Lifeboat Foundation

An object lurking in the foggy dawn of the Universe has given astronomers a big surprise.

Observations collected through the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed an active supermassive black hole 9 million times the mass of the Sun – one that is actively growing as it slurps up matter from the space around it.

Continue reading “The Earliest Supermassive Black Hole Ever Found Has Been Identified” »

OpenAI is forming a new team led by Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, to develop ways to steer and control “superintelligent” AI systems.

In a blog post published today, Sutskever and Jan Leike, a lead on the alignment team at OpenAI, predict that AI with intelligence exceeding that of humans could arrive within the decade. This AI — assuming it does, indeed, arrive eventually — won’t necessarily be benevolent, necessitating research into ways to control and restrict it, Sutskever and Leike say.

“Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue,” they write. “Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us.”

New X-ray capability could find wide application in environmental and medical research, as well as the development of batteries and microelectronic devices.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and various universities have successfully used X-ray beams to analyze a single atom.

An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus.

In a groundbreaking study published in Cell Genomics, a team of scientists led by Chris Walsh from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital has unveiled intriguing findings about the genetic factors contributing to schizophrenia and introduces a novel avenue for investigating the causes of psychiatric disorders.

Health care professionals are overcoming these obstacles with a new treatment called hepatic artery infusion pump chemotherapy that shrinks liver tumors, giving more people a chance for surgery. This treatment also can shrink tumors in the bile ducts inside the liver, called intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.

“Our goal is to expand the number of patients who could be offered curative treatment,” says Dr. Thiels. “We are also aiming to reduce the risk of cancer recurring in people with high-risk liver tumors.”

Continue reading “Colorectal cancer in the liver: New treatment gives more people hope for a cure” »

A study conducted by researchers from the Department of Neurology at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna has demonstrated for the first time that the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) can be significantly improved by additionally measuring the thickness of retinal layers in the eye.

Use of the procedure, which is already available at the Departments of MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna, helps to detect the condition at an earlier stage and predict its progression more accurately. This can lead to a decisive increase in the chance of improved patient outcomes. The findings have been published in the journal Neurology.

As part of their investigation, the research team headed by Gabriel Bsteh and Thomas Berger of the Department of Neurology at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna collaborated with colleagues from MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna’s Department of Ophthalmology and Optometrics to examine 267 MS patients over a period of five years.

In a recent article published in Nature communications*, researchers described a technique of capturing two-dimensional (2D) light patterns into deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and using high-throughput next-generation sequencing to retrieve recorded images.

Study: A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA. Image Credit: BillionPhotos/Shutterstock.com.

Scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have used bacteria for recording, storing, and retrieving images in DNA. This biological analog to a digital camera, which the authors have named “BacCam,” is a crucial step for DNA data storage techniques and the merging of biological and electronic systems.

The article, “A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA,” was published in Nature Communications.

Prior to this publication, there were two landmark papers that addressed either the use of cells to capture light or the storage of images into DNA, but not the two together. In May 2017, researchers from the lab of Christopher Voigt, PhD, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a system to produce ‘color photographs’ on bacterial culture plates by controlling pigment production and to redirect metabolic flux by expressing CRISPRi guide RNAs. Two months later, researchers in the lab of George Church, PhD, at Harvard Medical School demonstrated a method for encoding images via de novo DNA synthesis before insertion into the bacterial genome.

Worldwide, glass manufacturing produces at least 86 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. A new type of glass promises to cut this carbon footprint in half. The invention, called LionGlass and engineered by researchers at Penn State, requires significantly less energy to produce and is much more damage resistant than standard soda lime silicate glass. The research team recently filed a patent application as a first step toward bringing the product to market.

“Our goal is to make glass manufacturing sustainable for the long term,” said John Mauro, Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State and lead researcher on the project. “LionGlass eliminates the use of carbon-containing batch materials and significantly lowers the melting temperature of glass.”

Soda lime silicate glass, the common glass used in everyday items from windows to glass tableware, is made by melting three primary materials: quartz sand, soda ash and limestone. Soda ash is sodium carbonate and limestone is calcium carbonate, both of which release carbon dioxide (CO₂), a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, as they are melted.