Lifeboat Foundation

Nanozymes are synthetic materials that mimic the properties of natural enzymes for applications in biomedicine and chemical engineering. Historically, they are generally considered too toxic and expensive for use in agriculture and food science. Now, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a nanozyme that is organic, non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and cost effective.

In a newly published paper, they describe its features and its capacity to detect the presence of glyphosate, a common agricultural herbicide. Their goal is to eventually create an user-friendly test kit for consumers and agricultural producers.

“The word nanozyme is derived from nanomaterial and enzyme. Nanozymes were first developed about 15 years ago, when researchers found that iron oxide nanoparticles may perform catalytic activity similar to natural enzymes (peroxidase),” explained Dong Hoon Lee, a doctoral student in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) and The Grainger College of Engineering at U. of I.

At HLTH, Mayo Clinic Platform President John Halamka gave a window into how his health system is mitigating generative AI risks. Some of the measures Mayo is taking include running analyses on how well algorithms perform across various subgroups and training models only on internal de-identified data.

The rich dust clouds that are responsible for producing these giant stars are blocking the light from Hubble’s view. The star and the jet of material it is emitting are visible near the very center.

“The small, bright orange streak is a cavity in the dust carved out by the ferocity of the jet as it streams towards us. By breaking through its dusty cocoon, the jet reveals light from the protostar, but there is still so much dust that the light is “reddened” to a fiery orange. The massive protostar lies at the very lower-left tip of this cavity,” NASA wrote in a post.

Jet-setting through a star formation hotbed!The glimmering, star-forming region seen in this #HubbleFriday view is called G35.2–0.7N. The spectacular light show is caused by a powerful jet of matter ejecting from a very young star: https://go.nasa.gov/3twrzbE pic.twitter.com/hLEwFDqZCy — Hubble (@NASAHubble) October 13, 2023

Full episode with Joscha Bach (Jun 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM
Clips channel (Lex Clips): https://www.youtube.com/lexclips.
Main channel (Lex Fridman): https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman.
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Podcast full episodes playlist:

Continue reading “We exist inside the story that the brain tells itself (Joscha Bach)” »

If you want optimism about life extension, here is Bill Faloon at RAADFest with the latest.

Bill Faloon gave the keynote presentation at the RAADfest conference in September 2023. In his talk, he discussed many of the advances in longevity research over the past year and described the main barrier to faster advances in regenerative medicine.

As you might imagine for a scroll that has been buried under mounds of volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius for close to 2,000 years, the rolled-up papyrus excavated from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum is rather difficult to open, let alone read – but AI has found a way.

Scholars from the University of Kentucky launched the Vesuvius Challenge in March, releasing thousands of X-ray images of charred, carbonized Herculaneum scrolls together with untrained artificial intelligence software that could be used to interpret the scans.

Now two students have claimed the first prizes to be awarded: Luke Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a biorobotics grad student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

Around planets that have a magnetosphere, something magical happens.

If you listen with the right instruments, you can hear chirping and whistling, almost like the singing of birds at dawn and dusk. These so-called chorus waves have been recorded at Earth, and Jupiter, and Saturn; and observed at Uranus and Neptune.

Continue reading “Mysterious ‘Singing’ Plasma Waves Detected Around Mercury” »

Materials scientists at Kiel University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicon Technology in Itzehoe (ISIT) have cleared another hurdle in the development and structuring of new materials for next-generation semiconductor devices, such as novel memory cells.

They have shown that ferroelectric aluminum scandium nitride can be scaled down to a few nanometers and can store different states, making it suitable as a nanoswitch. In addition, they have proved aluminum scandium nitride to be a particularly stable and powerful semiconductor material for current technologies based on silicon, silicon carbide and gallium nitride. In contrast to today’s microelectronics, the material can withstand extreme temperatures of up to 1,000°C.

This opens up applications such as information storage or sensors for combustion processes in engines or turbines in both the chemical industry and in the steel industry. The results were published in the journal Advanced Science. The study was part of a research project that brings together basic research in materials development and applications in microelectronics.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a range of new single-walled transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) nanotubes with different compositions, chirality, and diameters by templating off boron-nitride nanotubes. They also realized ultra-thin nanotubes grown inside the template, and successfully tailored compositions to create a family of new nanotubes. The ability to synthesize a diverse range of structures offers unique insights into their growth mechanism and novel optical properties.

The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

The carbon nanotube is a wonder of nanotechnology. Made by rolling up an atomically thin sheet of carbon atoms, it has exceptional mechanical strength and electrical conductivity among a range of other exotic optoelectronic properties, with potential applications in semiconductors beyond the silicon age.