Lifeboat Foundation

Antibiotic resistance is a major public health threat, ranked as one of the top 10 by the World Health Organization. Every year, in the United States alone, nearly 3 million people are infected by drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, resulting in the death of around 35,000. While antibiotics are crucial in treating infections, overuse has led to the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. These infections pose a significant challenge to treatment.

Now, Professor John E. Moses of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has developed a new weapon to combat drug-resistant superbugs – an innovative antibiotic that has the ability to shape-shift by rearranging its atoms.

Moses came up with the idea of shape-shifting antibiotics while observing tanks in military training exercises. With rotating turrets and nimble movements, the tanks could respond quickly to possible threats.

The World Health Organization confirmed an outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus disease in the central African country of Equatorial Guinea on February 13, 2023. To date, there have been 11 deaths suspected to be caused by the virus, with one case confirmed. Authorities are currently monitoring 48 contacts, four of whom have developed symptoms and three of whom are hospitalized as of publication. The WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are assisting Equatorial Guinea in its efforts to stop the spread of the outbreak.

Marburg virus and the closely related Ebola virus belong to the filovirus family and are structurally similar. Both viruses cause severe disease and death in people, with fatality rates ranging from 22% to 90% depending on the outbreak. Patients infected by these viruses exhibit a wide range of similar symptoms, including fever, body aches, severe gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting, lethargy and sometimes bleeding.

We are virologists who study Marburg, Ebola, and related viruses. Our laboratory has a long-standing interest in researching the underlying mechanisms of how these viruses cause disease in people. Learning more about how Marburg virus is transmitted from animals to humans and how it spreads between people is essential to preventing and limiting future outbreaks.

There is no stable microbial community residing in the bloodstream of healthy humans, according to a new study led by a UCL researcher.

The new Nature Microbiology paper makes an important confirmation as blood donations are a crucial part of medical practice. Understanding what types of microbes may be found in blood may allow the development of better microbial tests in blood donations, which would minimize the risk of transfusion-related infections.

Lead author, Ph.D. student Cedric Tan (UCL Genetics Institute and Francis Crick Institute) said, Human blood is generally considered sterile. While sometimes microorganisms will enter the bloodstream such as via a wound or after tooth-brushing, mostly this is quickly resolved by the immune system.

Deep within our brain’s temporal lobes, two almond-shaped cell masses help keep us alive. This tiny region, called the amygdala, assists with a variety of brain activities. It helps us learn and remember. It triggers our fight-or-flight response. It even promotes the release of a feel-good chemical called dopamine.

Scientists have learned all this by studying the amygdala over hundreds of years. But we still haven’t reached a full understanding of how these processes work.

Now, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Bo Li has brought us several important steps closer. His lab recently made a series of discoveries that show how neurons called somatostatin-expressing (Sst⁺) central amygdala (CeA) neurons help us learn about threats and rewards. He also demonstrated how these neurons relate to dopamine. The discoveries could lead to future treatments for anxiety or drug addiction.

The amazing.

But maybe the future of these models is more focused than the boil-the-ocean approach we’ve seen from OpenAI and others, who want to be able to answer every question under the sun.

The amazing abilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT wouldn’t be possible without large language models. These models are trained on billions, sometimes trillions of examples of text. The idea behind ChatGPT is to understand language so well, it can anticipate what word plausibly comes next in a split second. That takes a ton of training, compute resources and developer savvy to make happen.

Continue reading “Generative AI’s future in enterprise could be smaller, more focused language models” »

“The eyes are the windows to the soul.” It’s an ancient saying, and it illustrates what we know intuitively to be true — you can understand so much about a person by looking them deep in the eye. But how? And can we use this fact to understand disease?

One company is making big strides in this direction. Israel’s NeuraLight, which just won the Health and Medtech Innovation award at SXSW, was founded to bring science and AI to understanding the brain through the eyes.

A focal disease for NeuraLight is ALS, which is currently diagnosed through a subjective survey of about a dozen questions, followed by tests such as an EEG and MRI.

Continue reading “How AI Can Look Into Your Eyes And Diagnose A Devastating Brain Disease” »

It also says that it has a healthy pipeline for chips in the future.

Search engine giant Google has claimed that the supercomputers it uses to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) models are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia Corporation’s. While processing power for most companies delving into the AI space comes from Nvidia’s chips, Google uses a custom chip called Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).

Google announced its Tensor chips during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when businesses from electronics to automotive faced the pinch of chip shortage.

Continue reading “AI chip race: Google says its Tensor chips compute faster than Nvidia’s A100” »

In a recent study published in the Nutrients journal, researchers explored the interaction of white adipose tissue (WAT) mitochondria with gut microbiota in obesity.

Study: The Crosstalk between Gut Microbiota and White Adipose Tissue Mitochondria in Obesity. Image Credit: AlphaTauri3DGraphics/Shutterstock.com

A man who has spent a staggering $2 million in an attempt to turn back the years has revealed the special machine he uses to carry out ‘20,000 sit ups’ in just 30 minutes. Bryan Johnson, 45, has embarked on an intensive — and expensive — experimental medical program with the aim of reversing his age.