Lifeboat Foundation

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies raises new questions. A new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits how these new technologies might affect human evolution.

In “How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?” author Rob Brooks considers the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions—without “dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.”

In the paper, Brooks considers (“often with considerable speculation”) some possible forms of human-AI interaction and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occurred when humans domesticated crops, livestock, and companion animals.

Cognitive neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin have published new research describing a brand new approach to making habit change achievable and lasting.

This innovative framework has the potential to significantly improve approaches to personal development, as well as the clinical treatment of compulsive disorders (for example obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, and eating disorders).

The research was led by Dr. Eike Buabang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Professor Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology, has been published as a paper titled “Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits” in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

The heart-stopping flights led to his research of unmanned aircraft systems while getting his doctorate degree in aerospace engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, he formed Rotor Technologies in 2021 to develop unmanned helicopters.

Rotor has built two autonomous Sprayhawks and aims to have as many as 20 ready for market next year. The company also is developing helicopters that would carry cargo in disaster zones and to offshore oil rigs. The helicopter could also be used https://apnews.com/article/wildfire-season-2024-firefighters…2e4c66fd7” rel=“noopener”>to fight wildfires.

For now, Rotor is focused on the agriculture sector, which has embraced automation with drones but sees unmanned helicopters as a better way to spray larger areas with pesticides and fertilizers.

Microorganisms—bacteria, viruses and other tiny life forms—may drive biological variation in visible life as much, if not more, than genetic mutations, creating new lineages and even new species of animals and plants, according to Seth Bordenstein, director of Penn State’s One Health Microbiome Center, professor of biology and entomology, and the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Endowed Chair in Microbiome Sciences.

Bordenstein and 21 other scientists from around the world published a paper in Science, summarizing research that they said drives a deeper understanding of biological variation by uniting life’s seen and unseen realms.

Continue reading “Q&A: Holobiont biology, a new concept for exploring how microbiome shapes evolution of visible life” »

A team of horticulturists, bio-breeders and agriculture specialists affiliated with a host of institutions across China has produced sweeter tomatoes without sacrificing size, weight or yield by altering two of their genes. In their study, published in the journal Nature, the group modified the genes of a tomato variant that coded for proteins that lowered levels of enzymes related to sugar production.

“The last two decades saw software transform nearly every industry, a trend famously captured by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s phrase ” software is eating the world.

Software became the backbone of industries like retail, transportation, finance, and entertainment, leading to a world where digital tools and applications are integral to daily life.

Looking forward, many experts believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a similarly transformative role over the next 20 years.

As people who research aging like to quip, the best thing you can do to increase how long you live is to pick good parents. After all, it has long been recognized that longer-lived people tend to have longer-lived parents and grandparents, suggesting that genetics influence longevity.

Complicating the picture, however, is that we know that the sum of your lifestyle, specifically diet and exercise, also significantly influences your health into older age and how long you live. What contribution lifestyle versus genetics makes is an open question that a recent study in Nature has shed new light on.

Scientists have long known that reducing calorie intake can make animals live longer. In the 1930s, it was noted that rats fed reduced calories lived longer than rats who could eat as much as they wanted. Similarly, people who are more physically active tend to live longer. But specifically linking single genes to longevity was until recently a controversial one.

Principal investigator Eric Pierce pointed out that the trial shows that gene therapy for hereditary vision loss is a worthy pursuit for future research. He believes the early research is promising.

“It’s a big deal to hear how thrilled they were to finally be able to see food on their plates,” said Pierce. “These were individuals who couldn’t read a single line on an eye chart. They had no treatment options, which is an unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.”

The goal is to inject CRISPR so that it reaches the retina to restore the ability to produce genes and proteins.

A multi-institutional group of researchers led by the Hubrecht Institute and Roche’s Institute of Human Biology has developed strategies to identify regulators of intestinal hormone secretion. In response to incoming food, these hormones are secreted by rare hormone producing cells in the gut and play key roles in managing digestion and appetite. The team has developed new tools to identify potential ‘nutrient sensors’ on these hormone producing cells and study their function. This could result in new strategies to interfere with the release of these hormones and provide avenues for the treatment of a variety of metabolic or gut motility disorders. The work will be presented in an article in Science, on October 18th.

The intestine acts as a vital barrier. It protects the body from harmful bacteria and highly dynamic pH levels, while allowing nutrients and vitamins to enter the bloodstream. The gut is also home to endocrine cells, which secrete many hormones that regulate bodily functions. These enteroendocrine cells (EECs, endocrine cells of the gut) are very rare cells that release hormones in response to various triggers, such as stretching of the stomach, energy levels and nutrients from food. These hormones in turn regulate key aspects of physiology in response to the incoming food, such as digestion and appetite. Thus, EECs are the body’s first responders to incoming food, and instruct and prepare the rest of the body for what is coming.

Medications that mimic gut hormones, most famously GLP-1, are very promising for the treatment of multiple metabolic diseases. Directly manipulating EECs to adjust hormone secretion could open up new therapeutic options. However, it has been challenging to understand how gut hormone release can be influenced effectively. Researchers have had trouble identifying the sensors on EECs, because EECs themselves represent less than 1% of cells in the intestinal epithelium, and in addition the sensors on these EECs are expressed in low amounts. Current studies mainly rely on mouse models, even though the signals to which mouse EECs respond are likely different compared to those to which human EECs respond. Therefore, new models and approaches were required to study these signals.