Lifeboat Foundation

Can organisms generate their own self-sustaining ecosystems in space without a planet. Researchers say it’s at least plausible.

A threat actor tracked as MUT-1244 has stolen over 390,000 WordPress credentials in a large-scale, year-long campaign targeting other threat actors using a trojanized WordPress credentials checker.

Researchers at Datadog Security Labs, who spotted the attacks, say that SSH private keys and AWS access keys were also stolen from the compromised systems of hundreds of other victims, believed to include red teamers, penetration testers, security researchers, as well as malicious actors.

The victims were infected using the same second-stage payload pushed via dozens of trojanized GitHub repositories delivering malicious proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits that targeted known security flaws, along with a phishing campaign prompting targets to install a fake kernel upgrade camouflaged as a CPU microcode update.

But it’s not clear how soon you’ll be able to get its help in finding them.

Because glucose metabolism is disrupted in several different neurodegenerative disorders, this treatment strategy also shows promise for other brain conditions.

“The beneficial effect on brain metabolism by IDO1 inhibition cuts across different types of pathology,” Andreasson said.

“It is exciting to think that this may be a more general mechanism that could be targeted in other neurodegenerative disorders, like Parkinson’s disease, where you have accumulation of a-synuclein, or ALS, where there is accumulation of tdp-43.”

I have liked kdnuggets for a while now. I used it for information on Tensorflow. This is cool though:

Neural networks are the building blocks behind every advanced AI system nowadays: from computer vision solutions to generative AI solutions and language models, most real-world solutions that involve some degree of AI have intricate neural network architectures at their core. But, what are neural networks and how do they perform surprisingly well in intelligently solving challenging tasks? To satisfy your curiosity at no cost, this post lists five resources to help you understand the mechanisms behind neural networks.

Continue reading “5 Free Resources to Understand Neural Networks” »

LLMs can shed a substantial portion of their attention layers without hurting their performance.

Salk scientists establish novel Link between cell nutrition and identity, say targeting nutrient-dependent activity could improve immunotherapies.

The decision between scrambled eggs or an apple for breakfast probably won’t make or break your day. However, for your cells, a decision between similar microscopic nutrients could determine their entire identity. If and how nutrient preference impacts cell identity has been a longstanding mystery for scientists—until a team of Salk Institute immunologists revealed a novel framework for the complicated relationship between nutrition and cell identity.

The findings were published in Science on December 12, 2024.

Introduction: The lips fulfill various critical physiological roles besides being viewed as a fundamental aesthetic feature contributing to the perception of health and beauty. Therefore, any lip injury, abnormality, or congenital malformation, such as cleft lip, needs special attention in order to restore proper lip function and aesthetics. To achieve this goal, a better understanding of the complex lip anatomy, function, and biology is required, which can only be provided by basic research endeavors. However, the current lack of clinically relevant human lip cells and three-dimensional in vitro lip models, capable of replacing ethically questionable animal experimentations, represents a significant limitation in this area of research.

Methods: To address these limitations, we aimed to pioneer the introduction of immortalized healthy lip-and cleft lip-derived keratinocytes. Primary keratinocytes were isolated from patients’ samples and immortalized by introducing the catalytic domain of telomerase, combined with the targeted knockdown of the cell cycle inhibitor gene, p16^INK4A. We then focused on validating the newly established cell lines by comparing their genetic stability and key phenotypic features with their primary keratinocyte counterparts.

Results: The newly established immortalized keratinocyte cell lines demonstrated genetic stability and preserved the main phenotypic characteristics of primary keratinocytes, such as cellular morphology and differentiation capacity. Three-dimensional lip models, generated using these cell lines, proved to be effective and convenient platforms for screening applications, including wound healing and microbial infection of the lip epithelium.

One of the most elusive challenges oncologists encounter is why some patients respond to a particular therapy while others do not. Thus, optimizing a personalized treatment regimen that gives a patient the best odds of success has become a cornerstone of cancer research. The desire to implement more individualized therapies has brought about an increasing the focus on personalized medicine. This promising approach uses specific patient characteristics, including genetic makeup, environment, and lifestyle, to develop an individualized treatment plan.

Working towards improving the speed and accuracy of genetic screening to inform personalized medicine, a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive study. The journal NPJ Precision Oncol recently published the results. The researchers meticulously investigated the gene expression of almost 800 cancer cell lines and their response to treatment. With this thorough process, the researchers identified specific genetic patterns that correlated with drug resistance.

The study identified 36 genes correlating to resistance to multiple anti-cancer drugs. The researchers calculated a score, called UAB36, based on the correlation coefficient of the 36 genes identified. This UAB36 score, a novel predictive tool, accurately forecasted resistance to tamoxifen, an anti-cancer drug used to treat some types of breast cancer and prevent cancer progression in women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).