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Category: biotech/medical – Page 119

Tech giant Microsoft unveiled a new computer chip on Wednesday that it says could transform everything from fighting pollution to developing new medicines, joining Google and IBM in arguing that the promise of quantum computing is closer to reality.

The US-made , called Majorana 1, can fit in the palm of a hand but packs a revolutionary design that Microsoft believes will solve one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing—making these super-powerful machines reliable enough for real-world use.

“We took a fresh approach and basically reinvented how quantum computers could work,” said Chetan Nayak, a senior scientist at Microsoft.

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Introducing a breakthrough in quantum computing. The Majorana 1 chip. An approach that ignores the limitations of current models to unleash the power of millions of potential qubits all working together to solve unsolvable challenges in creating new medicines, entirely new materials, and helping our natural world. All on a single chip.

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For more about Microsoft, our technology, and our mission, visit https://aka.ms/microsoftstories

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Isolated by mountains along the East African Rift is Lake Tanganyika. More than 400 miles long, it is the continent’s deepest lake and accounts for 16% of the world’s available freshwater. Between 2 and 3 million years ago, the number of virus species infecting fish in that immense lake exploded, and in a new study, UC Santa Cruz researchers propose that this explosion was perhaps triggered by the explosion of a distant star.

The new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, led by recent undergraduate student Caitlyn Nojiri and co-authored by astronomy and astrophysics professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and postdoctoral fellow Noémie Globus, examined iron isotopes to identify a 2.5 million-year-old supernova.

The researchers connected this stellar explosion to a surge of radiation that pummeled Earth around the same time, and they assert that the blast was powerful enough to break the DNA of living creatures—possibly driving those viruses in Lake Tanganyika to mutate into new species.

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When superconductors were discovered in 1911, they astounded researchers with their ability to conduct electricity with no resistance. However, they could only do so at temperatures close to absolute zero. But in 1986, scientists discovered that cuprates (a class of copper oxides) were superconductive at a relatively warm −225°F (above liquid nitrogen)—a step toward the ultimate goal of a superconductor that could operate at close to room temperature.

Applications of such a superconductor include compact and portable MRI machines, levitating trains, long-range electrical transmission without power loss, and more resilient quantum bits for quantum computers. Unfortunately, cuprates are a type of ceramic material which makes their application at industrial scales difficult—their brittleness, for example, would pose problems.

However, if researchers could understand what makes them superconduct at such high temperatures, they could recreate such processes in other materials. Despite a great deal of research, though, there is still a lack of consensus on the microscopic mechanism leading to their unusual superconductivity, making it difficult to take advantage of their unusual properties.

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Placazoa like seem simple at first — a crawling sheet of cells. Yet on closer examination, they show remarkable complexity and startling capabilities!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax)

adhaerens is one of the four named species in the phylum Placozoa. The others are Hoilungia hongkongensis, Polyplacotoma mediterranea and Cladtertia collaboinventa. Placozoa is a basal group of multicellular animals, possible relatives of Cnidaria. [ 2 ] are very flat organisms commonly less than 4 mm in diameter, [ 3 ] lacking any organs or internal structures. They have two cellular layers: the top epitheloid layer is made of ciliated “cover cells” flattened toward the outside of the organism, and the bottom layer is made up of cylinder cells that possess cilia used in locomotion, and gland cells that lack cilia. [ 4 ] Between these layers is the fibre syncytium, a liquid-filled cavity strutted open by star-like fibres.

Trichoplax feed by absorbing food particles—mainly microbes —with their underside. They generally reproduce asexually, by dividing or budding, but can also reproduce sexually. Though has a small genome in comparison to other animals, nearly 87% of its 11,514 predicted protein-coding genes are identifiably similar to known genes in other animals.

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There are a multitude of products for sale that promise the appearance of eternal youth by erasing wrinkles or firming up jaw lines; but what if we could truly turn back time, at the cellular level? Now, researchers from Japan have found a protein that may do just that.

In a study published this month in Cellular Signaling, researchers from Osaka University have revealed that a key protein is responsible for toggling between “young” and “old” cell states.

As we age, older and less active cells, known as senescent cells, accumulate in multiple organs. These cells are noticeably larger than younger cells, and exhibit altered organization of fibers, the structural parts of cells that help them move and interact with their environment.

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Humans have been selectively breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to make more desirable pets. A new startup called the Los Angeles Project aims to speed up that process with genetic engineering to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and possibly, one day, actual unicorns.

The Los Angeles Project is the brainchild of biohacker Josie Zayner, who in 2017 publicly injected herself with the gene-editing tool Crispr during a conference in San Francisco and livestreamed it. “I want to help humans genetically modify themselves,” she said at the time. She’s also given herself a fecal transplant and a DIY Covid vaccine and is the founder and CEO of The Odin, a company that sells home genetic-engineering kits.

Now, Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals,” she says.

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Expert sommeliers can take a whiff of a glass of wine and tell you a lot about what’s in your pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon. A team of physicists at CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have achieved a similar feat of sensing, only for a much wider range of substances.

The group has developed a new laser-based device that can take any sample of gas and identify a huge variety of the molecules within it. It is sensitive enough to detect those molecules at minute concentrations all the way down to parts per trillion.

Its design is also simple enough that researchers could employ the method quickly and at a low cost in a range of settings, from diagnosing illnesses in human patients to tracking from factories.

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Here’s more evidence that your drinking water may be unsafe.

A new analysis out of Sweden reports that disinfecting water with chlorine creates chemical byproducts that can increase the risk of bladder cancer by 33% and colorectal cancer by 15%.

The culprit appears to be trihalomethanes (THMs), which are made up of four compounds — chloroform, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane and bromoform. THMs are found in nearly all public water systems in the US and European Union.

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