Lifeboat Foundation

As we age, our muscles and other tissues break down in much the same way as degenerative diseases progress. What we learn from studying degenerative diseases such as muscular dystrophy could help researchers develop new interventions to fight common age-related ailments and chronic illnesses.

With help from NIA, biotechnology company Juvena Therapeutics has begun unlocking the secrets of proteins for regenerative medicine. Juvena scientists are using a form of muscular dystrophy — myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM-1) — as a model to sift through proteins that are produced by the body’s stem cells. These cells have the potential to become any type of cell in the body, from liver tissue to skin cells. The goal is to find proteins that encourage tissue growth and repair, ultimately designing new drugs to prevent and treat degenerative diseases like DM-1. As part of this process, Juvena hopes to learn more about how to reduce the effects of aging on muscles and other tissues, too.

A new biotech trying to establish itself can feel isolated from the larger scientific community. For example, Juvena is unable to submit findings for publication before taking care of intellectual property protections. But NIH’s peer-review process offered confidential, scientifically rigorous feedback to fill that critical gap, and the NIA Small Business Programs staff offered helpful advice.

Continue reading “Funded Small Business Spotlight: Juvena Therapeutics Unlocking the Secrets of Tissue Regeneration” »

The economic downturn is already a devastating blow to job seekers everywhere. Now scammers are taking advantage of the situation by ramping up their methods of swindling people.

Job scamming is a threat to job seekers all over the world. For example, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) reported an increase in job scam complaints in the United States and Canada in the past several years. Singapore job seekers lost $660 million SGD ($495 million USD) in 2022 alone. And in the UK, 10,000 people were approached on LinkedIn and Facebook by “foreign spies and malicious actors” to steal information.

Phishing attacks and malware are the primary methods of scamming job seekers, according to a February Trellix report. Scammers create fake websites, often employing typosquatting. A fake site uses a real name like Indeed that’s slightly misspelled (such as “Indeeed”) or extends the URL in hopes the job seeker will not notice the base domain name. These sites appear legitimate but are used to steal passwords and financial information.

Standing 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) tall, the Jeddah Tower will dwarf the Burj Khalifa by over 560 feet (172 m).

Jeddah Economic Company (JEC), the firm behind the ambitious Jeddah Tower Project in Saudi Arabia, has announced the resumption of work on the world’s tallest building, media reports have confirmed. The project that began in 2010 came to an abrupt halt in 2017.

Countries in the Middle East have been pouring money into ambitious projects to attract tourism and businesses and reduce their dependence on oil exports for income. The city of Dubai is replete with examples of structures meant to attract people from all over the world, whether one looks at the Palm Islands or the Moon-themed resort.

Jason Shawhan, Tesla’s director of manufacturing at Giga Texas, recently gave a rare talk about the facility’s existing operations and the company’s plans for the future. The executive shared the information during a keynote address at the State of Manufacturing conference and expo, which was held by the Austin Regional Manufacturers Association.

Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker by market cap, and its CEO, Elon Musk, is one of the most visible chief executives in the auto industry. Despite this, Tesla has a reputation for being tight-lipped when it comes to the details of its operations. Rare appearances from high-ranking executives such as Shawhan, who serves as director of manufacturing at Gigafactory Texas, are therefore very interesting.

Shawhan did not disappoint, as he did share a number of important insights about the facility. As noted in a report from the Austin Business Journal, the executive confirmed that Giga Texas has become the second-largest private employer in the region because the factory currently employs over 20,000 workers today. This is a notable increase from the 12,277 employees that Tesla confirmed at the end of 2022. Considering Gigafactory Texas’ growth so far, it would appear that the facility would be outpacing Musk’s estimates.

We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology. With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action. At Microsoft, we think about this as having a copilot to help navigate any task. We have been building AI-powered copilots into our most used and loved products – making coding more efficient with GitHub, transforming productivity at work with Microsoft 365, redefining search with Bing and Edge and delivering contextual value that works across your apps and PC with Windows.

Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life.

Continue reading “Announcing Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion” »

Cisco has a reputation of building the company through acquisitions, but it has tended to stay away from the really huge ones. That changed this morning when the company announced it was acquiring Splunk for $28 billion.

With Splunk, it gets an observability platform that could fit nicely into its security business to help customers better understand security threats, while also helping parse oodles of log data to resolve other problems like helping understand system failures or troubleshoot myriad issues across a broad array of enterprise systems.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco is paying a hefty premium of $157 per share. When you consider that the 52-week low was $65 a share and it has hovered in the high 80s and low 90s much of this year, that’s a big bump for Splunk stockholders and suggests there might have been some competition for the logging giant. The company’s most recent market cap sits at just over $20 billion.

Automation Anywhere, the leader in intelligent automation, announced a historic expansion of its Automation Success Platform, enabling enterprises to accelerate their transformation journeys and put AI to work securely throughout their organizations. Automation Anywhere’s new tools and enhancements deliver AI-powered automation across every team, system and process. During Imagine 2023, the company unveiled a new Responsible AI Layer, and announced four key product updates including the brand-new Autopilot, which enables the rapid development of end-to-end automations from Process Discovery, using the power of generative AI. The company also announced new, expanded features in Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users, Automation Co-Pilot for Automators, and Document Automation.

“The combination of generative AI and intelligent automation represents the most transformational technology shift of our generation,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-Founder, Automation Anywhere. “Every company, every team, every individual will be able to re-imagine their system of work and automate the processes that hold them back. Great people, empowered with AI and intelligent automation will be absolutely transformative to their organizations as they increase their productivity, creativity and accelerate the business.”

The API-AI nexus isn’t just for tech enthusiasts; its influence has widespread real-world implications. Consider the healthcare sector, where APIs can allow diagnostic AI algorithms to access patient medical records while adhering to privacy regulations. In the financial sector, advanced APIs can connect risk-assessment AIs to real-time market data. In education, APIs can provide the data backbone for AI algorithms designed to create personalized, adaptive learning paths.

However, this fusion of AI and APIs also raises critical questions about data privacy, ethical use and governance. As we continue to knit together more aspects of our digital world, these concerns will need to be addressed to foster a harmonious and responsible AI-API ecosystem.

We stand at the crossroads of a monumental technological paradigm shift. As AI continues to advance, APIs are evolving in parallel to unlock and amplify this potential. If you’re in the realm of digital products, the message is clear: The future is not just automated; it’s API-fied. Whether you’re a developer, a business leader or an end user, this new age promises unprecedented levels of interaction, personalization and efficiency—but it’s upon us to navigate it responsibly.

At a glance, Gemini’s ability to generate text and images gives it a serious advantage over GPT4 with respect to the range of content that it can produce.

However, perhaps the most threatening differentiator between the two is Google’s vast array of proprietary training data. Google Gemini can process data taken across services, including Google Search, YouTube, Google Books, and Google Scholar.

The use of this proprietary data in training the Gemini models could result in a distinct edge in the sophistication of the insights and inferences that it can take from a data set. This is particularly true if early reports that Gemini is trained on twice as many tokens as GPT4 are correct.

Continue reading “Google’s Gemini AI is a Serious Threat to ChatGPT — Here’s Why” »