Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at UCSF have trained an algorithm to parse meaning from neural activity.

One week ago…

“Gasoline in the United States has fallen to about $2 a gallon and continues to slide. However, that price is nowhere near the least expensive in the world. Venezuela has the least expensive gas in the world at two cents per gallon.”

There is an ongoing battle between cancer cells and p53, the protein known as “the guardian of the genome,” and a study conducted at the University of Trento has identified a number of factors that influence the outcome of this battle and therefore the effectiveness of cancer treatments.

Scientists explore two therapeutic cancer treatment scenarios: In one scenario, cancer cells stop proliferating; in the other, their death rate increases. Both of these outcomes are regulated the protein p53. Based on the new findings, a specific factor, a protein known as DHX30, determines how p53 can lead cancer cells to their death. That is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers of the University of Trento, who focused on a new molecular mechanism that works like a switch.

Erik Dassi, member of the research team, said, “When cancer cells are treated with a certain drug, it is the action of this switch (DHX30) that makes them to go toward cell death and not in the direction of cell cycle arrest.”

A new study suggests that the enzyme intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP) appears to help to prevent age-related loss of intestinal barrier integrity in mice, fruit flies, and potentially humans.

Improving intestinal barrier integrity

There can now be little doubt that the decline of intestinal barrier integrity and the resulting inflammation play an important role in aging. In fact, some researchers suggest that inflammaging, the low-grade chronic background of inflammation seen in older people, has its origin point in the microbiome, the ecosystem of bacteria living in our guts.

Brain implants are neural implants that are used to stimulate the parts & structures of the nervous system. These implants are technical systems that communicate with the nervous system and help to enhance senses, physical movement, and memory after a stroke or other head injuries. Deep brain stimulation and spinal cord stimulation are used to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and epilepsy, among other neural disorders.

Technology has touched all aspects of our lives in this 21st century world that we live in and has, in fact, become an integral part of our lives. So much so that we start feeling incomplete as soon as we manage to get away from it.

No doubt, it has enhanced our lives in many different ways and today we can do things that we couldn’t have even imagined a few decades ago. I mean, sending a text to someone half way around the world in an instant? Almost feels like magic, doesn’t it?

🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

CONSPIRACY nuts are reportedly setting phone masts alight and targeting engineers after a bizarre claim 5G “radiation” caused the deadly coronavirus spread.

The theory originated last month after a video filmed at a US health conference claimed Africa was not as affected by the disease because it is “not a 5G region”.

Continue reading “5G coronavirus conspiracists BURNING phone masts amid bizarre claim ‘radiation’ sparked killer bug” »

Since its beginnings, quantum mechanics hasn’t ceased to amaze us with its peculiarity, so difficult to understand. Why does one particle seem to pass through two slits simultaneously? Why, instead of specific predictions, can we only talk about evolution of probabilities? According to theorists from universities in Warsaw and Oxford, the most important features of the quantum world may result from the special theory of relativity, which until now seemed to have little to do with quantum mechanics.

Since the arrival of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, physicists have lost sleep over the incompatibility of these three concepts (three, since there are two theories of relativity: special and general). It has commonly been accepted that it is the description of quantum mechanics that is the more fundamental and that the theory of relativity that will have to be adjusted to it. Dr. Andrzej Dragan from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw (FUW) and Prof. Artur Ekert from the University of Oxford (UO) have just presented their reasoning leading to a different conclusion. In the article “The Quantum Principle of Relativity,” published in the New Journal of Physics, they prove that the features of quantum mechanics determining its uniqueness and its non-intuitive exoticism—accepted, what’s more, on faith (as axioms)—can be explained within the framework of the special theory of relativity. One only has to decide on a certain rather unorthodox step.

Albert Einstein based the special theory of relativity on two postulates. The first is known as the Galilean principle of relativity (which, please note, is a special case of the Copernican principle). This states that physics is the same in every inertial system (i.e., one that is either at rest or in a steady straight line motion). The second postulate, formulated on the result of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, imposed the requirement of a constant velocity of light in every reference system.

D-Wave, the Canadian quantum computing company, today announced that it is giving anyone who is working on responses to the COVID-19 free access to its Leap 2 quantum computing cloud service. The offer isn’t only valid to those focusing on new drugs but open to any research or team working on any aspect of how to solve the current crisis, be that logistics, modeling the spread of the virus or working on novel diagnostics.

One thing that makes the D-Wave program unique is that the company also managed to pull in a number of partners that are already working with it on other projects. These include Volkswagen, DENSO, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, MDR, Menten AI, Sigma-i Tohoku University, Ludwig Maximilian University and OTI Lumionics. These partners will provide engineering expertise to teams that are using Leap 2 for developing solutions to the Covid-19 crisis.

As D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told me, this project started taking shape about a week and a half ago. In our conversation, he stressed that teams working with Leap 2 will get a commercial license, so there is no need to open source their solutions and won’t have a one-minute per month limit, which are typically the standard restrictions for using D-Wave’s cloud service.