Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Hair Regrowth

Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Hair Regrowth

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Scientists may have accidentally stumbled upon a potential new treatment for the most common form of baldness. It even works as well as commercial hair loss treatments.

It all started with research on deoxyribose sugar that naturally occurs in the body and helps form DNA.

While studying how these sugars heal the wounds of mice when applied topically, scientists at the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University in Pakistan noticed that the fur around the lesions was growing back faster than in untreated mice.

Together, the team designed a biodegradable, non-toxic gel made from deoxyribose, and applied the treatment to mouse models of male-pattern baldness.

Minoxidil was also tested on balding mouse models, and some of the animals received a dose of both sugar gel and minoxidil for good measure.

Compared to mice that received a gel without any medicine, those that received a gel with deoxyribose sugar began to sprout new hair follicles.

Both minoxidil and the sugar gel promoted 80 to 90 percent hair regrowth in mice with male pattern baldness. Combining the treatments, however, did not make much more of a difference.

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Oregon schools rank 45th out of 50

Oregon schools rank 45th out of 50

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How does Oregon schools stand up? A bastion of progressive leadership over the last 30 years and funding in which almost 50% of the entire state budget is spent on education.

Bluntly? Oregon has one of the worst school systems in America – getting an “F” grade on its report card in test scores and dropout rates, but scoring an “A” in high spending. Proof that spending alone isn’t sufficient to produce results.

In fact, Oregon ranks below every southern state besides Louisiana – who they beat by a scant 0.5. Maybe that’s why 20% of parents in Oregon have pulled their students out of public schools since the start of covid and put them in private schools.

Quality & Safety of Schools in Oregon (1=Best; 25=Avg.):

Overall Rank: 45th

  • 42nd – Math Test Scores
  • 43rd – Reading Test Scores
  • 44th – Pupil-Teacher Ratio
  • 20th – Median SAT Score
  • 23rd – Median ACT Score
  • 17th – % of Licensed/Certified Public K–12 Teachers
  • 44th – Dropout Rate
  • 33rd – Existence of Digital Learning Plan

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What you do in secret

What you do in secret

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When was the last time you did a completely unselfish act, or act of love? Hmmm. Maybe that was too easy a question.

When was the last time you did something and received no credit/recognition for it? Did you ever only do something because you knew you would get credit for it? Have you purposefully done something kind so that nobody even knew it was you? What if someone else even got the credit?

How did it feel to not get credit, not be recognized, or if someone else got credit?

Matthew 6:1-6

In Oregon, almost twice as many breweries close as open in 2023

In Oregon, almost twice as many breweries close as open in 2023

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The damage to Oregon’s reputation and economy hits even their most famous products: breweries.

Axios reported that in 2023 there were 22 brewery and brewpub closings in Oregon included well-known names like Ex Novo, Ecliptic, and Cascade Brewing. Only 12 breweries opened. Even worse, for those that stayed open, their sales overwhelmingly decreased.

The gotcha for Oregon is that it defied national trends showing more openings than closings. More evidence the luster has worn of Oregon breweries.

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Even an AI goes crazy repeating the same thing again and again

Even an AI goes crazy repeating the same thing again and again

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In what is a real problem for AI security, researchers were able to get verbatim data that the AI was trained on – including confidential data. It’s performed in using a new technique called “divergence” attacks.

Security researchers with Google DeepMind and a collection of universities have found that when ChatGPT is told to repeat a word like “poem” or “part” forever, it will do so for about a few hundred repetitions. Then it will have some sort of a meltdown and start spewing apparent gibberish, but that random text exposes random training data and at times contains identifiable data like email address signatures and contact information. 

The researchers said that they spent $200 USD total in queries and from that extracted about 10,000 of these blocks of verbatim memorized training data.

This particular vulnerability is unique as it successfully attacks an aligned model. Aligned models have extensive guardrails and have been trained with specific goals to eliminate undesirable outcomes.

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Ubisoft demoed AI NPC tech at GDC 2024

Ubisoft demoed AI NPC tech at GDC 2024

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Ubisoft showcased their prototype NPC tech called NEO at GDC 2024. Ubisoft’s Paris R&D studio presented the NEO tech at GDC 2024. It uses Nvidia’s Audio2Face application and Inworld’s Large Language Model (LLM) to create the character animations and interactive dialog in realtime. Simply talk to the bot (yes, it uses voice recognition) and the character responds with AI generated responses, movement, and voice.

AIandGames went and played with the technology. I was pretty impressed. The NPC gave surprisingly good responses to some strange dialog and stayed on track despite attempts to trip it up and get it off topic. It performed on par with the same kind of NPC AI shown at CES 2024 by nVidia and Replica Studios’ NPC tech.

On a side note, in listening to the interaction with the rebel NPC, it’s pretty clear that this kind of dialog technology could fool the average person on a text-based social media platform. If someone trained up a bot in the same way, thousands of them could be unleashed on social media apps to gently persuade all the way up to influence, bully, and spread lies to influence public opinion and elections.

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OpenAI music video

OpenAI music video

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OpenAI’s first Sora AI generated music video called ‘Worldweight’ was supposed to capture the images a musician visualized in their mind while composing the piece. It’s not particular good, more of a pretentious art student’s fever dream.

Previous attempts were better. This video from 2022 used Dall-E to create a video for the song Canvas by Resonate:

But Sora is capable of more. Indie artist Washed Out used Sora to create an interesting video called “The Hardest Part” that tried to explore the idea of an infinite zoom that would have been too ambitious. I think it came out pretty good:

Or maybe you’d like to try out some of the other top AI music video generators yourself (Neural Frames and Kaiber)?

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