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 homo sapien


Evolution of intelligence in our ancestors may have come at a cost

New Scientist

A timeline of genetic changes in millions of years of human evolution shows that variants linked to higher intelligence appeared most rapidly around 500,000 years ago, and were closely followed by mutations that made us more prone to mental illness. The findings suggest a "trade-off" in brain evolution between intelligence and psychiatric issues, says Ilan Libedinsky at the Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Why did humans evolve big brains? "Mutations related to psychiatric disorders apparently involve part of the genome that also involves intelligence. So there's an overlap there," says Libedinsky. "[The advances in cognition] may have come at the price of making our brains more vulnerable to mental disorders."


Humans just got even OLDER: Ancient skull pushes back our origins by 400,000 years - making Homo sapiens more than one million years old

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Las Vegas man raped by mother as a child is told by judge that he's legal father to brother believed to be his biological son The five'worst cities to be a woman' in America... and they're all in deep red states D4vd's mansion is mysteriously EMPTIED by movers... as disturbing theory emerges about why he still hasn't been arrested after dismembered girl was found in his Tesla There's a sinister Establishment'plot' to undermine Prince William and Kate and bring back Harry and Meghan. I refuse to be part of it... and today I'm exposing what's going on: RICHARD EDEN Pastor and wife were living WITH their son who'kept four people PRISONER in basement dungeon'... as survivor's family reveal what'evil monster' did to victims Why your star sign has been WRONG your whole life: As astronomers reveal the zodiac is more than 2,500 years out of date, use our graphic to find out what your horoscope really is - and why it's changed I woke up one day with tinnitus. It ruined my life... but this is how I got rid of the agony for good - and why I believe we are treating this insidious condition completely wrong: Expert and audiologist DR GLADYS SANDA Star Trek icon William Shatner, 94, jokes about his DEATH as he breaks silence after'medical emergency' Amazon agrees to record $2.5b settlement over claims it tricked customers Jessica Alba is being humiliated by her ex-husband chasing lookalikes half her age! How I look like this at 45, by DAVID GANDY: His 45-minute routine, exactly what he eats, the cheap supplement he takes every day, what makes a man... and how to find the perfect pair of pants Livvy Dunne leaves fans in disbelief as'gross' photo goes viral She shows off huge new'Queen' ring with gem'associated with the goddess Diana' Megyn Kelly's brutal takedown of left-wing student who said Trump rhetoric was to blame for Charlie Kirk murder Top journalist slams entitlement of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Gardner's woke daughter after UN speech demanding mask mandates The threat of artificial intelligence wiping us out is so grave governments must bomb any labs suspected of developing it, by two top academics who've studied the threat for 25 years... and spell out in terrifying detail our bloody end This is the sad truth about people like Violet Affleck who are still wearing masks. I've seen it in so many patients at my practice... and this is what's really going on: DR MAX PEMBERTON It's time to rewrite the family tree, as scientists have revealed that our species is even older than we thought.


Neanderthals bred with humans 100,000 YEARS earlier than first thought, scientists say - as they discover skeleton of five-year-old crossbreed

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Neanderthals bred with our human ancestors 100,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study. Experts have discovered that a five–year–old child who lived 140,000 years ago had parents from both species. Their fossil – likely a female – was first unearthed 90 years ago in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel in what is now northern Israel. A team from Tel Aviv University and the French Centre for Scientific Research conducted a series of advanced tests on the remaining bones, including a CT scan of the skull. 'Genetic studies over the past decade have shown that these two groups exchanged genes,' said lead author Professor Israel Hershkovitz.


Scientists reveal exactly what a neanderthal human hybrid would look like

Daily Mail - Science & tech

It has been over 40,000 years since the last of the Neanderthals, our ancient human cousins, disappeared from the Earth. But from the shape of your nose to whether someone is an early riser, Neanderthal genes are still shaping many of our lives today. Starting from around 250,000 years ago, ancient homo sapiens and Neanderthals met, lived alongside each other, and often had children together. Now, MailOnline has asked leading paleoanthropologists to reveal what those hybrid children would have looked like. Scientists believe that hybrid children would inherit traits from both of their parents.


Homo Ratiocinator (Reckoning Human)

Communications of the ACM

Homo Sapiens, "wise human" in Latin, is the taxonomic species name for modern humans. But observing the current state of the world and its trajectory, it is hard for me to accept the description "wise." I am not the first to object to the "sapiens" descriptor. The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson argued in 1911 that a better term would be Homo Faber, referring to human tool-making ability. This ability goes back to early humans, about three million years ago. Most importantly, human tools got better and better due to innovation and cultural transmission.


OneProt: Towards Multi-Modal Protein Foundation Models

Flöge, Klemens, Udayakumar, Srisruthi, Sommer, Johanna, Piraud, Marie, Kesselheim, Stefan, Fortuin, Vincent, Günneman, Stephan, van der Weg, Karel J, Gohlke, Holger, Bazarova, Alina, Merdivan, Erinc

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent AI advances have enabled multi-modal systems to model and translate diverse information spaces. Extending beyond text and vision, we introduce OneProt, a multi-modal AI for proteins that integrates structural, sequence, alignment, and binding site data. Using the ImageBind framework, OneProt aligns the latent spaces of modality encoders along protein sequences. It demonstrates strong performance in retrieval tasks and surpasses state-of-the-art methods in various downstream tasks, including metal ion binding classification, gene-ontology annotation, and enzyme function prediction. This work expands multi-modal capabilities in protein models, paving the way for applications in drug discovery, biocatalytic reaction planning, and protein engineering.


Fine-tuning Protein Language Models with Deep Mutational Scanning improves Variant Effect Prediction

Lafita, Aleix, Gonzalez, Ferran, Hossam, Mahmoud, Smyth, Paul, Deasy, Jacob, Allyn-Feuer, Ari, Seaton, Daniel, Young, Stephen

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Protein Language Models (PLMs) have emerged as performant and scalable tools for predicting the functional impact and clinical significance of protein-coding variants, but they still lag experimental accuracy. Here, we present a novel fine-tuning approach to improve the performance of PLMs with experimental maps of variant effects from Deep Mutational Scanning (DMS) assays using a Normalised Log-odds Ratio (NLR) head. We find consistent improvements in a held-out protein test set, and on independent DMS and clinical variant annotation benchmarks from ProteinGym and ClinVar. These findings demonstrate that DMS is a promising source of sequence diversity and supervised training data for improving the performance of PLMs for variant effect prediction.


Guerrero: This California millionaire is peddling eternal life. Why do so many people believe him?

Los Angeles Times

For a moment, I fell under the spell of Bryan Johnson. Bathed in early-morning sunlight, the 46-year-old L.A.-based tech centimillionaire and longevity celebrity didn't look much younger than his age, although he claims to have the wrinkles of a 10-year-old and organs that are several years younger than his lifespan. We were standing at the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 13, ahead of a Johnson-sponsored "Don't Die" hike, one of many organized across the world that day and the only one hosted by him. Of the 500-plus people who had RSVP'd for the L.A. event, about 200 showed up. Some had slept in their cars to make it.


The 5 times humans almost went EXTINCT - as scientists reveal the date our species could finally be wiped out

Daily Mail - Science & tech

With eight billion people now walking the Earth, the thought of humans going extinct anytime soon seems rather unlikely. But even if our population is booming today, it hasn't always been that way. That's because there have been at least five occasions throughout history where the human race has been in danger of dying out, not least because of the eruption of a supervolcano 70,000 years ago that almost sent us the same way as the dinosaurs. But what happened on the other occasions? And how close did we really come to not existing?


AI Is Not an Arms Race

TIME - Tech

The window of what AI can't do seems to be contracting week by week. Machines can now write elegant prose and useful code, ace exams, conjure exquisite art, and predict how proteins will fold. Last summer I surveyed more than 550 AI researchers, and nearly half of them thought that, if built, high-level machine intelligence would lead to impacts that had at least a 10% chance of being "extremely bad (e.g. On May 30, hundreds of AI scientists, along with the CEOs of top AI labs like OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, signed a statement urging caution on AI: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." The simplest argument is that progress in AI could lead to the creation of superhumanly-smart artificial "people" with goals that conflict with humanity's interests--and the ability to pursue them autonomously.