Lifeboat Foundation

Watch as an expert discusses the link between obesity and cancer, and.

CHAPTERS
00:00 — Does Obesity Cause Cancer?
0:31 — Is Obesity the New Smoking?
1:30 — BMI and Cancer Risk.
1:58 — Obesity and Cancer Risk.

A symbiotic culture of specialized yeast and bacteria can generate tough materials able to perform a variety of functions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=bnXHwQIbHdyoSNV9&v=Ofv3…e=youtu.be

Computers, cars, mobile phones, toasters: countless everyday objects contain microchips. They’re tiny, unremarkable and cheap, but since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, they’ve been at the center of a political and industrial tug of war.

Against the backdrop of the trade war between China and the US, “The Microchip War” spotlights all the aspects of this conflict. In the film, the world’s most influential actors in this industrial sector weigh in.

Continue reading “The global battle over microchips | DW Documentary” »

One of the big questions GiveDirectly is trying to answer is how to direct cash to low-income households. “Just give cash” is a fun thing to say, but it elides some important operational details. It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. The paper is still being finalized, but Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week.

By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.

Good telescope that I’ve used to learn the basics: https://amzn.to/35r1jAk.
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Alternatively, PayPal donations can be sent here: http://paypal.me/whatdamath.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the incredible effects gut microbiome has on our body.
Links:
https://www.clarkson.edu/news/microbes-gut-might-affect-pers…s-research.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fecal-transplants-…180978416/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03532-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00093-9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_microbiota.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/3/466
#microbiome #gut #bacteria.

Continue reading “Bacteria Living Inside Our Guts Have Mindblowing Effects On Us” »

The crack resistance of polymer materials is explained by a new model that incorporates a network of stretchable polymer chains.

Plastics and other polymer materials are often very resistant to cracking—a fact that models have not been able to accurately capture. Now a research team has developed a model of polymer fracture that explains how these materials remain intact under intense stretching. [1]. The key to the model is that it accounts for polymer chains that extend deep within the material and that can share the strain that would break a material with more localized chains. The insights could lead to the development of new structures with an enhanced resistance to shocks.

Researchers typically study fracture by cutting a small notch or crack into a material and then pulling it apart. The amount of work required to enlarge the crack is called the fracture energy. For most materials, the fracture energy is equal to the energy it takes to break the molecular bonds located along the crack tip, where the enlargement occurs. For polymers, the situation is more complex, as the molecules are long chains. In the 1960s, theorists came up with a model of polymer fracture based on the rupture of individual chains at the crack tip [2]. “The problem is that this model underestimates by a factor of 10 to 100 the energy required to fracture a polymer material,” says Xuanhe Zhao from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Particles dispersed in a liquid typically jitter aimlessly in response to the random buffeting they receive from the molecules that surround them. But if the liquid is subjected to a steep temperature gradient, this random motion can become directional as the temperature gradient sets up flows that move the particles from hot regions of the liquid to colder ones. The theory of this so-called thermophoresis is actively developing, but direct observations of both the suspended particles and the liquid molecules are scant. Now Tetsuro Tsuji of Kyoto University in Japan and his colleagues have experimentally characterized the tiny surface flows that drive thermophoresis [1]. Those flows could be harnessed to move and concentrate DNA and other large biomolecules that are suspended in liquids.

For their experiments, the team glued a single polystyrene sphere, 7 µm in diameter, to the lid of a tiny transparent box. They filled the box with water laced with 500-nm-diameter fluorescent tracers. Shining a laser up through the bottom of the box, the team repeatedly drew a circle around the sphere, a process that trapped tracers located within the circle of light. The team focused a second laser, tuned to one of water’s absorption bands, at a spot 18 µm from the polystyrene sphere, locally heating the water to create a temperature gradient in the liquid and across the sphere.

Using a microscope the team observed that, after a few seconds, the tracers started flowing over the sphere’s surface, moving from the sphere’s cold end to its warmer one. From the observations, the researchers showed that this flow imparted momentum to the sphere. They also inferred the force that would have propelled the sphere away had it not been immobilized. Modeling the system under different conditions confirmed the inferences.

The onset time for “viscous fingering”—an instability that can occur at a gas–liquid boundary—depends on the compressibility of the gas, offering a way to control the behavior.

For the Gallery of Fluid Motion, researchers take the director’s chair and create videos on 3D printer patterns, frost formation, and paint swirls.

The APS Division of Fluid Dynamics has announced the 2023 winners of its annual Gallery of Fluid Motion video and poster contest. The videos below received the Milton van Dyke Award, which recognizes both videos and posters. A new traveling exhibit of past winners is currently on display at the National Academy of Sciences.