It may be possible to develop superconductors that operate at room temperature with further knowledge of the relationship between spin liquids and superconductivity, which would transform our daily lives.
Superconductors offer enormous technical and economic promise for applications such as high-speed hovertrains, MRI machines, efficient power lines, quantum computing.
Performing computation using quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.
That was Aubrey de Grey, this is Aubrey de White. New foundation, new therapy tests.
Co-founder of the SENS Foundation, Dr Aubrey de Grey is the co-organiser of this week’s Longevity Summit Dublin 2022; he was keynote speaker at this week’s summit, speaking on Robust Mouse Rejuvenation: real soon now? and featuring on the panel discussion Blank Cheque, which also enjoyed contributions from our own Phil Newman, Michael West, Tom Weldon, Greg Grinberg and Evelyne Bischof.
But most excitingly, Dr de Grey used the platform of Longevity Summit Dublin to launch his new foundation; its Board of Directors already boasts Greg Grinberg as Executive Chair, Daria Khaltourina, Martin O’Dea (also Events Director), Gennady Stolyarov and David Wood.
Dr de Grey has always been a passionate advocate of longevity research and biotechnology, so it’s no surprise his energy and enthusiasm has driven him to create a new foundation.
Visit Longevity. Technology — https://bit.ly/3PwtH8Y
Summary: A new in-home device that monitors movement and gait speed can evaluate Parkinson’s disease severity, progression, and a patient’s response to medication.
Source: MIT
Parkinson’s disease is the fastest-growing neurological disease, now affecting more than 10 million people worldwide, yet clinicians still face huge challenges in tracking its severity and progression.
Summary: New research in cloned pigs with a mutation of the SORL1 sheds light on Alzheimer’s development. The findings could pave the way for new treatments for the neurodegenerative disorder.
Source: Aarhus University.
For decades, researchers from all over the world have been working hard to understand Alzheimer’s disease. Now, a collaboration between the Department of Biomedicine and the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University has resulted in a flock of minipigs that could lead to a major step forward in the research and treatment of Alzheimer’s.
Summary: The Allen Institute is launching a new global collaboration to map approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain by type and function.
Source: Allen Institute.
Scientists at the Allen Institute are launching the brain equivalent of the Human Genome Project, leading a new global collaboration to map the approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain by their type and function.
Summary: Researchers successfully turned skin cells from Parkinson’s patients into dopaminergic neurons by introducing a combination of neural-inducing genes into the skin cells.
Source: international society for stem cell research.
The possibility to make virtually all cell types of the human body from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are embryonic-like cells generated from a patient’s skin, in a process called reprogramming, has opened new avenues for disease modeling in the lab.
Harvard Medical School scientists and colleagues at Stanford University have developed an artificial intelligence diagnostic tool that can detect diseases on chest X-rays directly from natural-language descriptions contained in accompanying clinical reports.
The step is deemed a major advance in clinical AI design because most current AI models require laborious human annotation of vast reams of data before the labeled data are fed into the model to train it.
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As humanity reaches out to the stars and make new homes on strange new worlds, how will our genetics & DNA change under those alien planets?
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Credits:
Genetic Divergence & Civilization.
Episode 236; April 30, 2020
Writers:
Experiments demonstrate that biological cells actively change shape to respond to their surroundings when moving in confined regions.
The movement of cells is essential for embryo development and wound healing. A study of individual human cells moving on a micropatterned surface reveals some of the basic principles governing this movement and shows how cells adapt their shape and behavior to the geometry of their surroundings [1]. The researchers developed a theoretical model, based on their experimental findings, that could be used to study and predict cell movement in more complex environments.
The shapes of animal cells are controlled in part by a web of protein filaments called the cytoskeleton, which can be rearranged by the cell to drive motion. For example, a cell can begin moving by creating a protrusion that bulges out from its surface. Such movement depends on the cell’s adhesion to the surrounding surfaces and on the formation of an asymmetrical arrangement of the cytoskeleton, referred to by biologists as polarity, which drives the growth of protrusions. The motion is also affected by the internal structures of the cell, especially the nucleus, which is less compressible than the fluid cytoplasm.
Modern medicine forces bacteria to adapt: in response to antibiotic treatment, they either increase their fitness or die out. Whether a bacterial population survives or not depends on a combination of its genetics and environment—the antibiotic concentration—at a given moment. Now Suman Das of the University of Cologne, Germany, and colleagues simulate the effect on adaptation of an environment that is constantly changing [1]. Using a model that describes how slow-moving disordered systems respond to external forces, the researchers find that microbe evolution in changing drug concentrations exhibits hysteresis and memory formation. They use analytical methods and numerical simulations to connect these statistical physics concepts to bacterial drug resistance.
The team’s model examines changes in a bacterial population’s genetic sequences. By combining data on bacterial growth rates with statistical tools, the researchers describe how the bacterial genome can store information about both present and past drug concentrations. Their simulations start with a genetic sequence optimized for a certain antibiotic concentration. They then track how the sequence mutates when the concentration shifts to another value. When the concentration increases and then reduces to a lower value, the genetic route taken on the downward path depends on the changes on the upward path. How different the mutation routes are depends on the rate of concentration change.
The researchers find that this behavior mimics that of disordered systems driven by external forces, such as ferromagnetic materials subjected to magnetic fields or amorphous materials subjected to a shearing force. They say that while their approach focuses on the evolution of drug resistance, the framework can be adapted to other problems in evolutionary biology that involve changing environmental parameters.