Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The researchers started with a sample taken from the temporal lobe of a human cerebral cortex, measuring just 1 mm3. This was stained for visual clarity, coated in resin to preserve it, and then cut into about 5300 slices each about 30 nanometers (nm) thick. These were then imaged using a scanning electron microscope, with a resolution down to 4 nm. That created 225 million two-dimensional images, which were then stitched back together into one 3D volume.

Machine learning algorithms scanned the sample to identify the different cells and structures within. After a few passes by different automated systems, human eyes “proofread” some of the cells to ensure the algorithms were correctly identifying them.

The end result, which Google calls the H01 dataset, is one of the most comprehensive maps of the human brain ever compiled. It contains 50000 cells and 130 million synapses, as well as smaller segments of the cells such axons, dendrites, myelin and cilia. But perhaps the most stunning statistic is that the whole thing takes up 1.4 petabytes of data – that’s more than a million gigabytes.

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The idea is simple: decades of research have found certain genes that seem to increase the chance of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. The numbers range over hundreds. Figuring out how each connects or influences another—if at all—takes years of research in individual labs. What if scientists unite, tap into a shared resource, and collectively solve the case of why Alzheimer’s occurs in the first place?

The initiative’s secret weapon is induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs. Similar to most stem cells, they have the ability to transform into anything—a cellular genie, if you will. iPSCs are reborn from regular adult cells, such as skin cells. When transformed into a brain cell, however, they carry the original genes of their donor, meaning that they harbor the original person’s genetic legacy—for example, his or her chance of developing Alzheimer’s in the first place. What if we introduce Alzheimer’s-related genes into these reborn stem cells, and watch how they behave?

By studying these iPSCs, we might be able to follow clues that lead to the genetic causes of Alzheimer’s and other dementias—paving the road for gene therapies to nip them in the bud.

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Article I just wrote about how going to Mars is actually good for protecting life on Earth, too.

People often lump going to Mars or the Moon into a this/that fight when it comes to bettering the life of the Earth and its inhabitants. But, it’s not that simple.

The technology we master in the pursuit of space colonization (starti n g at the Moon and Mars / space stations) will serve to advance that on Earth. The things we learn will help provide a guide for what to do on this future planet, and not just life beyond it. Sure, in-situ resource utilization/production will generate rocket fuel on extraterrestrial bodies. But, things like the NASA Kilopower nuclear reactor can lay the groundwork for alternative energies deployed on Earth at scale. I imagine thorium reactors will follow suit while we still try to deploy fusion at a consumer scale and not just a research basis.

That’s just energy. Now picture 3D printing habitat development and how that can impact production of low-cost housing on Earth and construction projects that can have shapes previously thought impossible or too-high a cost that are more efficient and allow for artists to sculpt new buildings like a sculpture rather than a boring block.

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Scientists from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat – Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter have developed a new understanding of how electrons behave in strong magnetic fields. Their results explain measurements of electric currents in three-dimensional materials that signal a quantum Hall effect – a phenomenon thus far only associated with two-dimensional metals. This new 3D effect can be the foundation for topological quantum phenomena, which are believed to be particularly robust and therefore promising candidates for extremely powerful quantum technologies. These results have just been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Dr. Tobias Meng and Dr. Johannes Gooth are early career researchers in the Würzburg-Dresdner Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat that researches topological quantum materials since 2019. They could hardly believe the findings of a recent publication in Nature claiming that electrons in the topological metal zirconium pentatelluride (ZrTe5) move only in two-dimensional planes, despite the fact that the material is three-dimensional. Meng and Gooth therefore started their own research and experiments on the material ZrTe5. Meng from the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) developed the theoretical model, Gooth from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids designed the experiments. Seven measurements with different techniques always lead to the same conclusion.

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It’s either some obscure fluid effect or black magic.

Just when I think I’ve seen every possible iteration of climbing robot, someone comes up with a new way of getting robots to stick to things. The latest technique comes from the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at UCSD, where they’ve managed to get a robot to stick to smooth surfaces using a vibrating motor attached to a flexible disk. How the heck does it work?

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The U.S. Department of Justice is elevating investigations of ransomware attacks to a similar priority as terrorism in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack and mounting damage caused by cyber criminals, a senior department official told Reuters.

Internal guidance sent on Thursday to U.S. attorney’s offices across the country said information about ransomware investigations in the field should be centrally coordinated with a recently created task force in Washington.

“It’s a specialized process to ensure we track all ransomware cases regardless of where it may be referred in this country, so you can make the connections between actors and work your way up to disrupt the whole chain,” said John Carlin, principle associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.

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Great new, lively episode with historian and author Jeff Shesol on the earliest and arguably darkest days of the Cold War and how they were inexorably intertwined with America’s space race with the former Soviet Union. The cast of characters includes Eisenhower, JFK, Khrushchev, and John Glenn. Please have a listen.

Historian and former Clinton presidential speechwriter Jeff Shesol chats about his new book, “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War” just out from W.W. Norton. Shesol makes the case that the Cold War and the Space Race were inextricably intertwined in ways that are rarely appreciated in most conventional histories of the subjects. Shesol gives us a great inside look into this mostly-forgotten early era.

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The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) researchers announced this week a natural language processing model called WuDao 2.0 that, per the South China Morning Post, is more advanced than similar models developed by OpenAI and Google.

The report said WuDao 2.0 uses 1.75 trillion parameters to “simulate conversational speech, write poems, understand pictures and even generate recipes.” The models developed by OpenAI and Google are supposed to do similar things, but they use fewer parameters to do so, which means WuDao 2.0 is likely better at those tasks.

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