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Dec 21, 2024

Phi-4 Technical Report. Phi-4 Technical Report

Posted by in category: futurism

Phi-4 Technical Report by: Microsoft Research “We present phi-4, a 14-billion parameter language model developed with a training recipe that is centrally focused on data quality.”

Speakers: Cecile Tamura, Robert Pray, Riju Pahwa

Dec 21, 2024

Hacker breaks into crypto wallet and recovers $2,000,000 in ‘high-stakes’ hack

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, cybercrime/malcode

One hacker has managed to recover over $2,000,000 for a man who forgot the password to his crypto wallet by breaking into the physical device in a ‘high-stakes’ hacking attempt.

Even in its infancy cryptocurrency was worth a lot of money, and it’s surprisingly easy to lose it all with one simple mistake.

Horror stories of people accidentally throwing away hard drives with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin are more than enough to scare anyone away, and this particular video shows how close of a call it can be to recover otherwise simple information.

Dec 21, 2024

How the Inflammatory Process Is Influenced by the Circadian Rhythm

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

There are various studies that have explored the role of the body’s circadian rhythm in regulating immune activity. Disruptions in the circadian rhythms exacerbate inflammation. Researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) University of Medicine and Health Sciences have previously studied how the immune cells called macrophages are affected without an internal body clock. Now, new research by RCSI describes how macrophages work differently at various times of day and could pave the way for time-targeted treatments for inflammatory diseases. The research also illuminates a key role for mitochondria in driving daily changes in immune activity.

The findings are published in The FASEB Journal in an article titled, “Time-of-day control of mitochondria regulates NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages.”

Macrophages release interleukin-1 (IL-1) cytokines in response to inflammatory stimuli, and the NLRP3 inflammasome mediates IL-1-family cytokine release via pyroptosis. Mitochondria play a multifaceted role regulating NLRP3 inflammasome activity. However, whether the macrophage clock regulates the NLRP3 inflammasome via mitochondrial control remains unclear.

Dec 21, 2024

Lithocholic acid phenocopies anti-ageing effects of calorie restriction

Posted by in category: life extension

Lithocholic acid is one of the metabolites upregulated during calorie restriction, and treatment of mice, worms and flies with this bile acid alone can reproduce the health benefits of calorie restriction.

Dec 21, 2024

Brown dwarfs: The stars that ‘fail’

Posted by in categories: materials, space

Brown dwarfs are curious celestial bodies that appear to straddle the mass divide between stars and planets. Often referred to as “failed stars,” brown dwarfs form in isolation from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust like a star.

However, while fully-fledged stars continue to gather material from the gas and dust cloud that births them, brown dwarfs are less successful at this mass harvesting. As a result, they don’t reach the masses of the smallest stars and can’t trigger the process that defines main sequence stars, like our sun.

Dec 21, 2024

Hubble’s ‘impossible’ planet explained? Gas giants may have formed fast in early universe

Posted by in categories: chemistry, computing, space

Dwarf galaxies like the SMC are often un-evolved when it comes to their chemistry because their history of star formation isn’t very extensive, so they haven’t had a chance to build up many heavy elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon or iron. NGC 346, for instance, contains about 10% the abundance of heavy elements that star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy have. This makes clusters such as NGC 346 great proxies for studying conditions akin to those found in the early universe.

NGC 346 is still forming lots of stars, and JWST found that many of the young ones, with ages of 20 to 30 million years, still possess planet-forming disks around them. Their existence confounds expectations.

“With Webb, we have a strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we create computer models for planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” said Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, who led the research.

Dec 21, 2024

How Fungi Make a Promising Compound for Treating Cancer and Inflammation

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists plan to borrow nature’s tools to develop and study fungal compounds further, which could lead to the development of new drugs.

Dec 21, 2024

Scientists Want to Define the Kilogram by Gravity—Not Electricity. They’re Onto Something

Posted by in category: futurism

Correctly quantifying mass is more important than you think.

Dec 21, 2024

Latest gravitational wave observations conflict with expectations from stellar models

Posted by in categories: cosmology, evolution, physics

Almost 300 binary mergers have been detected so far, indicated by their passing gravitational waves. These measurements from the world’s gravitational wave observatories put constraints on the masses and spins of the merging objects such as black holes and neutron stars, and in turn this information is being used to better understand the evolution of massive stars.

Thus far, these models predict a paucity of black hole binary pairs where each black hole has around 10 to 15 times the mass of the sun. This “dip or mass gap” in the mass range where seldom form depends on assumptions made in the models; in particular, the ratio of the two masses in the binary.

Now a new study of the distribution of the masses of existing black holes in binaries finds no evidence for such a dip as gleaned from the that have been detected to date. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Dec 21, 2024

Experimental drug that summons ‘warriors of the immune system’ shows early promise against non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

An investigational therapy is demonstrating preclinical promise against non-Hodgkin lymphoma by boosting natural killer cells and efficiently annihilating the malignancy without toxicity to the patient, a team of cancer biologists in France has found.

The emerging is for B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the most common form of lymphoma worldwide. Current therapies target the CD20+ protein on the surface of cancerous B cells but with limited efficacy. A newly developed antibody-based molecule targets B-non-Hodgkin lymphoma by engaging , warriors of the immune system. The experimental therapeutic is expected to help patients whose disease rebounds and is difficult to treat.

“Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is the most frequent hematological malignancy in humans, comprising nearly 3% of all diagnoses and oncology-related mortalities,” writes Dr. Olivier Demaria, lead author of the research published in Science Immunology.

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