Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Rockefeller University have combined their expertise to gain a better understanding of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). Mutations in CFTR cause cystic fibrosis, a fatal disease with no cure.

Current therapies using a drug called a potentiator can enhance CFTR functions in some patients; but how the potentiators work is not well understood. The new findings reveal how CFTR functions mechanistically and how disease mutations and potentiators affect those functions. With this information, researchers may be able to design more effective therapies for cystic fibrosis. The study was published today in Nature.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that causes people to produce mucus that is too thick and sticky. This can block airways and lead to lung damage as well as cause problems with digestion. The disease affects about 35,000 people in the United States. CFTR is an anion channel, a passageway that maintains the right balance of salts and fluid across epithelial and other membranes. Mutations in CFTR are what cause cystic fibrosis, but these mutations can affect CFTR function differently. Therefore, some drugs used to treat the disease can only partially restore function of specific mutant forms of CFTR.

One of the largest mysteries of science is that humans have conscious awareness of their complex subjective experiences – or what we call “qualia” – such as being aware of what it’s like to delight in the color of a flower, melt into the comfort of a bed, or to feel sharp pain. Why and how qualia could emerge from physical matter and be a part of the human experience is unknown, and this is called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Related to qualia is the mystery of why humans feel like they have free will, or the ability to intentionally choose and execute actions.

The ‘easy’ problem of consciousness is mapping these mind states to brain states, such as identifying which brain regions are active during a certain experience, such as smelling a flower. Despite advances in classical physics and neuroscience, many aspects of the mind-brain relationship, such as qualia, remain unresolved. New theories of mind are required to address this perennial mystery.

In a new paper, we propose that some aspects of mind are quantum and can play an active role in the physical world, explaining some of the unexplainable.

A new report has found that 186 banks in the US are at risk of failure due to rising interest rates and a high proportion of uninsured deposits. The research, posted on the Social Science Research Network titled ‘Monetary Tightening and US Bank Fragility in 2023: Mark-to-Market Losses and Uninsured Depositor Runs?’ estimated the market value loss of individual banks’ assets during the Federal Reserve’s rate-increasing campaign. Assets such as Treasury notes and mortgage loans can decrease in value when new bonds have higher rates.

The study also examined the proportion of banks’ funding that comes from uninsured depositors with accounts worth over $250,000.

If half of the uninsured depositors quickly withdrew their funds from these 186 banks, even insured depositors may face impairments as the banks would not have enough assets to make all depositors whole. This could potentially force the FDIC to step in, according to the paper.

Year 2018 😗😁 Biological singularity here we come 💜 😌 💕

Building a computer out of the skeletons that hold our cells together could make them smaller and far more energy efficient.

Unreal Engine 5’s MetaHuman is getting a new update called Animator to create new fully animated facial models in real time with just a phone camera. The team from Ninja Theory, including Senua actor Melina Juergens shows this process in real time.

#IGN #Gaming #UnrealEngine5

Photosynthesis is the process that plants, algae, and even certain species of bacteria use to convert sunlight into oxygen and chemical energy stored as sugar (aka gluclose). But what are the mechanisms behind one of nature’s most profound processes?

These are questions that a team of researchers led by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) hope to answer as they used quantum chemical calculations to examine a photosynthesis protein complex known as photosystem I (PSI) in hopes of better understanding the complete process of photosynthesis and how plants are able to convert sunlight to energy, specifically pertaining to how chlorophylls and the reaction center play their roles in the process.

GPT-4 is reportedly six times larger than GPT-3, according to a media report, and Elon Musk’s exit from OpenAI has cleared the way for Microsoft.

The US website Semafor, citing eight anonymous sources familiar with the matter, reports that OpenAI’s new GPT-4 language model has one trillion parameters. Its predecessor, GPT-3, has 175 billion parameters.

Semafor previously revealed Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI and the integration of GPT-4 into Bing in January and February, respectively, before the official announcement.

Although neutrinos are produced abundantly in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), until now no neutrinos produced in such a way had been detected. Within just nine months of the start of LHC Run 3 and the beginning of its measurement campaign, the FASER collaboration changed this picture by announcing its first observation of collider neutrinos at this year’s electroweak session of the Rencontres de Moriond. In particular, FASER observed muon neutrinos and candidate events of electron neutrinos. “Our statistical significance is roughly 16 sigma, far exceeding 5 sigma, the threshold for a discovery in particle physics,” explains FASER’s co-spokesperson Jamie Boyd.

In addition to its observation of neutrinos at a particle collider, FASER presented results on searches for dark photons. With a null result, the collaboration was able to set limits on previously unexplored parameter space and began to exclude regions motivated by dark matter. FASER aims to collect up to ten times more data over the coming years, allowing more searches and neutrino measurements.

FASER is one of two new experiments situated at either side of the ATLAS cavern to detect neutrinos produced in proton collisions in ATLAS. The complementary experiment, SND@LHC, also reported its first results at Moriond, showing eight muon neutrino candidate events. “We are still working on the assessment of the systematic uncertainties to the background. As a very preliminary result, our observation can be claimed at the level of 5 sigma,” adds SND@LHC spokesperson Giovanni De Lellis. The SND@LHC detector was installed in the LHC tunnel just in time for the start of LHC Run 3.

Saw this coming 5 or 10 years back. Soon concept of being a model will be non existent. Probably by 2030. And, once can realistically animate and walk around and speak, end of actors and acting also.

Levi’s is partnering with an AI company on computer-generated fashion models to “supplement human models.” The company frames the move as part of a “digital transformation journey” of diversity, equity, inclusion and sustainability. Although that sounds noble on the surface, Levi’s is essentially hiring a robot to generate the appearance of diversity while ridding itself of the burden of paying human beings who represent the qualities it wants to be associated with its brand.

Levi Strauss is partnering with Amsterdam-based digital model studio Lalaland.ai for the initiative. Founded in 2019, the company’s mission is “to see more representation in the fashion industry” and “create an inclusive, sustainable, and diverse design chain.” It aims to let customers see what various fashion items would look like on a person who looks like them via “hyper-realistic” models “of every body type, age, size and skin tone.”

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