Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from Japan reveal that they may just have found a way to repair cardiac damage in patients suffering from chronic heart attack and heart failure.

In a study published in Circulation, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have shown that changing heart cell programming by tweaking the expression of a few key genes can actually reverse the lasting damage caused by heart attacks.

Adult heart cells have very limited ability to form new heart tissue, so when the heart muscle is damaged by a heart attack, the damaged areas are filled in with inflexible scar tissue. The presence of scar tissue impairs heart function and leads to arrhythmias, progressive heart failure and eventual death.

On Thursday, a pair of tech hobbyists released Riffusion, an AI model that generates music from text prompts by creating a visual representation of sound and converting it to audio for playback. It uses a fine-tuned version of the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image synthesis model, applying visual latent diffusion to sound processing in a novel way.

Since a sonogram is a type of picture, Stable Diffusion can process it. Forsgren and Martiros trained a custom Stable Diffusion model with example sonograms linked to descriptions of the sounds or musical genres they represented. With that knowledge, Riffusion can generate new music on the fly based on text prompts that describe the type of music or sound you want to hear, such as “jazz,” “rock,” or even typing on a keyboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QykUAQmSzpU

Slowing speed of aging will increase life expectancy.

Peter Diamandis, the founder of the Singularity University and the X Prize Foundation has a goal for the next decade: to add 20 or 30 healthy years to people’s life. Or, in other words, making 100 years old the new 60s. He presents his vision during “Priorities”, a summit that took place on September 2022 in New York and organized by the FII Institute. Here are the highlights.

Continue reading “Peter Diamandis: In 10 Years Tech Will Reset Your Age” »

Their work has numerous potential impacts, especially in the context of understanding and responding to autoimmune disorders and inflammation.

ALSO READ: Man dies of heart attack watching Avatar 2; what cardiologists say

While our immune system serves a very important function protecting us from infection and injury, when immune responses become too aggressive this can lead to damaging inflammation, which occurs in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Inflammation is triggered when our bodies produce “alarm proteins” (interleukins), which ramp up our defenses against infection and injury by switching on different components of our immune system.

Researchers at UC San Francisco (UCSF) have engineered molecules that act like “cellular glue,” allowing them to direct in precise fashion how cells bond with each other. This discovery represents a major step toward building tissues and organs, a long-sought goal of regenerative medicine [1].

Longevity. Technology: Adhesive molecules are found naturally throughout the body, holding its tens of trillions of cells together in highly-organised patterns. They form structures, create neuronal circuits and guide immune cells to their targets. Adhesion also facilitates communication between cells to keep the body functioning as a self-regulating whole.

Now a new study, published in Nature, details how the researchers engineered cells containing customised adhesion molecules that bound with specific partner cells in predictable ways to form complex multicellular ensembles.

Riding on the shoulders of the Apollo generation, the Artemis missions will pave the way for humans to return to the moon, begin human exploration of Mars, and someday for humanity to reach the edges of our solar system and beyond.

While the exploration of deep space is critical to advancing our understanding of so many unanswered questions about the universe and our place in it, it is equally as critical that the United States government and private industry work together to lead the commercialization of Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and capture the resulting massive new space economy.

As I wrote in The Washington Post recently, the most profound chapter in human history is the industrial revolution happening in LEO, just 250 miles above our heads. We are at a turning point for our civilization, pivoting from 60 years of space exploration to a new era of unprecedented economic activity, manufacturing and growth in space. This burgeoning epoch is called the Orbital Age, and it will drive a new trillion-dollar industry.

SAN FRANCISCO – EOI Space, the Earth-observation startup formerly known as Earth Observant, attracted its first major customer for ultra-high-resolution imagery drawn from a constellation of satellites destined for very low Earth orbit.

NTT Data, part of the Tokyo-based technology company NTT Group, is acquiring 2.5 percent of EOI plus exclusive rights to sell EOI satellite imagery in Japan, one of the world’s largest Earth-observation markets.

NTT Data is the first partner to sign up for priority access to EOI imagery and services. EOI plans to work with other organizations and governments across the globe, but the NTT Data contract is an important one.

TAMPA, Fla. — Microsoft said Dec. 14 it is partnering with satellite operator Viasat to find solutions for bringing internet access to 10 million unserved or underserved people within three years.

Viasat is the first satellite operator to join Microsoft’s Airband initiative, which aims to deliver connectivity to a quarter of a billion people by the end of 2025 through a mix of technologies.

Microsoft set up Airband in 2017 and said the initiative had enabled high-speed internet access for more than 51 million people globally — about 20% of its goal.

Experiments suggest that hydrogen bonding explains why a wet surface can have nearly twice as much friction as a dry surface.

A wet floor poses a risk for slipping, but in certain cases, water added to a surface can increase friction. Researchers have now found that this phenomenon is partly explained by hydrogen bonds between the water and the surface, an effect that was not previously thought to play an important role [1]. The team reached this conclusion by studying the friction between two silicon surfaces under a range of wetness conditions. The researchers showed that heavy water produces greater friction than normal water—evidence that hydrogen bonding has an influence. The results could lead to a deeper understanding of the effects of humidity on friction.

The earliest friction studies looked at relatively large objects, such as a wood block sliding down an inclined surface. More recent efforts have focused on the nanoscale, exploring the friction forces on needle-like probes. These latter experiments have identified the friction mechanisms that operate at a single microscopic bump, or “asperity,” on a surface. But a missing piece is how to relate the friction at nanoscales to that at macroscales, says Liang Peng from the University of Amsterdam.