Lifeboat Foundation

Many of the proteins that play a crucial role in living cells adhere to a core principle of biology: their form, or shape, fits their function. But there is also a vast number of proteins and their parts that defy that dogma.

Why it matters: New findings are revealing how these flexible, disordered proteins work — and deciphering their role in human diseases and potential treatments.

How it works: Whether many medicines, immune cells, or the moment-to-moment inner workings of cells function depends on the shape of proteins they interact with or use.

Top 10 upcoming future technologies | trending technologies | 10 upcoming tech.

Future technologies are currently developing at an acclerated rate. Future technology ideas are being converted into real life at a very fast pace.

Continue reading “10 Upcoming Future Technologies: How They’ll Impact Your Life” »

The organoids can be used to study the development of diseases and the effects of drugs.

Michael Helmrath, a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and his colleagues made headlines last week when they revealed trials where they had transplanted balls of human intestinal tissue into mice, according to a report by *Wired* published on Thursday.

After a few weeks, these transplants developed key features of the human immune system, introducing a model that could be used to effectively simulate the human intestinal system.

Continue reading “Scientists Grew Mini Human Guts Inside Mice” »

A powerful plant-derived toxin with a unique way of killing harmful bacteria has been identified as one of the most promising new antibiotics in decades.

Albicidin, a new antibiotic, is produced by the plant pathogen Xanthomonas albilineans, responsible for causing sugar cane’s destructive leaf scald disease. The toxin is believed to aid the pathogen’s spread by attacking the plant. Albicidin has been shown to be highly effective against harmful bacteria, including drug-resistant superbugs such as E. coli and S. aureus.

Despite its antibiotic potential and low toxicity in pre-clinical experiments, pharmaceutical development of albicidin has been hampered because scientists did not know precisely how it interacted with its target, the bacterial enzyme DNA.

In a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell on February 2, researchers show that brain organoids—clumps of lab-grown neurons—can integrate with rat brains and respond to visual stimulation like flashing lights.

Decades of research has shown that we can transplant individual human and rodent neurons into rodent brains, and, more recently, it has been demonstrated that human brain organoids can integrate with developing rodent brains. However, whether these organoid grafts can functionally integrate with the visual system of injured adult brains has yet to be explored.

“We focused on not just transplanting individual cells, but actually transplanting tissue,” says senior author H. Isaac Chen, a physician and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. “Brain organoids have architecture; they have structure that resembles the brain. We were able to look at individual neurons within this structure to gain a deeper understanding of the integration of transplanted organoids.”

SUMMARY Researchers at the George Washington University, together with researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the deep-tech venture startup Optelligence LLC, have developed an optical convolutional neural network accelerator capable of processing large amounts of information, on the order of petabytes, per second. This innovation, which harnesses the massive parallelism of light, heralds a new era of optical signal processing for machine learning with numerous applications, including in self-driving cars, 5G networks, data-centers, biomedical diagnostics, data-security and more.

THE SITUATION Global demand for machine learning hardware is dramatically outpacing current computing power supplies. State-of-the-art electronic hardware, such as graphics processing units and tensor processing unit accelerators, help mitigate this, but are intrinsically challenged by serial data processing that requires iterative data processing and encounters delays from wiring and circuit constraints. Optical alternatives to electronic hardware could help speed up machine learning processes by simplifying the way information is processed in a non-iterative way. However, photonic-based machine learning is typically limited by the number of components that can be placed on photonic integrated circuits, limiting the interconnectivity, while free-space spatial-light-modulators are restricted to slow programming speeds.

THE SOLUTION To achieve a breakthrough in this optical machine learning system, the researchers replaced spatial light modulators with digital mirror-based technology, thus developing a system over 100 times faster. The non-iterative timing of this processor, in combination with rapid programmability and massive parallelization, enables this optical machine learning system to outperform even the top-of-the-line graphics processing units by over one order of magnitude, with room for further optimization beyond the initial prototype.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

In recent years, cloud computing has proven itself as one of the fundamental technologies empowering modern enterprises with on-demand connectivity. Without it, the widespread move toward hybrid work wouldn’t have been possible during the COVID–19 pandemic. Yet what about cybersecurity in this new cloud-centric world?

The convenience of instant connectivity has created new vulnerabilities for security teams to confront, and many organizations are still playing catchup, with 81% of organizations experiencing cloud-related security incidents in the past year.

H5N1 avian flu has existed for a quarter century. Only rarely have human cases occurred, with no sustained transmission reported. But “we cannot assume that will remain the case,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference. New, frequent reports that the disease has crossed into small mammals like minks, otters, foxes, and sea lions are cause for alarm, given the species’ similarities with humans, he noted.

While the risk to people remains low, public health officials must prepare “to face outbreaks in humans, and be ready also to control them as soon as possible,” Dr. Sylvie Briand, director of Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness and Emergency Preparedness at the WHO, told Fortune.

Ghebreyesus cautioned against touching or collecting sick or dead animals, and encouraged those who encounter such to report them to local authorities. Countries must strengthen their avian flu surveillance in areas where humans and wild animals interact, he insisted. And public health officials must work with manufacturers to ensure that vaccines and antivirals are available for global use, he said.

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Researchers inserted the gene into the part of the catfish genome that codes for an essential reproductive hormone. The produced hybrids showed increased disease resistance and sterility.