Most Alzheimer's cases linked to variants in a single gene. And that gene is ... APOE, coding for apolipoprotein E. Why would that be? What's the connection?
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Origin cells for common malignant brain tumor in young adults uncovered. It's amazing that before, the presence of an IDH1 mutation in glioblastoma was felt to be an occasional marker and perhaps something that could be used as a targeted treatment. Now, the presence of an IDH1 mutation means that a tumor is NOT a glioblastoma, but rather a grade 4 astrocytoma.
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Infections can be diagnosed in 20 minutes. This is not really news, as it's been reported before. I'd like to see how this pans out in real life. Sometimes infections can be polymicrobial, and so detection of only the lead bacteria can lead to unexpected outcomes. Still, it's an advance, and certainly welcome.
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Always learning something new. How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA. Sperm donors don't pass on these traits since mRNA is too fragile to survive the storage process. Even one of the researchers said "“It’s still very hand-wavy.” The idea is that certain aspects of a father's fitness might be passed on through microRNAs is intriguing, though.
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Having a million word context window may not always be a good thing. It's called "context rot" and appears when models are given too much context. Even frontier models degrade on tasks like knowledge retrieval. There is context dilution with longer windows. Apparently that final softmax function becomes less reliable when there so many datapoints. It's kinda like with the human brain. Even LLMs stumble when given too much information to chew on. Positioning also matters. Put critical information at the start and end of the query, use RAG for very large corpora, and consider chunking with summarization for documents that exceed reliable limits. Good to know.
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How hackers are fighting back against ICE surveillance tech. I must admit to being conflicted. I don't like surveillance tech, but it's been around for years ever since the Patriot Act was passed and no one complained. Yet people are complaining now because it's being used to identify illegal aliens. That I don't understand. It's a fact that the U.S. has let in a large number of bad boys and we need all we can use to track them and get them out of our society. That's just common sense. Why hackers are opposed to this is baffling. Who do they think they are protecting?
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One prediction shared by several Lorentz-invariance-violating quantum gravity models is that the speed of light may depend slightly on a photon's energy. Any such effect would have to be tiny to match existing experimental limits. However, it could become detectable at the highest photon energies, specifically in very-high-energy gamma rays.
Nope. No observed difference in the speed of light. Einstein is still right.
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Washington state officials have issued a correction after they were caught exaggerating the benefits of state spending to curb climate change. In November, a report from the Washington Department of Ecology said the first two years of auction proceeds would keep more than 8.6 million metric tons of pollution out of the air.
“That’s the equivalent of taking 40% of all gas and diesel vehicles in Washington off the road for a whole year,” an Ecology press release stated.
Yet that claimed carbon benefit was 28 times higher than the reality. According to revised calculations by Ecology, the projects will only keep about 300,000 metric tons of heat-trapping gas out of the air over their lifespans.
That’s less than one-half of 1% of the state’s annual emissions.
It's all B.S. and I'm surprised that the left-wing OPB actually reported it. I guess Katherine Maher's influence is already gone.
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