For many years, medical scientists have sought ways to deliver drugs to the brain to treat health conditions such as brain cancers. Because the brain is protected by the skull, it is extremely difficult to inject them directly. Researchers have also been stymied in their efforts by the BBB—a filtering mechanism in the capillaries that supply blood to the brain and spinal cord that blocks foreign substances from entering. Thus, simply injecting drugs into the bloodstream is not an option. In this new effort, the researchers used a defense cell type that naturally passes through the BBB to carry drugs to the brain.

To build their tiny robots, the researchers exposed groups of white blood cells called neutrophils to tiny bits of magnetic nanogel particles coated with fragments of E. coli material. Upon exposure, the neutrophils naturally encased the tiny robots, believing them to be nothing but E. coli bacteria. The microrobots were then injected into the bloodstream of a test mouse with a cancerous tumor. The team then applied a magnetic field to the robots to direct them through the BBB, where they were not attacked, as the immune system identified them as normal neutrophils, and into the brain and the tumor. Once there, the robots released their cancer-fighting drugs.

A breakthrough in synthetic biology could shed new light on mechanisms controlling the most basic processes of life.

A user in a low level hacking forum has published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.

Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known Facebook users’ phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook’s password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number.

Cybersecurity specialists report that Intel is facing a class action lawsuit for violating an anti–wiretapping law in the state of Florida, US. The plaintiffs argue that the company hid software on its website that allowed it to record users’ keystrokes and mouse movements without their express consent.

This is a new case of practice known as session replay, used by multiple companies to take detailed records of how their users interact with their websites, involving the capture of mouse movements, clicks and information queries on the page visited.

Continue reading “Intel’s website records and tracks keystrokes, mouse clicks, and user cursor movement” »

Michael I. Jordan explains why today’s artificial-intelligence systems aren’t actually intelligent.

THE INSTITUTE Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley.

He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning—the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI—or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web. Machine learning also can provide new services to humans in domains such as health care, commerce, and transportation, by bringing together information found in multiple data sets, finding patterns, and proposing new courses of action.

Continue reading “Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says” »

China has a good chance of becoming the dominant space power in the 21st century, and it’s not just looking to copy NASA on the way to the top. Instead, it’s paying close attention to innovative US companies like SpaceX, writes Eric Berger.