Lifeboat Foundation

The US Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by NSO Group to block a WhatsApp lawsuit accusing the Israeli tech firm of allowing mass cyberespionage of journalists and human rights activists.

The Supreme Court denied NSO’s plea for legal immunity and ruled that the case, which targets the company’s Pegasus software, can continue in a California federal court, a court filing showed.

Pegasus gives its government customers—which have allegedly included Mexico, Hungary, Morocco and India—near-complete access to a target’s device, including their personal data, photos, messages and location.

Ralph Lydic, professor in the UT Department of Psychology, and Dmitry Bolmatov, a research assistant professor in the UT Department of Physics and Astronomy, are part of a UT/ORNL research team studying how bio-inspired materials might inform the design of next-generation computers. Their results, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could have big implications for both edge computing and human health.

Scientists at ORNL and UT discovered an artificial cell membrane is capable of long-term potentiation, or LTP, a hallmark of biological learning and memory. This is the first evidence that a cell membrane alone—without proteins or other biomolecules embedded within it—is capable of LTP that persists for many hours. It is also the first identified nanoscale structure in which memory can be encoded.

“When facilities were shut down as a result of COVID, this led us to pivot away from our usual membrane research,” said John Katsaras, a biophysicist in ORNL’s Neutron Sciences Directorate specializing in neutron scattering and the study of biological membranes at ORNL. “Together with postdoc Haden Scott, we decided to revisit a system previously studied by Pat Collier and co-workers, this time with an entirely different electrical stimulation protocol that we termed ‘training.’”.

A variety of healthy eating patterns are linked to reduced risk of premature death, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers. They found that participants who scored high on adherence to at least one of four healthy eating patterns were less likely to die during the study period from any cause and less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, cancer, or respiratory disease, compared with people with lower scores. The findings are consistent with the current Dietary Guidelines for America, which recommend multiple healthy eating patterns.

“The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are intended to provide science-based dietary advice that promotes good health and reduces major chronic diseases. Thus, it is critical to examine the associations between DGAs-recommended dietary patterns and long-term health outcomes, especially mortality,” said corresponding author Frank Hu, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Nutrition.

The study will be published online January 9, 2023, in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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Continue reading “China Preparing for World War III With Biological Weapons” »

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Canada has found that obesity in young mice can lead to inflammatory disease later in life even if the mouse is no longer overweight. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes studying early life obesity in test mice and the development of age-related macular degeneration. Kevin Mangum and Katherine Gallagher with the University of Michigan have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the research.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in older people can lead to permanent blindness. Prior research has shown obesity plays a major role in its development. Other research has also shown that AMD is a neuroinflammatory condition. It is believed that the inflammation in the eyes is related to obesity, but the exact connection has not been identified. In this new effort, the researchers sought to find the connection by studying obesity and macular degeneration in mice.

The work involved feeding test mice a high-fat diet and studying the impact on adipose tissue macrophages (types of white blood cells that are part of the immune system). They found that obesity in mice led to epigenetic changes in the macrophages that resulted in an increase in expression of genes that incite an inflammatory response. They also found that the increased expression continued even after the test mice were put on a reduced diet that allowed them to return to their normal weight.

Needs work.

AN ultrarealistic AI robot has opinions about the afterlife and can even sense anxiety with her advanced technology, The U.S. Sun has learned.

Through a camera in her eyes, the amazing bot called “Xoxe” (pronounced Zo-zie) can detect if anybody in her presence has committed any illegal activities.

Continue reading “Creepy ultrarealistic AI Xoxe sensed my anxiety as we discussed end of the world” »

But for some industry leaders, chatbots and image-generators are far from the final robotic frontier. Next up? Consciousness.

“This topic was taboo,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

Consciousness is one of the longest standing, and most divisive, questions in the field of artificial intelligence. And while to some it’s science fiction — and indeed has been the plot of countless sci-fi books, comics, and films — to others, like Lipson, it’s a goal, one that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it for good.

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About one-third of individuals suffering from depression are at risk for treatment resistance. Whereas inhaled 50% nitrous oxide has early antidepressant effects on individuals with treatment-resistant major depression (TRMD), adverse effects can occur at this concentration. In this phase 2 clinical trial, Nagele et al. studied the effects of a single 1-hour treatment with 25% nitrous oxide on depression symptoms in those with TRMD, finding that this lower concentration had comparable efficacy to 50% nitrous oxide over several weeks but was associated with significantly fewer adverse effects. These results highlight that lower concentrations of nitrous oxide may be a useful treatment for TRMD.

Twenty-five percent inhaled nitrous oxide improves symptoms of treatment-resistant major depression with fewer adverse effects than the 50% concentration.