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The value of physical intelligence: How researchers are working to safely advance capabilities of humanoid robots

You may not remember it, but odds are you took a few tumbles during your toddler era. You weren’t alone. Falling, after all, is a natural consequence of learning to crawl, walk, climb and jump. Our balance, coordination and motor skills are developing throughout early childhood.

But it also doesn’t take long for these abilities—also known as physical intelligence—to become second nature for most, including deceptively complex actions such as walking, grasping objects and navigating our way across a room without having to think about it.

“As humans, we often take our physical intelligence for granted because it becomes so automatic when we’re still young,” said Bowen Weng, roboticist and assistant professor of computer science at Iowa State University.

Reactivating a fetal gene enables adult heart cells to regenerate after injury

Around the globe, heart disease remains one of the top causes of death. Once patients begin to suffer from serious heart problems, like heart attacks and heart failure, the heart muscles become damaged and are difficult to treat and repair. Although many therapies have been developed to treat symptoms, full recovery to a pre-disease state has been essentially impossible. This is due to a lack of regeneration ability in adult human heart cells. Studies using stem cells or progenitor cells for repair have demonstrated limited efficacy in clinical trials, thus far.

However, there may be new hope for these patients. Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have been working to turn back time by switching on a gene known to regenerate heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes. Their study, recently published in npj Regenerative Medicine, indicates that adult human hearts may be given the ability to regenerate themselves with future therapies.

Novel peanut allergy vaccine shows promise to transform allergy care

Researchers at Imperial’s National Heart & Lung Institute (NHLI) have reported encouraging results from the first phase of clinical trials for a new peanut allergy vaccine.

This vaccine aims to ‘reset’ the immune system, potentially allowing the individual to tolerate peanuts without triggering the severe allergic reactions that often occur when peanut proteins are ingested.

Phase 1 trials for a new peanut allergy vaccine show promising results, offering potential long-term relief from allergic reactions.

In collaboration with industry partner Allergy Therapeutics, the team from Imperial has developed a vaccine using virus-like particle (VLP) technology to encapsulate the peanut allergen protein Ara h2. In the latest paper, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI), a phase 1 first-on-human clinical trial demonstrated the VLP peanut allergy vaccine’s safety and tolerability, with no reactivity observed during skin prick tests comparing the vaccine to control treatments.

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational technology that could reshape our world, driving new scientific discoveries and helping us tackle humanity’s greatest challenges. Now, we’re asking where we can go to unlock its fullest potential.

The Sun is the ultimate energy source in our solar system, emitting more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production. In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute. Working backwards from there, our new research moonshot, Project Suncatcher, envisions compact constellations of solar-powered satellites, carrying Google TPUs and connected by free-space optical links. This approach would have tremendous potential for scale, and also minimizes impact on terrestrial resources.

We’re excited about this growing area of exploration, and our early research, shared today in “Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design,” a preprint paper, which describes our progress toward tackling the foundational challenges of this ambitious endeavor — including high-bandwidth communication between satellites, orbital dynamics, and radiation effects on computing. By focusing on a modular design of smaller, interconnected satellites, we are laying the groundwork for a highly scalable, future space-based AI infrastructure.

‘As if a shudder ran from its brain to its body’: The neuroscientists that learned to control memories in rodents

In this adapted excerpt from “How to Change a Memory,” author and neuroscientist Steve Ramirez recounts the events that led him and his colleagues to discover memories could be artificially controlled in rodents by zapping their brains with lasers.

The Impact Of Tech On Geopolitics: Why Business Needs To Rethink Risk

#risk #tech #business #geopolitical

Geopolitical tensions and kinetic conflicts can impact both physical security and supply chain stability, as well as overall economic stability. Evolving and often contradictory regulatory environments can create compliance challenges across different jurisdictions. Operating on the home turf of potentially hostile nation-states can increase insider risk, as employees may choose or be compelled to misuse their privileged access to appropriate and exfiltrate sensitive information from the organization. There are also risks that remain agnostic of jurisdiction, such as cyber threats, whether perpetrated by criminals, state-backed actors, or even hacktivists.

Drug-delivery patch could help to heal the heart following a heart attack

MIT engineers have developed a flexible drug-delivery patch that can be placed on the heart after a heart attack to help promote healing and regeneration of cardiac tissue.

The new patch is designed to carry several different drugs that can be released at different times, on a pre-programmed schedule. In a study of rats, the researchers showed that this treatment reduced the amount of damaged by 50% and significantly improved cardiac function.

If approved for use in humans, this type of patch could help victims recover more of their cardiac function than is now possible, the researchers say.

Rare side effects of antipsychotic medications provide new evidence for safer global prescribing

Patients with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, often require long-term use of antipsychotic medications. Some of these drugs, however, can pose potential risks, such as elevated prolactin levels and compromised immune function. Previous studies have relied mostly on small or single-center data, making it difficult to accurately assess the true incidence of rare adverse effects.

Researchers from the LKS Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed), through multidisciplinary collaboration and rigorous epidemiological methods, leveraged territory-wide data from the Hospital Authority to conduct two internationally impactful studies. The findings were published in the journals World Psychiatry and The Lancet Psychiatry. These discoveries provide solid evidence for drug regulation and and establish Hong Kong as a global leader in big data research on psychiatric safety.

Protein-based gel restores dental enamel and could advance tooth repair

Scientists from the University of Nottingham’s School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, have developed a bio-inspired material that has the potential to regenerate demineralized or eroded enamel, strengthen healthy enamel, and prevent future decay. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

The gel can be rapidly applied to teeth in the same way dentists currently apply standard fluoride treatments. However, this new protein-based gel is fluoride free and works by mimicking key features of the natural proteins that guide the growth of dental enamel in infancy.

When applied, the gel creates a thin and robust layer that impregnates teeth, filling holes and cracks in them. It then functions as a scaffold that takes calcium and phosphate ions from saliva and promotes the controlled growth of new mineral in a process called epitaxial mineralization. This enables the new mineral to be organized and integrated into the underlying natural tissue while recovering both the structure and properties of natural healthy enamel.

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