Lifeboat Foundation

What changed things for Germany? A handful of prominent scientists communicating regularly and openly with the public. (via CNBC)…and a leader who is a scientist.

Germany, like many other countries, had a contingent of people who fought lockdowns and argued that Covid-19 was a hoax. But it also had a handful of prominent scientists communicating regularly and openly with the public. That played a huge role in drowning out rumors and misinformation, locals tell CNBC.

“We have a great educational system and everyone has access to it,” said Dennis Traub, a tech worker in Hamburg, Germany. “So I believe that many people and the majority listened to both sides and one of those sides sounded much more reasonable.”

Continue reading “Germany’s coronavirus response is a master class in science communication” »

A team of marine ecologists from Oregon State University has described the formation and development of a new methane seep — a location where methane escapes from an underground reservoir and into the ocean — in the Ross Sea, the High Antarctic.

Summary: Depending on the network state, certain neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex can be more or less excitable, which shapes stimulus processing in the brain.

Source: Max Planck Institute

Rustling leaves, light rain at the window, a quietly ticking clock – muffled sounds, just above the threshold of hearing. One moment we perceive them, the next we don’t, even if we, or the sounds, don’t seem to change. Many studies have shown that we never process an incoming stimulus, be it a sound, an image, or a touch, in the same way. This is true, even if the stimulus is exactly the same. This occurs because the impact a stimulus makes, on the brain regions that process it, depends on the momentary state of the networks those brain regions belong to. However, the factors that influence and underlie the constantly fluctuating momentary state of the networks and whether these states are random or follow a rhythm, was previously unknown.

In this post, we will cover the initial experience of using mapperidea.

Mapperidea CLI requires Node installed into your machine, as well as the nvm utility, so check the requisites first:

The original creator and inventor of that development concept and methodology: Clovis Wichoski, currently Skalena’s CTO. That solution has more than 15 years. In 2014, Clovis met Edgar Silva, back on that time working for WSO2 as the Latin American Head, and working together for a customer with a low budget and very short time to get the project done, they had decided to use bacalhau(codfish) the first way that Edgar had named that project on that time. In 2018, Edgar invited Clovis to be part of a new project in 2019 (Skalena), where one of the goals was to make mapperidea a real product, and not only in Brazil, but helping the whole world in how to develop software better, faster and to be a key enabler for a pragmatic and definitive Digital Transformation.

Researchers have developed an automated machine learning system they say can detect social media posts involved in coordinated political influence campaigns—such as Russia’s alleged efforts to sway the results of the 2016 elections in the United States—regardless of platform and based only on the content of the posts.

Read more in Science Advances.

We study how easy it is to distinguish influence operations from organic social media activity by assessing the performance of a platform-agnostic machine learning approach. Our method uses public activity to detect content that is part of coordinated influence operations based on human-interpretable features derived solely from content. We test this method on publicly available Twitter data on Chinese, Russian, and Venezuelan troll activity targeting the United States, as well as the Reddit dataset of Russian influence efforts. To assess how well content-based features distinguish these influence operations from random samples of general and political American users, we train and test classifiers on a monthly basis for each campaign across five prediction tasks. Content-based features perform well across period, country, platform, and prediction task. Industrialized production of influence campaign content leaves a distinctive signal in user-generated content that allows tracking of campaigns from month to month and across different accounts.

Continue reading “Content-based features predict social media influence operations” »

Guest: David Shumaker, USA

Utilizing neurotransmitters as a passport into the brain:

Safe and efficient delivery of blood-brain barrier (BBB)–impermeable cargos into the brain through intravenous injection remains a challenge. Here, we developed a previously unknown class of neurotransmitter–derived lipidoids (NT-lipidoids) as simple and effective carriers for enhanced brain delivery of several BBB-impermeable cargos. Doping the NT-lipidoids into BBB-impermeable lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) gave the LNPs the ability to cross the BBB. Using this brain delivery platform, we successfully delivered amphotericin B (AmB), antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) against tau, and genome-editing fusion protein (−27)GFP-Cre recombinase into the mouse brain via systemic intravenous administration. We demonstrated that the NT-lipidoid formulation not only facilitates cargo crossing of the BBB, but also delivery of the cargo into neuronal cells for functional gene silencing or gene recombination. This class of brain delivery lipid formulations holds great potential in the treatment of central nervous system diseases or as a tool to study the brain function.

The ASTHROS mission will be carried on a big balloon that will be about 150 meters wide — or roughly the size of a football stadium — and will be inflated with helium. A carrier below the balloon will hold the instruments and the telescope. During its flight, it will allow scientists to control the direction of the telescope with precision and download the data in real-time using satellite links.

The ASTHROS team expects that stratospheric winds will help the balloon complete two to three loops around the South Pole in approximately 21 to 28 days. Once complete, the parachute will return the carrier to the ground and the telescope will be recovered and refurbished for future missions.

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Circa 2018

Warehouses are being revolutionized by AI and robotics, and British supermarket chain Ocado is at the forefront of this change. We went inside the company’s new facilities to see how technology is affecting how you shop online.