Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Vast, quasi-circular features on Venus’s surface may reveal that the planet has ongoing tectonics, according to new research based on data gathered more than 30 years ago by NASA’s Magellan mission.

On Earth, the planet’s surface is continually renewed by the constant shifting and recycling of massive sections of crust, called tectonic plates, that float atop a viscous interior. Venus doesn’t have tectonic plates, but its surface is still being deformed by molten material from below.

Seeking to better understand the underlying processes driving these deformations, the researchers studied a type of feature called a corona.

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Artificial intelligence isn’t always a reliable source of information: large language models (LLMs) like Llama and ChatGPT can be prone to “hallucinating” and inventing bogus facts. But what if AI could be used to detect mistaken or distorted claims, and help people find their way more confidently through a sea of potential distortions online and elsewhere?

As presented at a workshop at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology present an AI architecture designed to do just that, using open-source LLMs and free versions of commercial LLMs to identify potential misleading narratives in reports on .

“Inaccurate information is a big deal, especially when it comes to scientific content—we hear all the time from doctors who worry about their patients reading things online that aren’t accurate, for instance,” said K.P. Subbalakshmi, the paper’s co-author and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens.

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In two new studies led by bacteriologist Brandon L. Jutras, Northwestern scientists have identified an antibiotic that cures Lyme disease at a fraction of the dosage of the current “gold standard” treatment and discovered what may cause a treated infection to mimic chronic illness in patients. The studies were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

New studies offer insight into disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms.

Northwestern scientists have identified an antibiotic that cures Lyme disease at a fraction of the dosage of the current “gold standard” treatment and discovered what may cause a treated infection to mimic chronic illness in patients.

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The thymus is widely recognized as an immunological niche where autoimmunity against the acetylcholine receptor (AChR) develops in myasthenia gravis (MG) patients, who mostly present thymic hyperplasia and thymoma. Thymoma-associated MG is frequently characterized by autoantibodies to the muscular ryanodine receptor 1 (RYR1) and titin (TTN), along with anti-AChR antibodies. By real-time PCR, we analyzed muscle—CHRNA1, RYR1, and TTN—and muscle-like—NEFM, RYR3 and HSP60—autoantigen gene expression in MG thymuses with hyperplasia and thymoma, normal thymuses and non-MG thymomas, to check for molecular changes potentially leading to an altered antigen presentation and autoreactivity.

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A team of roboticists and AI specialists at the Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Lab in Korea has designed, built and successfully tested a four-legged robot that is capable of conducting high-speed parkour maneuvers. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they gave their robot a controller capable of both planning and tracking its own movements to allow it to freely traverse a range of environments.

Parkour is an obstacle course type athletic discipline that takes place in unpredictable, real-world, generally —it involves climbing walls, jumping between buildings, maneuvering around objects and running across difficult, uneven terrain. The objective is to get from one place to another without injury. To give their robot the ability to conduct parkour maneuvers, the team made one change right away—they gave it four legs.

The next thing they did was design and build a special kind of controller, one that was capable of planning the route to be taken and a tracker that told the robot where to place its feet and how to use its body to move forward safely.

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A small team of roboticists at Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, has designed, built and tested a four-legged robot capable of playing badminton with human players.

In their study, published in the journal Science Robotics, the group used a reinforcement learning-based controller to give the robot the ability to track, predict and respond to the movement of a shuttlecock in play, demonstrating the feasibility of using multi-legged robots in dynamic sports scenarios.

Badminton is a sport similar to tennis, the main difference being the use of a shuttlecock rather than a . The goal is the same: to hit the shuttlecock over a net placed midcourt to an awaiting opponent.

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Being cut off in traffic, giving a presentation or missing a meal can all trigger a suite of physiological changes that allow the body to react swiftly to stress or starvation. Critical to this “fight-or-flight” or stress response is a molecular cycle that results in the activation of protein kinase A (PKA), a protein involved in everything from metabolism to memory formation. Now, a study by researchers at Penn State has revealed how this cycle resets between stressful events, so the body is prepared to take on new challenges.

The details of this reset mechanism, uncovered through a combination of imaging, structural and biochemical techniques, are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“Some of the early changes in the fight-or-flight response include the release of hormones, like adrenaline from stress or glucagon from starvation,” said Ganesh Anand, associate professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and lead author of the paper.

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