Lifeboat Foundation

Following established guidelines about prescription drugs would seem to be an obvious course of action, especially for the professionals that do the prescribing. Yet doctors and their family members are less likely than other people to comply with those guidelines, according to a large-scale study co-authored by an MIT economist.

Depending on your perspective, that result might seem surprising or it might produce a knowing nod. Either way, the result is contrary to past scholarly hypotheses. Many experts have surmised that knowing more, and having easier communication with medical providers, leads patients to follow instructions more closely.

At number 4 on IE’s list of 22 best innovations is ChatGPT, an AI-powered Chatbot that gained over 1 million registered users in just 5 days after release.

The year 2022 saw a host of brilliant inventions, ranging from the James Webb Space Telescope, the HIV vaccine, and DALL-E, to transparent solar windows. But just when we thought the year had seen its fair share of excellence and innovation, ChatGPT caught us by surprise.

Developed by the OpenAI foundation, an independent research body founded by Elon Musk, the Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbot released on November 30, is everything mind-blowing, bizarre, and daunting. The San Francisco-based company is also responsible for the breakthrough image generator DALL-E 2.

A significant step toward improved accessibility.

Neuroscientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine developed a new test to identify a sign of Alzheimer’s disease neurodegeneration in a blood sample, according to a press release.

“At present, diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease requires neuroimaging,” said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt.

Continue reading “Neuroscientists developed a blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer’s diagnosis” »

Welder from Greater Manchester said he ‘wouldn’t be here’ without the trial Related video: Promising Drug Trial Appears to Cure Cancer Patients A man who was told he only has 12 months to live is now free of cancer thanks to a new drug trial.

Using this approach, researchers can map how light spreads in opaque environments.

Depression is a difficult illness. Not only does it make you feel like crap, but like so many primarily mental illnesses, it also comes with a bucketful of misinformation and misconceptions surrounding it. Even medical specialists, whom you’d expect to be the authorities on the matter, are stumped by some aspects of the disease – the truth is, while humanity may be more informed than ever on matters of the brain, we still really don’t know what’s going on inside of it when it glitches like this.

But that may soon change. Researchers based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, claim to have developed what they call a “mood decoder” – a way of reading people’s emotional state just from looking at brain activity.

“This is the first demonstration of successful and consistent mood decoding of humans in these brain regions,” Baylor College neurosurgeon and project lead Sameer Sheth told MIT Technology Review. And the best part? The team have also found a way to stimulate a positive mood in patients’ brains.

Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives: Bioelectrical pattern memories, regeneration, and synthetic living organisms.

A key question for basic biology and regenerative medicine concerns the way in which evolution exploits physics toward adaptive form and function. While genomes specify the molecular hardware of cells, what algorithms enable cellular collectives to reliably build specific, complex, target morphologies? Our lab studies the way in which all cells, not just neurons, communicate as electrical networks that enable scaling of single-cell properties into collective intelligences that solve problems in anatomical feature space. By learning to read, interpret, and write bioelectrical information in vivo, we have identified some novel controls of growth and form that enable incredible plasticity and robustness in anatomical homeostasis. In this talk, I will describe the fundamental knowledge gaps with respect to anatomical plasticity and pattern control beyond emergence, and discuss our efforts to understand large-scale morphological control circuits. I will show examples in embryogenesis, regeneration, cancer, and synthetic living machines. I will also discuss the implications of this work for not only regenerative medicine, but also for fundamental understanding of the origin of bodyplans and the relationship between genomes and functional anatomy.

How do our bodies know what to become?

There are no instructions in our genes that code for the exact 3D structure of our bodies. There’s no tiny human contained in our DNA. So, what powers the transformation of the first cell in the embryo to a full-blown organism?

Continue reading “#14 Michael Levin — Our Body is a Collection of Intelligent Organisms” »

Gate’s team of scientists observed genetic changes in the CSF immune cells in older healthy individuals that made the cells appear more activated and inflamed with advanced age.

“The immune cells appear to be a little angry in older individuals,” Gate said. “We think this anger might make these cells less functional, resulting in dysregulation of the brain’s immune system.”

In the cognitively impaired group, inflamed T-cells cloned themselves and flowed into the CSF and brain as if they were following a radio signal, Gate said. Scientists found the cells had an overabundance of a cell receptor — CXCR6 — that acts as an antenna. This receptor receives a signal — CXCL16 — from the degenerating brain’s microglia cells to enter the brain.