Lifeboat Foundation

A long, long time ago, back in the early exciting days of raltegravir, the first HIV integrase inhibitor, we learned something important from a clinical trial with disappointing results. The trial bore the (barely) hidden name of the company that developed the drug — SWITCHMRK, get it? — and had a profound impact on how we managed virologically suppressed patients for years.

What did we learn? Namely, that it was risky to switch stable people from their “high resistance barrier” regimen of lopinavir/ritonavir plus NRTIs to raltegravir plus NRTIs if they harbored viruses with NRTI resistance. Some of the participants who had a history of treatment failure who switched ended up experiencing virologic rebound with integrase inhibitor resistance, which made the switch to raltegravir not noninferior (sorry for the double negative) to continuing lopinavir/ritonavir.

The interpretation was that despite the potency and excellent tolerability of raltegravir — massively better than lopinavir/ritonavir — it wasn’t enough to maintain viral suppression reliably unless the NRTIs were also fully active. Based on these results, for years we steered clear of use of this valuable drug class in any setting where we couldn’t use at least one other fully active drug.

Security researchers have detailed the inner workings of the commercial Android spyware called Predator, which is marketed by the Israeli company Intellexa (previously Cytrox).

Predator was first documented by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) in May 2022 as part of attacks leveraging five different zero-day flaws in the Chrome web browser and Android.

The spyware, which is delivered by means of another loader component known as Alien, is equipped to record audio from phone calls and VoIP-based apps as well as gather contacts and messages, including from Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

But they’re not the only ones. Multiple companies are working on haptic devices, like gloves or vests, to add a sense of touch to virtual experiences. And now, researchers are aiming to integrate a fourth sense: smell.

How much more real might that peaceful meadow feel if you could smell the wildflowers and the damp Earth around you? How might the scent of an ocean breeze amplify a VR experience that takes place on a boat or a beach?

Scents have a powerful effect on the brain, eliciting emotions, memories, and sometimes even fight-or-flight responses. You may feel nostalgic with the cologne or perfume a favorite grandparent wore, comforted by a whiff of a favorite food, or extra-alert to your surroundings if it smells like something’s burning.

Radhika is a professor at Harvard and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She studies collective behavior in biological systems and how such behaviors can be applied to computing and robotics.

Radhika Nagpal is the Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute.
for Biologically Inspired Engineering. At Harvard, she leads the Self-organizing Systems Research Group (SSR) and her research combines.
computer science, robotics, and biology. Her main area of interest is how cooperation can emerge or be programmed from large groups of.
simple agents. Radhika Nagpal is a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, where she heads the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group in the study of collective behavior in biological systems and how such behaviors can be applied to computing and robotics. A professor at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), her research draws on inspiration from social insects and multicellular biology, with the goal of creating globally robust systems made up of many cooperative parts.

Continue reading “Taming the swarm” »

Taken from the UK Column.
AI is closer than you think, Dr Graham Downing.
talks about how they want to upload our minds to.
a network by injecting a mesh between the skull and the brain.
They are already testing this on rats.

Virtual reality goggles damage the mind, especially young minds.
But are starting to be pushed onto children at schools.

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Computing machinery and intelligence by Alan Turing.

Shared with Dropbox.

Far from being a blueprint for an organism, genes are mere tools used by life’s true expert builders: cells.

R. Srikumar is Senior Vice President, Head Portfolio Group at Mphasis.

As technology advances at an unprecedented rate, it is easy to assume that all countries and regions have equal access to the latest innovations. However, that is not always the case. Emerging markets often lack the infrastructure and resources necessary to keep up with technological advancements. But instead of being left behind, these regions have embraced “leapfrog innovation” to catch up and even surpass more developed markets.

Leapfrog innovation refers to the process of bypassing traditional technologies and adopting newer, more advanced technologies to meet the specific needs of emerging markets. This approach has increasingly become the norm in some areas of Southeast Asia and Africa, where the lack of infrastructure, limited resources and rapidly growing populations have made traditional development approaches difficult to implement.