Lifeboat Foundation

Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you’re up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe.

Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security.

As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community’s research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden’s senior adviser on technology and national security issues. And then, in July of last year, he became CEO and president of Rand, the oldest nonprofit think tank in the US, which has shaped government policy on nuclear strategy, the Vietnam War, and the development of the internet.

National clinical guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19 vary significantly around the world, with under-resourced countries the most likely to diverge from gold standard (World Health Organization; WHO) treatment recommendations, finds a comparative analysis published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health.

And nearly every national guideline recommends at least one treatment proven not to work, the analysis shows.

Significant variations in national COVID-19 treatment recommendations have been suspected since the advent of the pandemic, but these haven’t been formally quantified or studied in depth, note the researchers.

Rice University engineers have developed the smallest implantable brain stimulator demonstrated in a human patient. Thanks to pioneering magnetoelectric power transfer technology, the pea-sized device developed in the Rice lab of Jacob Robinson in collaboration with Motif Neurotech and clinicians Dr. Sameer Sheth and Dr. Sunil Sheth can be powered wirelessly via an external transmitter and used to stimulate the brain through the dura ⎯ the protective membrane attached to the bottom of the skull.

The device, known as the Digitally programmable Over-brain Therapeutic (DOT), could revolutionize treatment for drug-resistant depression and other psychiatric or neurological disorders by providing a therapeutic alternative that offers greater patient autonomy and accessibility than current neurostimulation-based therapies and is less invasive than other brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

Advances in gene sequencing technology and computing power have significantly increased the availability of bioinformatic data and processing capabilities. This convergence provides an ideal opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) to develop methods to control cellular behavior.

In a new study, Northwestern University researchers have reaped fruit from this nexus by developing an AI-powered transfer learning approach that repurposes publicly available data to predict combinations of gene perturbations that can transform cell type or restore diseased cells to health.

The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

This regimented approach to dieting has helped many people achieve the discipline they need to lose weight, and some research has shown that it can provide a myriad of health benefits, including improved blood pressure.

But a new yet-to-be-published study, presented this week at a meeting of the American Heart Association, suggests that intermittent fasting could have serious consequences for your cardiovascular health.

In an analysis of over 20,000 US adults, the study found that those who eat in just an eight hour window or less per day — thereby fasting for at least 16 hours — had a 91 percent higher chance of dying from heart disease.

Hugging Face has published a new leaderboard and benchmark for evaluating generative AI models on health-related tasks and questions.

“This remains I think an enormous concern,” the UN health agency’s chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters in Geneva.

Cows and goats joined the list of species affected last month – a surprising development for experts because they were not thought susceptible to this type of influenza. US authorities reported this month that a person in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to dairy cattle, with 16 herds across six states infected apparently after exposure to wild birds.

The A(H5N1) variant has become “a global zoonotic animal pandemic”, Farrar said.

Land subsidence is overlooked as a hazard in cities, according to scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Virginia Tech. Writing in the journal Science, Prof Robert Nicholls of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at UEA and Prof Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech and United Nations University for Water, Environment and Health, Ontario, highlight the importance of a new research paper analyzing satellite data that accurately and consistently maps land movement across China.