Lifeboat Foundation

George Church is a geneticist known for his pioneering work in developing new technologies for genome sequencing, editing, and synthesis. He has also been involved in research on genome engineering and gene therapy.

Links.
https://wyss.harvard.edu/team/core-faculty/george-church/
https://arep.med.harvard.edu/

Continue reading “George Church: Biomanufacturing, CRISPR,1 million cell edits, Woolly mammoth-Learning with Lowell-164” »

As fusion developers around the world race to commercialize fusion energy, TAE Technologies has pioneered the pursuit of the cleanest and most economical path to providing electricity with hydrogen-boron (also known as p-B¹¹ or p¹¹ B), an abundant, environmentally sound fuel. Today the company is announcing, in collaboration with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), a noteworthy research advancement: the first-ever hydrogen-boron fusion experiments in a magnetically confined fusion plasma.

In a paper published by Nature Communications, scientists explain the outcome of the nuclear fusion reaction of hydrogen-boron in an experiment in NIFS’ Large Helical Device (LHD). This paper describes the experimental work of producing the conditions necessary for hydrogen-boron fusion in the LHD plasma and TAE’s development of a detector to make measurements of the hydrogen-boron reaction products: helium nuclei, known as alpha particles.

The finding reflects years of collaborative international scientific fusion research, and represents a milestone in TAE’s mission to develop commercial fusion power with hydrogen-boron, the cleanest, most cost-competitive, and most sustainable fuel cycle for fusion.

Last week, Microsoft researchers announced an experimental framework to control robots and drones using the language abilities of ChatGPT, a popular AI language model created by OpenAI. Using natural language commands, ChatGPT can write special code that controls robot movements. A human then views the results and adjusts as necessary until the task gets completed successfully.

In a demonstration video, Microsoft shows robots—apparently controlled by code written by ChatGPT while following human instructions—using a robot arm to arrange blocks into a Microsoft logo, flying a drone to inspect the contents of a shelf, or finding objects using a robot with vision capabilities.

Backed by Google Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and more, Chroma Medicine announced the closing of a $135 million Series B financing Wednesday.

Word on the street is that GPT-4 is already done, and that the geniuses at OpenAI are secretly working on GPT-5 as we speak. That’s right; you heard it here first! But is it true? Is the next generation of language models already underway? Let’s dive in and find out.

0:00: Intro.
0:29: GPT-5
1:31: Is Bing’s AI Chatbot GPT-4?
4:13 A100 GPUs.

Continue reading “GPT-5 is Being Trained on INSANE Amounts of GPUs” »

Researchers from Southwest University in China have constructed the entire chromosomal-scale genome assembly and complete spidroin gene set of the golden orb-weaving spider, Trichonephila clavata, known for its especially strong, golden-colored webs.

They attest that their work “Provides multidimensional data that significantly expand the knowledge of spider dragline silk generation…” and the researchers plan on using this new “molecular atlas” to better understand how spiders manufacture their silk.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the paper details the steps the researchers took, from wild spider capture to multiomic analysis, in revealing the interplay of genes within the spider’s major ampullate gland, the gland responsible for producing dragline silk.

Climate, tectonics and time combine to create powerful forces that craft the face of our planet. Add the gradual sculpting of the Earth’s surface by rivers and what to us seems solid as rock is constantly changing.

However, our understanding of this dynamic process has at best been patchy.

Scientists today have published new research revealing a detailed and dynamic model of the Earth’s surface over the past 100 million years.

A new RMIT-led international collaboration published in February has uncovered, for the first time, a distinct disorder-driven bosonic superconductor-insulator transition.

The discovery outlines a global picture of the giant anomalous Hall effect and reveals its correlation with the unconventional charge density wave in the AV₃Sb₅ kagome metal family, with potential applications in future ultra-low energy electronics.

Superconductors, which can transmit electricity without energy dissipation, hold great promise for the development of future low-energy electronics technologies, and are already applied in diverse fields such as hover trains and high-strength magnets (such as medical MRIs).

Lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) are among the most widespread rechargeable battery technologies, due to their high energy densities and performances. Despite their versatility and advantageous characteristics, these batteries often require specific times to charge and speeding up these charging times has so far proved challenging.

The main reason for this is that during fast charging, lithium plating could form on the batteries’ graphite anode, which could pose safety risks. In fact, lithium plating reactions on graphite anodes, which can also occur at low temperatures, during overcharging or following battery malfunctions, can lead to the formation of non-cyclable lithium metal and salts, which could ignite causing fires or battery explosions.

Researchers at University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently carried out a study investigating potential ways to reduce these risks and enable the creation of safe fast-charging LiBs. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, outlines a series of simple techniques for quantifying irreversible Li plating on the graphite anodes inside LiBs.