The final 1 million BTC will take over a century to mine, with the last fractions, measured in satoshis, expected to be issued around 2140.
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Stem Cell Treatments For Parkinson’s And Heart Failure Approved in World First
Japan has approved ground-breaking stem-cell treatments for Parkinson’s and severe heart failure, one of the manufacturers and media reports said Friday, with the therapies expected to reach patients within months.
Pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma said it received the green light for the manufacture and sale of Amchepry, its Parkinson’s disease treatment that transplants stem cells into a patient’s brain.
Japan’s health ministry also gave the go-ahead to ReHeart, heart muscle sheets developed by medical startup Cuorips that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function, media reports said.
Nonlinear photonic neuromorphic chips for spiking reinforcement learning
Photonic computing chips have made significant progress in accelerating linear computations, but nonlinear computations are usually implemented in the digital domain, which introduces additional system latency and power consumption, and hinders the implementation of fully functional photonic neural network chips. Here, we propose and fabricate a 16-channel programmable incoherent photonic neuromorphic computing chip by co-designing a simplified Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) mesh and distributed feedback lasers with saturable absorber (DFBs-SA) array using different materials, enabling implementation of both linear and nonlinear spike computations in the optical domain through two separate chips. Furthermore, previous studies mainly focused on supervised learning and simple image classification tasks. Here, we propose a photonic spiking reinforcement learning (RL) architecture for the first, to our knowledge, time, and develop a software–hardware collaborative training-inference framework (in situ photonic training and hardware-aware fine-tuning) to address the challenge of training spiking RL models. We achieve large-scale, energy-efficient (photonic linear computation: 1.39 TOPS/W, photonic nonlinear computation: 987.65 GOPS/W), and low-latency (on-chip 320 ps) deployment of an entire layer of photonic spiking RL. Two RL benchmarks including the discrete CartPole task and the continuous Pendulum task are demonstrated experimentally based on the spiking proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm. The hardware–software collaborative computing reward value converges to 200 (−250) for the CartPole (Pendulum) tasks, respectively, comparable to that of a traditional PPO algorithm. This experimental demonstration addresses the challenge of the absence of large-scale on-chip photonic nonlinear spike computation and spiking RL training difficulty, and presents a high-speed and low-latency photonic spiking RL solution with promising application prospects in fields such as robot control, autonomous driving, and embodied intelligence.
Cancer drug reduces early Alzheimer’s-like brain hyperconnectivity in lab tests
Neuroscientists at King’s College London have pinpointed a mechanism behind the increased neural connectivity observed in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Published in Translational Psychiatry, the study also demonstrated that a cancer medication has the potential to reduce this hyperconnectivity.
The research showed that low levels of the protein amyloid-beta could induce hyperconnectivity and this pattern closely resembled changes seen in the brains of people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Amyloid-beta is thought to be instrumental in Alzheimer’s disease, where it creates plaques—or sticky clumps of amyloid-beta proteins—around the neurons.
These new findings suggest that low levels of amyloid-beta alone are enough to trigger early, disease-relevant changes in how brain cells connect.
