Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Betaine, a dietary supplement extracted from sweet beets, reduces behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia in mice with genetic risk factors for the disorder. The supplement may help protect proteins that build the cellular skeletons of neurons.

Source: University of Tokyo.

A simple dietary supplement reduces behavioral symptoms in mice with a genetic mutation that causes schizophrenia. After additional experiments, including visualizing the fluorescently stained dancing edge of immature brain cells, researchers concluded that the supplement likely protects proteins that build neurons’ cellular skeletons.

Cerebras Systems has unveiled its new Wafer Scale Engine 2 processor with a record-setting 2.6 trillion transistors and 850000 AI-optimized cores. It’s built for supercomputing tasks, and it’s the second time since 2019 that Los Altos, California-based Cerebras has unveiled a chip that is basically an entire wafer.

Chipmakers normally slice a wafer from a 12-inch-diameter ingot of silicon to process in a chip factory. Once processed, the wafer is sliced into hundreds of separate chips that can be used in electronic hardware.

But Cerebras, started by SeaMicro founder Andrew Feldman, takes that wafer and makes a single, massive chip out of it. Each piece of the chip, dubbed a core, is interconnected in a sophisticated way to other cores. The interconnections are designed to keep all the cores functioning at high speeds so the transistors can work together as one.

A CRISPR-based treatment to stop the replication of both the flu virus and the virus that causes COVID-19 in mice. Moreover, the new treatment is delivered to the lungs via a nebulizer, which could make it simple for patients to administer themselves at home.

The treatment uses a type of CRISPR to target viral RNA and appears to stop replication of both viruses in the lungs.

An electronic device called the memristor could be our best hope for making practical chips that borrow design points from the human brain.

One in 17 people will suffer from a rare disease at some time in their lives. Most of these rare diseases have a genetic cause and often affect children, but proving which gene change causes a disease is a huge challenge.

Scientists have discovered a new genetic disease, which causes some children’s brains to develop abnormally, resulting in delayed intellectual development and often early onset cataracts.

The majority of patients with the condition, which is so new it doesn’t have a name yet, were also microcephalic, a birth defect where a baby’s head is smaller than expected when compared to babies of the same sex and age.

Continue reading “Strange New Genetic Disease Discovered That Causes Children’s Brains to Develop Abnormally” »

As expected, various samples of fruits, nuts, and other foods revealed very faint traces of cesium-137 when measured with a gamma detector, but even Kaste wasn’t prepared for what happened when he ran the same test with a jar of honey from a North Carolina farmer’s market.

Traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s can still be found in American honey, new research reveals.

Continue reading “American Honey Still Contains Radioactive Fallout From Nuclear Tests Decades Ago” »

Any discussion of rejuvenation biotechnology almost certainly includes the subject of and the objection that medical advances that directly address the various processes of aging will lead to an overpopulated world. Such dire predictions are a common theme in many discussions involving advances in medicine that could increase human lifespans.

Overpopulation is a word that gives the simple fact of population growth a negative connotation. It implies that an increase in the number of people will harm our lives in different ways, such as famine, scarcity of resources, excessive population density, increased risks of infectious diseases, and harm to the environment.

Continue reading “Increased Longevity and Overpopulation” »

There are several key technologies converging on an inevitable effect, namely a dramatic, explosive increase in human population. Currently around 40% of Earth’s total land area is dedicated to agricultural production to feed seven billion people, but, interestingly, while the human population will increase, the land area required to sustain this population will decrease, approaching zero land area to sustain a trillion human lives. In this era, bulk elements such as gold will have no value, since they will be so easy to produce by fusion separation of elements from bulk rock. Instead, value will be attached to biological material and, most importantly, new technologies themselves.

The several key emerging technologies that make this state of affairs unstoppable are listed along with aspects of their impact:

1) Most important is fusion energy, an unlimited, scalable energy, with no special fuel required to sustain it. This will allow nearly all agriculture to be contained in underground “vertical farm” buildings, extending thousands of feet downwards. Cheap artificially-lighted, climate-controlled environments will allow the maximum efficiency for all food crops. Thus, agriculture will take up close to zero surface area, largely produced underground on Earth or the Moon.

Continue reading “Approaching a Singularity, When The Number of Humans Alive Will Equal The Number Who Have Ever Died” »

Clip from Lew Later (This iPhone is 1 in 100 Million…) — https://youtu.be/OczdkxrD2uQ.