Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have identified a specific gene they believe could be a key player in the changes in brain structure seen in several psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and autism.

The team from Cardiff University’s Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute has found that the deletion of the gene CYFIP1 leads to thinning of the insulation that covers nerve cells and is vital for the smooth and rapid communications between different parts of the brain.

The new findings, published in the journal Nature Communications and highlighted in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, throws new light on the potential cause of psychiatric conditions and could ultimately point to new and more effective therapies.

Cold storage for agricultural biodiversity.

Y.-H. Luo et al. Quantum teleportation in high dimensions. Physical Review Letters. Vol. 123, August 16, 2019. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.070505.

North Korea has miniaturised nuclear warheads and made them small enough to fit on ballistic missiles, Japan believes.

Tokyo defence chiefs warn in a new white paper that North Korea’s military activities pose a ‘serious and imminent threat’.

Continue reading “Japan warns North Korea now has miniaturized nukes” »

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk not only wants to explore Mars, he wants to ‘nuke’ it.

In a tweet this week, Musk reiterated calls to ‘Nuke Mars!’ adding that t-shirts are ‘coming soon.’

Continue reading “Elon Musk back to promoting bombing Mars with nuclear weapons” »

Carbon can be arranged in a number of configurations. When each of its atoms is bonded to three other carbon atoms, it’s relatively soft graphite. Add just one more bond and it becomes one of the hardest minerals known, diamond. Chuck 60 carbon atoms together in a soccerball shape and boom, buckyballs.

But a ring of carbon atoms, where each atom is bonded to just two others, and nothing else? That’s eluded scientists for 50 years. Their best attempts have resulted in a gaseous carbon ring that quickly dissipated.

So it’s a pretty big deal that a team of researchers, from Oxford University and IBM Research, has now created a stable carbon ring.

The Killers, the short film about cryonics shot by Russian director Vlad Kozlov, who works in the USA, won a Best Director prize at the 37th Flickers: Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF).

RIIFF is one of the most important international film festivals supporting independent filmmakers. The festival has been held annually since 1982 during the second week of August and lasts six days. Its main goal is to discover new talents of independent cinema. More than 5,426 independent films selected from more than 68,000 received applications were presented to the public during the time of existence of the festival. In 2019, 321 films from 51 countries were presented at the festival, which was held from August 6 to August 11 in Rhode Island, USA.

Cryonics as the central element of the plot was shown in a film of this level for the first time. The main roles in the film are played by world-famous actors such as Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks) and Franco Nero (Django). The role of Max, the main character, was played by a young and promising American actor Jeff DuJardin, who had previously worked with Vlad Kozlov on the set of Silent Life, the film about the star of silent film Rudolf Valentino. The producers of the film are Vlad Kozlov, Natalia Dar, Yury Ponomarev, Dmitry Pristankov and David Roberson.

Hot Chips 31 is underway this week, with presentations from a number of companies. Intel has decided to use the highly technical conference to discuss a variety of products, including major sessions focused on the company’s AI division. AI and machine learning are viewed as critical areas for the future of computing, and while Intel has tackled these fields with features like DL Boost on Xeon, it’s also building dedicated accelerators for the market.

The NNP-I 1000 (Spring Hill) and the NNP-T (Spring Crest) are intended for two different markets, inference and training. “Training” is the work of creating and teaching a neural network how to process data in the first place. Inference refers to the task of actually running the now-trained neural network model. It requires far more computational horsepower to train a neural network than it does to apply the results of that training to real-world categorization or classification tasks.

Intel’s Spring Crest NNP-T is designed to scale out to an unprecedented degree, with a balance between tensor processing capability, on-package HBM, networking capability, and on-die SRAMs to boost processing performance. The underlying chip is built by TSMC — yes, TSMC — on 16nm, with a 680mm die size and a 1200mm interposer. The entire assembly is 27 billion transistors with 4x8GB stacks of HBM2-2400 memory, 24 Tensor Processing Clusters (TPCs) with a core frequency of up to 1.1GHz. Sixty-four lanes of SerDes HSIO provides 3.58Tbps of aggregate bandwidth and the card supports an x16 PCIe 4.0 connection. Power consumption is expected to be between 150-250W. The chip was built using TSMC’s advanced CoWoS packaging (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate), and carries 60MB of cache distributed across its various cores. CoWoS competes with Intel’s EMIB, but Intel has decided to build this hardware at TSMC rather than using its own foundries. Performance is estimated at up to 119 TOPS.

Today, we want to spotlight a recent study showing that boosting nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) levels in mice prevents age-related hearing loss.

What is β-Lapachone?

β-Lapachone is a quinone-containing compound that was originally isolated from the lapacho tree in South America. It is worth noting that this tree has been used as a herbal medicine for a number of South and Central American indigenous peoples and that the bark of the tree is sometimes used for making a herbal tea called taheebo.