Lifeboat Foundation

At Boston University, a team of researchers is working to better understand how language and speech is processed in the brain, and how to best rehabilitate people who have lost their ability to communicate due to brain damage caused by a stroke, trauma, or another type of brain injury. This type of language loss is called aphasia, a long-term neurological disorder caused by damage to the part of the brain responsible for language production and processing that impacts over a million people in the US.

“It’s a huge problem,” says Swathi Kiran, director of BU’s Aphasia Research Lab, and College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate dean for research and James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation. “It’s something our lab is working to tackle at multiple levels.”

For the last decade, Kiran and her team have studied the brain to see how it changes as people’s language skills improve with speech therapy. More recently, they’ve developed new methods to predict a person’s ability to improve even before they start therapy. In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, Kiran and collaborators at BU and the University of Texas at Austin report they can predict language recovery in Hispanic patients who speak both English and Spanish fluently—a group of aphasia patients particularly at risk of long-term language loss—using sophisticated computer models of the brain. They say the breakthrough could be a game changer for the field of speech therapy and for stroke survivors impacted by aphasia.

TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operators have cleared a portion of C-band in a key step toward giving the spectrum to U.S. wireless companies in December.

Work has now started on installing filters on ground antennas across the United States, so wireless operators can use the lower 120 MHz of C-band for 5G without interfering with satellite broadcast customers.

Intelsat and SES, the satellite operators with the largest share of the 500 MHz C-band in the U.S., will get more than $2 billion from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) if they can hand over the 120 MHz swath of frequencies by Dec. 5.

New EPFL research has found that almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turkey are fake, a scale of manipulation previously unheard of. It also proves for the first time that many trends are created solely by bots due to a vulnerability in Twitter’s Trends algorithm.

Social media has become ubiquitous in our modern, daily lives. It has changed the way that people interact, connecting us in previously unimaginable ways. Yet, where once our social media networks probably consisted of a small circle of friends most of us are now part of much larger communities that can influence what we read, do, and even think.

One influencing mechanism, for example, is “Twitter Trends.” The platform uses an algorithm to determine hashtag-driven topics that become popular at a given point in time, alerting twitter users to the top words, phrases, subjects and popular hashtags globally and locally.

Criminals use high-pressure tactics to extort victims.

Generation of an ARHGAP11B-transgenic mouse line.

To generate a stable transgenic mouse line that expresses an ARHGAP11B protein, we first determined the temporal and spatial expression patterns of human ARHGAP11A and human ARHGAP11B mRNAs by qPCR of foetal human neocortical tissue at various developmental stages (gestational weeks 12–21; Fig EV1A and B) and by analysing previously published RNA-seq data sets of defined isolated NPC and neuron populations (Florio et al, 2015) (Fig EV1C and D), respectively. As the expression patterns of ARHGAP11A and ARHGAP11B mRNAs were found to be similar, we decided to generate the transgenic mouse line by converting one allele of the mouse Arhgap11a gene into a mutant mouse ARHGAP11B gene (mARHGAP11B), using the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology (for details, see Materials and Methods). In m ARHGAP11B, the 55 nucleotides of Arhgap11a that in humans would be deleted from the ARHGAP11B mRNA by splicing using the new splice-donor site are replaced by the 141 nucleotides encoding the human-specific 47-amino acid sequence plus three nucleotides to generate a translational stop codon (Fig EV1E). Unless indicated otherwise, the ARHGAP11B-transgenic mice obtained (referred to as 11B mice hereafter) were used as heterozygous animals, that is, with one mouse Arhgap11a allele being replaced by m ARHGAP11B. The resulting ARHGAP11B protein will be expressed in developing mouse neocortex under the control of the native mouse Arhgap11a promotor.

Critical advances in the investigation of brain functions and treatment of brain disorders are hindered by our inability to selectively target neurons in a noninvasive manner in the deep brain.

This study aimed to develop sonothermogenetics for noninvasive, deep-penetrating, and cell-type-specific neuromodulation by combining a thermosensitive ion channel TRPV1 with focused ultrasound (FUS)-induced brief, non-noxious thermal effect.

The sensitivity of TRPV1 to FUS sonication was evaluated in vitro. It was followed by in vivo assessment of sonothermogenetics in the activation of genetically defined neurons in the mouse brain by two-photon calcium imaging. Behavioral response evoked by sonothermogenetic stimulation at a deep brain target was recorded in freely moving mice. Immunohistochemistry staining of ex vivo brain slices was performed to evaluate the safety of FUS sonication.

Scientists have created a cybersecurity technology called Shadow Figment that is designed to lure hackers into an artificial world, then stop them from doing damage by feeding them illusory tidbits of success.

The aim is to sequester bad actors by captivating them with an attractive—but imaginary—world.

Continue reading “Shadow Figment technology foils cyberattacks” »

The Nvidia 170HX could offer an Ethereum hash rate way in excess of an RTX 3090 for less power.

The latest rumours point to a brand new Nvidia cryptocurrency mining processor that’s capable of an Ethereum mining hash rate 164MH/s. If you’re not familiar with the hash rates of cryptocurrency mining, that make it an absolute whopper of a card—the GeForce RTX 3090 is somewhere in the region of 120-130MH/s. Wild, right?

It’s called the 170HX, says Twitter leaker 9550Pro, and it will feature 4480 CUDA Cores and run at 250W. Its secret, how it manages to out mine a beefier card in the 350W RTX 3090, is the choice of memory. There’s just 8GB of it on the reported card but that 8GB is made up of HBM2e, the HBM in which literally stands for High Bandwidth Memory.

Continue reading “Leaked Nvidia cryptocurrency card could be powerful enough to save gaming GPUs from the mines” »

HSE doesn’t expect health services to return to normal for “a number of weeks” as it continues to deal with the fallout of the ransomware attack against critical IT infrastructure.