These bubbles kill cancer

2023-10-06 Jim Lynch

The process [of histotripsy] uses a transducer—which converts electricity into sound—to deliver ultrasound waves to a malignant mass at a precise location. When the waves hit gasses inside cancerous cells, they generate clouds of tiny bubbles through a process known as cavitation.

Pulsing sound waves causes the millimeter-sized bubble clouds to repeatedly grow and collapse. On an ultrasound monitor, it can look like bubbles from boiling water—quickly rising and falling along the surface in your pot.

In the past, researchers saw the creation of bubbles through ultrasound as “uncontrollable,” something to be avoided. Histotripsy, however, generates mechanical energy to activate those bubble clouds and break up the tumor cells’ structure, turning it into a liquid called acellular lysate.

histotripsy foils cancer’s cloaking efforts by destroying its cell walls, leaving the tumor antigens in plain sight for the body’s immune system.

https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/10/these-bubbles-kill-cancer/

What Are Dreams For?

2023-08-31 Amanda Gefter

In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body. You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with maps of our bodies

In 2013, Blumberg published a paper in Current Biology titled “Twitching in Sensorimotor Development from Sleeping Rats to Robots.” In it, he asked, “Can twitching, as a special form of self-generated movement, contribute to a robot’s knowledge about its body and how it works?”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/what-are-dreams-for

Password advice

There have been news stories about how the Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of the Interior found weak passwords in the Department of Interior’s Active Directory accounts:

The OIG report:
P@s$w0rds at the U.S. Department of the Interior: Easily Cracked Passwords, Lack of Multifactor Authentication, and Other Failures Put Critical DOI Systems at Risk
It has password advice on page 8:

NIST SP 800–63 recommends using passphrases instead of passwords …

Password vs. Passphrase Examples
Password = 5pr1ng*Ish3re
Passphrase = DinosaurLetterTrailChance

I believe the passphase words have to be chosen randomly from a large word list to be effective, but it is easier to remember than a complex password.

Geoffrey Hinton’s Forward-Forward Algorithm Charts a New Path for Neural Networks

2022-12-08 by Synced

there is increasing interest in whether the biological brain follows backpropagation or, as Hinton asks, whether it has some other way of getting the gradients needed to adjust the weights on its connections. In this regard, Hinton proposes the FF [Forward-Forward] algorithm as an alternative to backpropagation for neural network learning.

It aims to replace the forward and backward passes of backpropagation with two forward passes: a positive pass that operates on real data and adjusts weights “to improve the goodness in every hidden layer,” and a negative pass that operates on externally supplied or model-generated “negative data” and adjusts weights to deteriorate the goodness.

https://syncedreview.com/2022/12/08/geoffrey-hintons-forward-forward-algorithm-charts-a-new-path-for-neural-networks/

The Forward-Forward Algorithm: Some Preliminary
Investigations by Geoffrey Hinton
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/FFA13.pdf

Using the Forward-Forward Algorithm for Image Classification
Includes sample Python code using the Keras Python library.
https://keras.io/examples/vision/forwardforward/

Ryan Reynolds reveals the No. 1 skill that’s helped him succeed: ‘It really changed my life’

2022-10-13 Morgan Smith

“We live in a world that’s increasingly gamified, and I think we have an instinct to win, crush and kill,” he said. “But if you can disengage or disarm that instinct for a second and replace it with seeking to learn about somebody instead, that, as a leadership quality, for me, has quite literally changed every aspect of my life.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/ryan-reynolds-credits-his-success-to-one-skill-it-changed-my-life.html