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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,560

Julian Beinart: A life of carefully chosen words

Professor Emeritus Julian Beinart, an internationally celebrated architect and longtime MIT professor known for his highly influential course on urbanism, died on Oct. 2 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 88.

“Julian Beinart’s best ideals were the best ideals of this department,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, head of the MIT Department of Architecture. “A tireless student of form, he believed architecture’s role in the city also made it inextricable from politics. His legacy — in South Africa, the U.S., and beyond — also reminds us that the professional obligation of architects to the city stands alongside the civic demands on every one of us, architect or not.”

“Julian’s strengths came from an old-school faith,” says Arindam Dutta, professor of architectural history at MIT. “He believed cities were somehow designed artifacts, and in being so, they could be designed better. It was his task to train designers for this job.”

NASA finally makes contact with Voyager 2 after longest radio silence in 30 years

There’s never been a radio silence quite like this one. After long months with no way of making contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the record-setting interstellar spacecraft.

The breakdown in communications – lasting since March, almost eight months and a whole pandemic ago – wasn’t due to some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with interstellar space weirdness (although there’s that too).

The US Election & Aylmer Pastor Hildebrandt Speaks Again: The November 5th, 2020 Age of Ingenuity

If last week was a heavy political week in Canada, then this Tuesday was the culmination of an unprecedented period of political turmoil in the US. We’re going to take a look at what the alternative media, but not what the legacy media, is saying about this.

We’ve also reconnected with Henry Hildebrandt, the pastor of the Church of God in Aylmer Ontario. He’s been at the centre of the anti-lockdown protest movement in Ontario almost since the beginning of this so-called pandemic in March 2020.

He’s been so effective, the local Mayor has declared a “state of emergency” in an effort to shut down a planned protest featuring him in Aylmer Ontario on November 7th.

For the show notes, check out http://acuriousguy.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-us-election-aylmer-pastor-henry.html.

Is China banking on ‘disruptive technologies’ for a military edge?

Military observers said the disruptive technologies – those that fundamentally change the status quo – might include such things as sixth-generation fighters, high-energy weapons like laser and rail guns, quantum radar and communications systems, new stealth materials, autonomous combat robots, orbital spacecraft, and biological technologies such as prosthetics and powered exoskeletons.

Speeding up the development of ‘strategic forward-looking disruptive technologies’ is a focus of the country’s latest five-year plan.

Data analysis identifies the ‘mother’ of all SARS-CoV-2 genomes

In the field of molecular epidemiology, the worldwide scientific community has been sleuthing to solve the riddle of the early history of SARS-CoV-2.

Since the first SARS-CoV-2 virus infection was detected in December 2019, tens of thousands of its genomes have been sequenced worldwide, revealing that the coronavirus is mutating, albeit slowly, at a rate of 25 per per year.

But despite major efforts, no one to date has identified the first case of human transmission, or “patient zero” in the COVID-19 pandemic. Finding such a case is necessary to better understand how the virus may have jumped from its animal host first to infect humans as well as the history of how the SARS-CoV-2 has mutated over time and spread globally.

Physicists develop efficient modem for a future quantum internet

The first quantum revolution brought about semiconductor electronics, the laser and finally the internet. The coming, second quantum revolution promises spy-proof communication, extremely precise quantum sensors and quantum computers for previously unsolvable computing tasks. But this revolution is still in its infancy. A central research object is the interface between local quantum devices and light quanta that enable the remote transmission of highly sensitive quantum information. The Otto-Hahn group “Quantum Networks” at the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching is researching such a “quantum modem”. The team has now achieved a first breakthrough in a relatively simple but highly efficient technology that can be integrated into existing fiber optic networks. The work is published this week in Physical Review X.

The Corona pandemic is a daily reminder of how important the internet has become. The World Wide Web, once a by-product of basic physical research, has radically changed our culture. Could a quantum internet become the next major innovation out of physics?

It is still too early to answer that question, but basic research is already working on the quantum internet. Many applications will be more specialized and less sensual than video conferencing, but the importance of absolutely spy-proof long-distance communication is understandable to everyone. “In the future, a quantum internet could be used to connect quantum computers located in different places,” Andreas Reiserer says, “which would considerably increase their computing power!” The physicist heads the independent Otto-Hahn research group “Quantum Networks” at the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching.

Senotherapeutic peptide reduces skin biological age and improves skin health markers

Hi everybody. Today, it was published a paper in which it’s described the research that led to the identification and testing of a peptide that reduces the amount of senescent cells in the skin, and that peptide is being used in the first product in the whole world (as far as I know) that is already in the market and reduces the amount of senescent cells in humans (in this case, in the skin). The paper can be found in I don’t think it’s an ordinary thing that a product that reduces the amount of senescent cells is being sold in the market. After many years watching Aubrey de Grey’s talks, and reading news about promising researches about senescent cells, and about the formation of many companies to research how to reduce the amount of senescent cells, finally there is something that reached the public. This paper is very important as it allows that the rejuvenation field analyzes it and be prepared to seize this opportunity to show to the world, in practice, that the theoretical base of the rejuvenation therapies can be translated to practice and rejuvenate the human body — in this case, the skin. As some of you already know, the company which organized this research and launched the product is OneSkin, and its CEO, Carolina Reis, has been presenting their research in several conferences in the rejuvenation field in the last months. OneSkin is a company with its interests, of course, but at the same time is a representative of the rejuvenation field which is opening a path for all the other companies.

Skin aging has been primarily related to aesthetics and beauty. Therefore, interventions have focused on reestablishing skin appearance, but not necessarily skin health, function, and resilience. Recently, cellular senescence was shown to play a role in age-related skin function deterioration and influence organismal health and, potentially, longevity. In the present study, a two-step screening was performed to identify peptides capable of reducing cellular senescence in human dermal fibroblasts (HDF) from Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria (HGPS) patients. From the top four peptides of the first round of screening, we built a 764-peptide library using amino acid scanning, of which the second screen led to the identification of peptide 14. Peptide 14 effectively decreased HDF senescence induced by HGPS, chronological aging, ultraviolet-B radiation, and etoposide treatment, without inducing significant cell death, and likely by modulating longevity and senescence pathways. We further validated the effectiveness of peptide 14 using human skin equivalents and skin biopsies, where peptide 14 promoted skin health and reduced senescent cell markers, as well as the biological age of samples, according to the Skin-Specific DNA methylation clock, MolClock. Topical application of peptide 14 outperformed Retinol treatment, the current gold-standard in anti-aging skincare. Finally, we determined that peptide 14 is safe for long-term applications and also significantly extends both the lifespan and healthspan of C. elegans worms tested in two independent testings. This highlights the potential for geroprotective applications of the senotherapeutic compounds identified using our screening platform beyond the skin.

MB, AZ, CR, LB, EA, and JC are named as inventors of a patent directed at this invention, which is solely owned by OneSkin, Inc. MB, AZ, CR, EA, and JC are co-founders of OneSkin Inc. SAV and MR are co-founders of the startup company NemaLife Inc. that is commercializing microfluidic devices used in this study and licensed from Texas Tech University. SAV, MR, and TA are named inventors on a patent owned by Texas Tech University and receive royalty fees.

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