Lifeboat Foundation

Our planet supports approximately 8.7 million species, of which over a quarter live in water.

But humans can have a hard time comprehending numbers this big, so it can be difficult to really appreciate the breadth of this incredible diversity of life on Earth.

In order to fully grasp this scale, we draw from research by Bar-On et al. to break down the total composition of the living world, in terms of its biomass, and where we fit into this picture.

Credit: Getty Images.

The work, led by Johns Hopkins University researchers, is detailed today in Nature Cardiovascular Research.

Medical tech company Viz.ai, a developer of an AI-powered stroke detection and care platform, has pulled in a new investment of $100 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion, making it Israel’s newest unicorn (a private company valued at over $1 billion).

The company said Thursday that the Series D funding will be used to expand the Viz platform to detect and triage additional diseases and grow its customer base globally.

Viz.ai’s newest round was led by Tiger Global Management, a New York-based investment firm focused on software and financial tech, and Insight Partners, a VC and private equity firm also based in New York. Tiger Global has invested in Israeli companies such as cybersecurity companies Snyk and SentinelOne as well as payroll tech companies Papaya Global and HoneyBook. Insight Partners is a very active foreign investor in Israeli companies, with at least 76 local portfolio startups to its name including privacy startup PlainID, bee tech startup Beewise, and music tech startup JoyTunes.

The new results, taken from two combined studies, reveal that people who responded to psilocybin-assisted therapy showed increased brain connectivity not just during their treatment, but up to three weeks afterwards. This “opening up” effect was associated with self-reported improvements in their depression.

Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, helps to “open up” depressed people’s brains, even weeks after use, a study has found.

These are the findings of a new analysis of brain scans from close to 60 people receiving treatment for depression, led by Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research. The team behind the study believes it may have untangled how psilocybin exerts its therapeutic effects on the brain.

Continue reading “Magic mushroom compound increases brain connectivity in people with depression” »

The optical properties of mitochondrial bundles in the retina may improve how efficiently the eye captures light.

We are already living in the future. Our everyday lives are influenced by robots in many ways, whether we’re at home or at work. As artificial intelligence, open source algorithms, and cloud technology have been developed in recent years, they have contributed to creating favorable conditions for robot revolution, which is closer than you might expect.

Today we are going to be examining whether or not the world is a curse from two extremely divergent points of view.

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The goal of this virtual workshop is to discuss whether microbial pathogens may represent a causal component of Alzheimer’s disease, review knowledge gaps, and establish scientific priorities to address these gaps. The workshop discussed gaps in current knowledge and explored new opportunities for research in the areas intersecting infectious organisms and Alzheimer’s disease.

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A new spin on one of the 20th century’s smallest but grandest inventions, the transistor, could help feed the world’s ever-growing appetite for digital memory while slicing up to 5% of the energy from its power-hungry diet.

Following years of innovations from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Christian Binek and University at Buffalo’s Jonathan Bird and Keke He, the physicists recently teamed up to craft the first magneto-electric transistor.

Along with curbing the energy consumption of any microelectronics that incorporate it, the team’s design could reduce the number of transistors needed to store certain data by as much as 75%, said Nebraska physicist Peter Dowben, leading to smaller devices. It could also lend those microelectronics steel-trap memory that remembers exactly where its users leave off, even after being shut down or abruptly losing power.