Lifeboat Foundation

A recent study from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, investigating meditation as a treatment for chronic lower back pain, has revealed that men and women use different biological mechanisms for pain relief. Men primarily rely on the release of endogenous opioids, the body’s natural painkillers, whereas women depend on alternative, non-opioid pathways to manage pain.

Synthetic opioid drugs, such as morphine and fentanyl, are the most powerful class of painkilling drugs available. Women are known to respond poorly to opioid therapies, which use synthetic opioid molecules to bind to the same receptors as naturally occurring endogenous opioids. This aspect of opioid drugs helps explain why they are so powerful as painkillers, but also why they carry a significant risk of dependence and addiction.

“Dependence develops because people start taking more opioids when their original dosage stops working,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., professor of anesthesiology and Endowed Professor in Empathy and Compassion Research at UC San Diego Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. “Although speculative, our findings suggest that maybe one reason that females are more likely to become addicted to opioids is that they’re biologically less responsive to them and need to take more to experience any pain relief.”

A team at Kumamoto University has made a discovery that could help promote healthy aging. As the world’s population ages, Japan’s aging population in particular is growing at an unprecedented rate, making it crucial to extend healthy lifespans rather than just lifespans.

Just as we mimicked birds and fish to model cars and planes, we may gain inspiration for deep dive vehicles.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Continue reading “How Cells Resist the Pressure of the Deep Sea” »

Understand the levels of large language models that power generative AI and the types of platforms that best support them.

Researcher feeds screen recordings into Gemini to extract accurate information with ease.

Anikeeva added, “Yes, it is a record-breaking particle, but it’s not as record-breaking as it could be.”

Although that is still a work in progress, the team has ideas about how to move forward.

Large-scale safety studies are one of the additional steps that would be necessary to move these nanodiscs from basic research using animal models to clinical use in humans, “which is something academic researchers are not necessarily most well-positioned to do,” according to Anikeeva.

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NASA has selected a new crew of four volunteers to participate in a simulated mission to Mars within a habitat at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro, Shareef Al Romaithi, and Piyumi Wijesekara will step into the agency’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, on Friday, May 10. Once inside, the team will live and work like astronauts for 45 days. The crew will exit the facility on June 24 after they “return” to Earth. Jose Baca and Brandon Kent are this mission’s alternate crew members.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a series of structural changes and leadership appointments aimed at accelerating the company’s AI initiatives.

The restructuring sees the Gemini app team, led by Sissie Hsiao, joining Google DeepMind under the leadership of Demis Hassabis.

“Bringing the teams closer together will improve feedback loops, enable fast deployment of our new models in the Gemini app, make our post-training work proceed more efficiently and build on our great product momentum,” Pichai explained.

A flow battery, also known as a reduction-oxidation (Redox) flow battery, is an electrochemical cell that uses two moving liquid electrolytes to generate electricity.

Ion transfer occurs across the cell membrane, accompanied by current flow through an external circuit, while the liquids circulate in their respective spaces. The liquids required are stored in separate tanks until required.

Continue reading “All electric without batteries: Are flow batteries the future of EVs?” »