In many ways, our brain and our digestive tract are deeply connected. Feeling nervous may lead to physical pain in the stomach, while hunger signals from the gut make us feel irritable. Recent studies have even suggested that the bacteria living in our gut can influence some neurological diseases.
Some four years after it was originally due to be completed, and over a decade after first being commissioned, Vincent Callebaut’s twisting Tao Zhu Yin Yuan (aka Agora Garden Tower) in Taipei, Taiwan, is finally nearing completion – and it’s looking like the wait has been worth it. The high-rise residential project has an ambitious DNA-inspired form incorporating thousands of plants on its facade and sustainability features including solar power, rainwater collection, and more.
Rising to a height of 93.2 m (305 ft), Tao Zhu Yin Yuan consists of 21 floors (plus four basement levels), and is defined by an unusual twisting design inspired by the DNA double helix. Twenty of the floors twist 4.5 degrees per floor as the building rises, for a total of 90 degrees from bottom to top.
Though it’s not looking quite as green as was suggested in early renders, this is understandable as the 23000 trees, shrubs and plants that are planted throughout the ground floor garden, balconies and terraces, still have some time to grow. SWA is leading landscaping duties and Vincent Callebaut Architectures (VCA) reckons that all those plants will remove significant amounts of CO2 from the local atmosphere each year.
Beyond AI-powered weapons, the panel’s lengthy report recommended use of AI by intelligence agencies to streamline data gathering and review; $32 billion in annual federal funding for AI research; and new bodies including a digital corps modeled after the army’s Medical Corps and a technology competitiveness council chaired by the U.S. vice president.
The United States should not agree to ban the use or development of autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI) software, a government-appointed panel said in a draft report for Congress.
I realize this will step on a lot of toes, but, its time to accept that the AI will be what solves it.
Targeting aging may extend the average life expectancy more substantially than prevention or treatment of individual diseases.
“In a paper recently published the Journal of Cleaner Production, the researchers detail how they grew wood-like plant tissue from cells extracted from the leaves of a zinnia plant, without soil or sunlight. “The plant cells are similar to stem cells,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and co-author of the paper. “They have the potential to be many things.” With the ability to “tune” the plant cells into whatever shape they decide, Ashley Beckwith, mechanical engineering PhD student and the paper’s lead author, says they could use this process to grow more efficient materials. “Trees grow in tall cylindrical poles, and we rarely use tall cylindrical poles in industrial applications,” she says. “So you end up shaving off a bunch of material that you spent 20 years growing and that ends up being a waste product.” Instead, their idea is to grow structures that are more practical, like rectangular boards or eventually an entire table that doesn’t need to be assembled, which would reduce waste and potentially let land currently used for logging instead be preserved as forest.”
Why cut down trees when you can grow wood in the exact shape you need?
The FDA had promised to render a decision on the approval of aducanumab by March 7. The process is now being extended to June 7.
For centuries, scientists have tried to work on formulas to extend human life. While scientific and medical advancements have pushed the average human life expectancy to 71 years worldwide, researchers are still trying to find out if it can be extended further. Now, a group of scientists is leaning on artificial intelligence (AI) to combine conventional medicine to treat diseases and prevent them to extend longevity.
Conventional medicine has been the go-to tool for scientists to treat diseases and effectively extend life expectancy. But it has limitations too. While it can treat diseases, it’s not very effective in detecting early signs of an ailment that can reduce life expectancy. But combining AI, fundamental research and medicine could bring about a change in the research of extending human life. Dubbed as Longevity medicine, the scientists — Alex Zhavoronkov, Evelyne Yehudit Bischof and Kai-Fu Lee — proposed a framework. Their article was published in the journal Nature Aging.
Dr Zhavoronkov is a computer scientist with a doctorate in biophysics. Bischof is a practicing doctor who is researching on aging and gerooncology at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland. Lee is known for his expertise in AI.
Scientists have proposed an artificial intelligence-based framework that can analyze millions of parameters and help fight aging.
This is the first part of the interview with Harold Katcher in Modern Healthspan YouTube channel.
Dr. Harold Katcher is a professor of Biology at the University of Maryland. He has been a pioneer in the field of cancer research, in the development of modern aspects of gene hunting and sequencing. He carries expertise in bioinformatics, chronobiology, and biotechnology. Dr. Katcher is currently working in the capacity of Chief Technical Officer at Nugenics Research exploring rejuvenation treatments in mammals.
In May 2020 there was a paper published on biorxiv about the rejuvenation of rats by over 50%. We did a review of the paper which you can find linked to above. In this interview series we talk with Dr. Harold Katcher, one of the main authors of the paper about the experiment, the steps to get validation, commercialization and how the results fit into his theories of aging.
In this video we talk about the actual experiment and some of the results that Dr. Katcher and his team saw.
The paper can be found here https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.07.082917v1.full.
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An international team of researchers has used modeling techniques borrowed from chemistry applications to create a new kind of city simulator. In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, the group describes using their models to create simulations of of COVID-19 spread for two real-world cities: Birmingham England and Bogota Columbia.
