Lifeboat Foundation

The company behind Oreo cookies has, by its own admission, been quietly creating new flavors using machine learning.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Mondelez — the processed food behemoth that manufactures Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Clif Bars, and other popular snacks — has developed a new AI tool to dream up new flavors for its brands.

Used in more than 70 of the company’s products, the company says the machine learning tool is different from generative AI tools like ChatGPT and more akin to the drug discovery algorithms used by pharmaceutical companies to find and test new medications rapidly. Thus far the tool, created with the help of the software consultant Fourkind, has created products like the “Gluten Free Golden Oreo” and updated Chips Ahoy’s classic recipe, per the WSJ.

Andrew Cassy had spent his working life in a telecommunications research department until a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2010 pushed him into early retirement. Curious about his illness, which he came to think of as an engineering problem, he decided to volunteer for clinical trials.

“I had time, something of value that I could give to the process of understanding the disease and finding good treatments,” he says.

In 2024, he was accepted into a radical trial. That October, surgeons in Lund, Sweden, placed neurons that were derived from human embryonic stem (ES) cells into his brain. The hope is that they will eventually replace some of his damaged tissue.

Continue reading “Stem cells head to the clinic: treatments for cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease could soon be here” »

“Genesis” can compress training times from decades into hours using 3D worlds conjured from text.

Chris Donaldson was told he had just a few years to live after cancer in his eyes spread to his liver. But he received a new treatment that kills cancer cells with soundwaves. It’s been two months since his treatment, and Donaldson’s liver remains cancer free.

When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022, the world’s attention turned to the prospect of how that breakthrough experiment — designed to secure the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile — might also pave the way for virtually limitless, safe and carbon-free fusion energy.

Advanced 3D printing offers one potential solution to bridging the science and technology gaps presented by current efforts to make inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants a reality.

“Now that we have achieved and repeated fusion ignition,” said Tammy Ma, lead for LLNL’s inertial fusion energy institutional initiative, “the Lab is rapidly applying our decades of know-how into solving the core physics and engineering challenges that come with the monumental task of building the fusion ecosystem necessary for a laser fusion power plant. The mass production of ignition-grade targets is one of these, and cutting-edge 3D printing could help get us there.”

The James Webb telescope has focused its attention on an oddball space rock lurking between Jupiter and Neptune. The unusual “centaur,” named 2060 Chiron, has features of both comets and asteroids.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured imagery of the R Aquarii binary star system from 2014–2023. The images have been time-lapsed here to show the evolution of the region.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Stute, M. Karovska, D. de Martin \& M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble) | edited by Space.com.

Continue reading “Watch the R Aquarii binary star system evolve in Hubble imagery time-lapse” »

Bursts of light hint that a star in a nearby galaxy was partially shredded in 2022 and 2024 and might be in for another round.

AI can spot patterns in the data from blood tests that can give an early warning of disease.