Lifeboat Foundation

The African turquoise killifish is an emerging vertebrate model organism with great potential for aging research due to its naturally short lifespan. Thus far, turquoise killifish aging omic studies using RNA-seq have examined a single organ, single sex and/or evaluated samples from non-reference strains. Here, we describe a resource dataset of ribosomal RNA depleted RNA-seq libraries generated from the brain, heart, muscle, and spleen from both sexes, as well as young and old animals, in the reference GRZ turquoise killifish strain. We provide basic quality control steps and demonstrate the utility of our dataset by performing differential gene expression and gene ontology analyses by age and sex. Importantly, we show that age has a greater impact than sex on transcriptional landscapes across probed tissues. Finally, we confirm transcription of transposable elements (TEs), which are highly abundant and increase in expression with age in brain tissue. This dataset will be a useful resource for exploring gene and TE expression as a function of both age and sex in a powerful naturally short-lived vertebrate model.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

From an emerging golden age in medicine to Microsoft’s quantum supercomputer, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

If you want to become a leader, start yammering. It doesn’t even necessarily matter what you say. New research shows that groups without a leader can find one if somebody starts talking a lot.

This phenomenon, described by the “babble hypothesis” of leadership, depends neither on group member intelligence nor personality. Leaders emerge based on the quantity of speaking, not quality.

Continue reading “Babble hypothesis shows key factor to becoming a leader” »

MIT engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions.

As the material absorbs water vapor, it can swell to make room for more moisture. Even in very dry conditions, with 30 percent relative humidity, the material can pull vapor from the air and hold in the moisture without leaking. The water could then be heated and condensed, then collected as ultrapure water.

The transparent, rubbery material is made from hydrogel, a naturally absorbent material that is also used in disposable diapers. The team enhanced the hydrogel’s absorbency by infusing it with lithium chloride — a type of salt that is known to be a powerful dessicant.

When Max More writes, it’s always worth paying attention.

His recent article Existential Risk vs. Existential Opportunity: A balanced approach to AI risk is no exception. There’s much in that article that deserves reflection.

Continue reading “The rise of AI: beware binary thinking” »

Humans rely increasingly on sensors to address grand challenges and to improve quality of life in the era of digitalization and big data. For ubiquitous sensing, flexible sensors are developed to overcome the limitations of conventional rigid counterparts. Despite rapid advancement in bench-side research over the last decade, the market adoption of flexible sensors remains limited. To ease and to expedite their deployment, here, we identify bottlenecks hindering the maturation of flexible sensors and propose promising solutions. We first analyze challenges in achieving satisfactory sensing performance for real-world applications and then summarize issues in compatible sensor-biology interfaces, followed by brief discussions on powering and connecting sensor networks.

Bacteria that contribute to gum disease may be a cause of the gynaecological condition endometriosis, which means it could be treated with antibiotics.

By Grace Wade

The project has been funded by the European Space Agency.

The Danish Technological Institute (DTI) has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to engineer a smart skin for robot arms to be used in space.

This is according to a report by Printed Electronics published on Thursday…

Continue reading “Scientists are developing a smart skin for use in robots in space” »

The development could result in many more general-purpose robots being developed at a faster rate.

Robots today can do a variety of tasks as long as they are trained on real-world data. But what if they could bypass this step? It would result in many more general-purpose robots being developed at a faster rate.

Continue reading “DeepMind introduces self-improving AI model called RoboCat” »