A remarkably detailed study of Maria Branyas, who lived past 117, reveals that extreme longevity may involve both intense aging and powerful biological protection at the same time. Researchers found signs of advanced aging, but also low inflammation, beneficial gut bacteria, protective genetic features, and a biological age younger than her chronological age. Because she avoided major disease, the study offered a rare look at aging itself rather than the illnesses that often accompany it.
Quantum computers promise to tackle problems that are extraordinarily difficult for today’s computers. But there is a major obstacle: quantum systems are notoriously fragile. Noise, loss and even tiny disturbances can destroy the delicate behavior that gives them their power. Building systems with many quantum particles is also extremely challenging.
Now, physicists at Louisiana State University have demonstrated a different route. Instead of starting with a fragile source of quantum light, the team begins with bright, readily available classical light and uses an optical network together with measurements that count photons one by one. This combination reveals and uses hidden multiphoton quantum behavior for information processing.
In a study published in Advanced Science, researchers in LSU’s Department of Physics & Astronomy report the first robust multiphoton quantum reservoir of its kind to operate at room temperature while tolerating substantial noise and loss. The platform accesses multiparticle systems with up to 40 photons, simulates complex quantum dynamics, and uses the same optical machine to learn several very different mathematical functions.
That is the load-bearing claim of Julia Lampert’s new book. I spent three hours trying to break it.
Then she gave me a word I had never used.
Her doctorate was on utopias, dystopias, and atopias in Jerusalem 2060. An atopia is the place between the two, where you cannot quite say what it is.
We talk about AI in utopia and dystopia all the time. Both vivid. Both well funded.
The atopia is the part nobody has language for yet. It may also be the part we end up living in.
Her book is a manual for the How. My argument, for fifteen years now, is that technology is the How and never the Why or the What.
Helium—the lightest atom that can be laser-cooled and controlled—powers a new design for high-powered, stable quantum computers.
In a paper published in PRX Quantum, a team led by University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Physics Department Associate Professor Jacob Covey outlined a new concept that could turn helium’s light weight into the next generation of quantum computers.
Once built, the computer could use high-powered lasers as “optical tweezers” to capture and control individual helium atoms, the second-lightest element overall and the lightest that can be trapped with current technology. This offers a major advance over designs based on lithium, the third-lightest element.
RhoBAST is a tiny RNA molecule that activates fluorescent dyes, enabling researchers to track RNA molecules in living cells with super-resolution. An international collaboration, which includes Ronald Micura and his team from the Institute of Organic Chemistry, has now shown that a small, local “nucleotide flip” within the RNA controls this fluorescence activation.
Fluorescent light-up aptamers (FLAPs) are short RNA sequences that bind and activate small dye molecules that otherwise exhibit only weak fluorescence. This enables genetic tagging of RNAs for live-cell imaging without the need for protein fusion markers. Because the dye is only “switched on” upon binding to the RNA, background fluorescence remains low.
Systems such as Spinach, Broccoli, Mango and Pepper have continuously advanced this principle over the past years. RhoBAST additionally enables high-resolution imaging of individual RNA molecules in living cells.
Metallic nanostructures are exceptionally effective at concentrating light into tiny volumes, while dielectric nanostructures excel at storing light with minimal energy loss. Combining these complementary properties has traditionally required complicated hybrid structures in which the two optical modes become mixed, making them difficult to control independently.
Achieving both resonance types within a single nanostructure without mode interference has therefore remained a major challenge in nanophotonics, limiting the development of compact, multifunctional optical devices.
New research shows how artificial intelligence, combined with advanced experimental science, can help find “hidden” and unexplored proteins in the human body and reveal what they actually do, according to a new study published in Nature.
The discovery suggests a new way to study how cells communicate, survive stress and possibly contribute to disease.
Researchers from Aarhus University and the Danish Technological Institute have taken a new approach in the search for enzymes capable of breaking down some of the most difficult types of plastic to recycle. They collected millions of bacteria from a landfill in Kenya, Randers Regnskov Tropical Zoo, the guts of larvae and a compost heap near Aarhus—and examined their enzymes. They found 12 that work.
We might as well jump straight to the conclusion: The best candidate came from the compost heap.
And the researchers are now busy improving the enzyme’s ability to break down polyurethane and nylon.