Lifeboat Foundation

A new study shows that using DNA analysis for newborn screening can detect far more serious, yet treatable, health conditions than traditional methods. The study, called GUARDIAN, is one of the first large-scale projects to use genome sequencing for newborns, and early results suggest that this approach could greatly improve medical care for children.

Early findings from a study on newborn screening reveal that DNA analysis detects significantly more preventable or treatable serious health conditions than traditional screening methods. Most parents offered the option of genome sequencing prefer it.

The study, called GUARDIAN, is among the first large-scale research projects globally to use genome sequencing for newborn screening. It is also the first to release preliminary results.

The demand for lithium, essential for powering sustainable technologies, is rising quickly, yet current methods leave up to 75% of the world’s lithium-rich saltwater sources inaccessible.

With some predicting global lithium supply could fall short of demand as early as 2025, the innovative technology – EDTA-aided loose nanofiltration (EALNF) – sets a new standard in lithium processing. The technology uniquely extracts both lithium and magnesium simultaneously, unlike traditional methods that treat magnesium salts as waste, making it smarter, faster and more sustainable.

The work, co-led by Dr Zhikao Li, from the Monash Suzhou Research Institute and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Professor Xiwang Zhang from the University of Queensland, promises to meet the surging demand for lithium and paves the way for more sustainable and efficient extraction practices.

Abstract: We report the discovery of a bright pulse having a dispersion measure (DM) equal to 134.4 \pm 2 pc cm^{-3}, a peak flux density (S_p) equal to 20 \pm 4 Jy and a half-width (W_e) equal to 211 \pm 6 ms. The excessive DM of the pulse, after taking into account the Milky Way contribution, is 114 pc cm^{-3} that indicates its extragalactic origin. Such value of DM corresponds to the luminosity distance 713 Mpc. The above parameters make the pulse to be a reliable candidate to the fast radio burst (FRB) event, and then it is the second FRB detected at such a large \lambda \sim 2.7 m wavelength and the first one among non-repeating FRBs. The normalized luminosity L_
u of the event, which we have designated as FRB 20,190,203, estimated under assumption that the whole excessive DM is determined by the intergalactic environment toward the host galaxy, is equal to \simeq 10^{34} erg s^{-1} Hz{-1}. In addition to the study of radio data we analyzed data from the quasi-simultaneous observations of the sky in the high energy (\ge 80 keV) band by the omnidirectional detector SPI/ACS aboard the INTEGRAL orbital observatory (in order to look for a possible gamma-ray counterpart of FRB 20190203). We did not detect any transient events exceeding the background at a statistically significant level. In the INTEGRAL archive, the FRB 20,190,203 localization region has been observed many times with a total exposure of \sim 73.2 days. We have analyzed the data but were unable to find any reliable short gamma-ray bursts from the FRB 20,190,203 position. Finally we note that the observed properties of FRB 20,190,203 can be reproduced well in the framework of a maser synchrotron model operating in the far reverse shock (at a distance of \sim 10^{15} cm) of a magnetar. However, triggering the burst requires a high conversion efficiency (at the level of 1%) of the shock wave energy into the radio emission.

From: Sergey Tyul’bashev A. [view email].

The two new studies place the sources of ordinary chondrite types into specific asteroid families – and most likely specific asteroids. This work requires painstaking back-tracking of meteoroid trajectories, observations of individual asteroids, and detailed modelling of the orbital evolution of parent bodies.

The study led by Miroslav Brož reports that ordinary chondrites originate from collisions between asteroids larger than 30 kilometres in diameter that occurred less than 30 million years ago.

The Koronis and Massalia asteroid families provide appropriate body sizes and are in a position that leads to material falling to Earth, based on detailed computer modelling. Of these families, asteroids Koronis and Karin are likely the dominant sources of H chondrites. Massalia (L) and Flora (LL) families are by far the main sources of L-and LL-like meteorites.

A security flaw impacting the Wi-Fi Test Suite could enable unauthenticated local attackers to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges.

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024–41992, said the susceptible code from the Wi-Fi Alliance has been found deployed on Arcadyan FMIMG51AX000J routers.

“This flaw allows an unauthenticated local attacker to exploit the Wi-Fi Test Suite by sending specially crafted packets, enabling the execution of arbitrary commands with root privileges on the affected routers,” the CERT/CC said in an advisory released Wednesday.

Combat AI impersonation fraud with Beyond Identity’s RealityCheck—your shield against deepfake attacks.

SEC charges four companies for misleading disclosures regarding the SolarWinds cyberattack, imposing fines totaling $6 million.

Over the past decade or so, computer scientists have developed increasingly advanced computational techniques that can tackle real-world tasks with human-comparable accuracy. While many of these artificial intelligence (AI) models have achieved remarkable results, they often do not precisely replicate the computations performed by the human brain.

Researchers at Tibbling Technologies, Broad Institute at Harvard Medical School, The Australian National University and other institutes recently tried to use AI to mimic a specific type of computation performed by circuits in the neocortex, known as “winner-take-all” computations.

Their paper, published on the bioRxiv preprint server, reports the successful emulation of this computation and shows that adding it to transformer-based models could significantly improve their performance on image classification tasks.

December is shaping up to be a month of dueling AI announcements from OpenAI and Google.