Lifeboat Foundation

A cherry-red pickup truck in Carmel, Indiana runs on hydrogen without carrying any fuel cells. The engineer who developed this “hydrogen-on-tap” system hopes it can someday power cargo trucks and cruise ships worldwide.

The city of Carmel, Ind., has trucks for plowing snow, salting streets, and carrying landscaping equipment. But one cherry-red pickup can do something no other vehicle can: produce its own hydrogen.

A 45-kilogram metal box sits in the bed of the work truck. When a driver starts the engine, the device automatically begins concocting the colorless, odorless gas, which feeds into the engine’s intake manifold. This prevents the truck from guzzling gasoline until the hydrogen supply runs out. The pickup has no fuel cell module, a standard component in most hydrogen vehicles. No high-pressure storage tanks or refueling pumps are needed, either.

Continue reading “‘Hydrogen-On-Tap’ Device Turns Trucks Into Fuel-Efficient Vehicles” »

This robot contains the digitized brain of a worm, and without any outside input it just… works! Here’s what this could mean for the future of AI.

This Is How Your Brain Powers Your Thoughts — https://youtu.be/yxUkUaV2VPs

Continue reading “Scientists Put the Brain of a Worm Into a Robot… and It MOVED” »

Jukebox is a generative artificial intelligence model that can create music from raw audio. It’s probably a copyright nightmare.

To tackle this problem, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research identified a gel that closely mimics the physicochemical properties of organs that have undergone the tissue clearing process. Starting with computer simulations and following up with laboratory tests, the team optimized the soaking solution temperature, dye and antibody concentrations, chemical additives, and electrical properties to produce the best staining and imaging results. They then tested their method with more than two dozen commonly used dyes and antibodies on mouse and marmoset brains.

Scans of an entire mouse brain and one hemisphere of a marmoset brain—rendered into 3D using light sheet microscopy—revealed the similarity between the two animals’ neural vascular systems, showing the use of the system for comparative anatomy, the researchers report this week in. They also showed that they could simultaneously stain and image up to four molecular targets in a mouse brain, a feat that “has never been reported before,” says Ludovico Silvestri, of the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, who was not involved in the research.

The team also used its technique to image an entire infant marmoset and a small human brain sample—something that could one day lead to new understandings of solid tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. The team says its approach to optimizing staining can be applied to other techniques to advance the entire field of 3D imaging.

Five of the world’s biggest central banks recently announced that they’ve banded together to seriously explore central bank digital currencies.

Boston biopharma startup resTORbio Inc. is revamping its pipeline to focus on cancer cell therapies through a reverse-merger.

Both studies were based on reviewing patients’ records, which does not provide evidence as strong as the results of controlled clinical trials, where patients are picked at random to take one treatment or another 🙄.

People taking widely used medicines did not face higher rates of infection or more severe illness, new research indicates.

Looking for expert advice for managing remote teams over Zoom? @KeithFerrazzi is my go-to leader on coaching high-performance executive teams, and recently he’s been working with the CEO of Zoom, to bring best practices to the largest corporations on the planet.

The small intestine is one of the most important interfaces between the environment and our body. It is responsible for nutrient absorption but also forms a barrier against potentially harmful environmental cues. A research team, led by researchers from the Leibniz Institute on Aging—Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena, Germany, investigated the effects of aging and diet on the intestinal epithelium of young and old mice. They were able to show region-specific effects on the proteome and age-related impairments in adaptation to nutrient availability. Their results provide a complete picture of the spatial organization of the small intestine proteome in the mouse. The results were published in the journal Cell Reports.

The small intestine (SI) is one of the most important interfaces between the environment and our body. It has two major functions: it is responsible for absorbing nutrients from the food we eat and functions as a barrier to restrict the entry of harmful substances. The SI is a highly adaptive and dynamic organ, as it adapts to changes in nutrient intake or diet. The intestinal epithelium undergoes a process of continuous renewal, every 3–5 days.

Effects of aging and diet on the small intestine have already been investigated. It is known that aging leads to reduced absorption of nutrients by the epithelium thus contributing to malnutrition in elderly people. In addition, anatomical differences between different regions of the SI are well known, but so far, region-specific effects of aging and diet on the set of proteins that compose the intestinal epithelium had not been investigated.