Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: chemistry – Page 181

From regulators to researchers and most industries in between, all eyes are on PFAS, per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of highly fluorinated human-made compounds that have been used for decades in everything from nonstick cookware and personal care products to fire-fighting foams and school uniforms. Their commonality and extreme resistance to environmental degradation has made them ubiquitous in ground water, soil, and worst of all humans. Linked to a slew of health risks including liver toxicity, bladder cancer, and decreased immune response to vaccinations, exposure to PFAS is concerning. So, how can we eliminate these “forever chemicals?”

Historically, PFAS substances have only been characterized in water and soil, but the emission of these compounds during chemical manufacturing, use, and disposal results in their emission into the air. Ryan Sullivan, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, has been developing new methods to measure PFAS in both the atmosphere and in aerosol particles to answer outstanding questions regarding PFAS atmospheric components that lead to human exposure. His group is also developing new approaches to destroy forever molecules that are not removed by conventional water treatment plants.

The research is published in the journal Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts.

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The Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Méditerranée (LSPM) lies 40 km off the coast of Toulon, at a depth of 2,450 m, inaccessible even to sunlight. Through this national research platform run by the CNRS in collaboration with Aix-Marseille University (AMU) and IFREMER, scientists will investigate undersea unknowns while scanning the skies for neutrinos. These elementary particles of extraterrestrial origin know few obstacles and can even traverse our planet without bumping into a single atom.

The main instrument at the LSPM is KM3NeT, a giant neutrino detector developed by a team of 250 researchers from 17 countries. In the pitch-black abyss, KM3NeT will study the trails of bluish light that neutrinos leave in the water. Capable of detecting dozens of these particles a day, it will help elucidate their quantum properties, which still defy our understanding.

The other LSPM instruments will permit the to study the life and chemistry of these depths. They will offer researchers insights into , deep-sea deoxygenation, marine radioactivity, and seismicity, and allow them to track cetacean populations as well as observe bioluminescent animals. This oceanographic instrumentation is integrated into the subsea observatory network of the EMSO European research infrastructure.

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The future of space travel with my new YouTube video on nuclear propulsion! Learn how this technology can improve the propellant efficiency of chemical rockets, making it a viable option for crewed missions to Mars, and perhaps get us to the stars.

Plus, compare nuclear propulsion to conventional chemical rockets such as the Saturn V and to the Epstein Drive from the Expanse.

Take your knowledge of space travel to the next level with our new YouTube video on nuclear propulsion!

Discover how nuclear thermal propulsion technology can double the propellant efficiency of chemical rockets, making it a viable option for crewed missions to Mars. We’ll also compare future nuclear propulsion to conventional chemical rockets like the Saturn V and even the Epstein Drive from the Expanse TV series.

In our video, you’ll learn about the theory, design, and operation of nuclear propulsion engines.

Continue reading “Nuclear Propulsion — How close are we to the Expanse?” | >

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the world like wildfire and continues to make headlines. However, the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has been around for a very long time. The technology was first pioneered in academia with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio publishing their first seminal work on Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014 and then Google picked up the torch and published seminal papers and patents in both GANs and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). In fact, my first paper on generative chemistry, was published in 2016, first granted patent in 2018, and the first AI-generated drug went through the first phase of clinical trials.

Forbes is one of the most reputable content providers on the planet and probably the most reputable when it comes to anything dealing with money. If Forbes does not classify you as a billionaire, you are not a billionaire. It has decades of high-quality expert-generated longitudinal text, and multimedia content in multiple languages. In addition to elite human reporters and editors, it also has a small army of content creators specializing in specific areas contributing to Forbes.com. For example, it is my 5th year as a contributor and I contribute regularly to keep the pencil sharp. This massive human intelligence may be partly repurposed to help develop internal generative resources within the Forbes empire, help curate the datasets and help train or benchmark third-party generative resources. I would gladly volunteer a small amount of time to such a task.

Nature and several other journals in the Nature Publishing Group portfolio are considered to be the Olympus in academic publishing. To publish in one of the elite Nature journals academics spend months and sometimes years going through the rounds of editorial and then peer-review. The quality of the data is questioned, all experimental data is disclosed, and the thousands or millions of dollars that went into the experiments are presented in the form of a paper and supplementary materials.

Having vast amounts of highest-quality data that is not available to the public gives Nature and other publishers the ability to either develop their own versions of ChatGPT, sell or license the data, and restructure the editorial and review processes to create more value for the future generative systems.

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Every minute of every day, your body is physically reacting, literally changing, in response to the thoughts that run through your mind.

It’s been proven over and over again that just thinking about something causes your brain to release neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that allow it to communicate with parts of itself and your nervous system. Neurotransmitters control virtually all of your body’s functions, from hormones to digestion to feeling happy, sad, or stressed.

Studies have shown that thoughts alone can improve vision, fitness, and strength. The placebo effect, as observed with fake operations and sham drugs, for example, works because of the power of thought. Expectancies and learned associations have been shown to change brain chemistry and circuitry which results in real physiological and cognitive outcomes, such as less fatigue, lower immune system reaction, elevated hormone levels, and reduced anxiety.

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Cancer is not a uniform disease. Rather, cancer is a disease of phenotypic plasticity, meaning tumor cells can change from one form or function to another. This includes reverting to less mature states and losing their normal function, which can result in treatment resistance, or changing their cell type altogether, which facilitates metastasis.

In addition to direct changes in your DNA in cancer, a key driver of cancer progression is where and when your DNA is activated. If your DNA contains the “words” that spell out individual genes, then epigenetics is the “grammar” of your genome, telling those genes whether they should be turned on or off in a given tissue. Even though all tissues in the body have almost exactly the same DNA sequence, they can all carry out different functions because of chemical and structural modifications that change which genes are activated and how. This “epigenome” can be influenced by environmental exposures such as diet, adding a dimension to how researchers understand drivers of health beyond the DNA code inherited from your parents.

I’m a cancer researcher, and my laboratory at Johns Hopkins University studies how the differences among normal tissues are controlled by an epigenetic code, and how this code is disrupted in cancer. In our recently published review, colleague Andre Levchenko at Yale University and I describe a new approach to understanding cancer plasticity by combining epigenetics with mathematics. Specifically, we propose how the concept of stochasticity can shed light on why cancers metastasize and become resistant to treatments.

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Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced the invention of a nanowire, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, which can be cheaply grown by common bacteria and can be tuned to “smell” a vast array of chemical tracers—including those given off by people afflicted with different medical conditions, such as asthma and kidney disease.

Thousands of these specially tuned wires, each sniffing out a different chemical, can be layered onto tiny, , allowing health-care providers an unprecedented tool for monitoring potential health complications. Since these wires are grown by bacteria, they are organic, biodegradable and far greener than any inorganic nanowire.

To make these breakthroughs, which were detailed in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectrics, senior authors Derek Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, and Jun Yao, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, needed to look no farther than their own noses.

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For the first time, scientists have used machine learning to create brand-new enzymes, which are proteins that accelerate chemical reactions. This is an important step in the field of protein design, as new enzymes could have many uses across medicine and industrial manufacturing.

“Living organisms are remarkable chemists. Rather than relying on toxic compounds or extreme heat, they use enzymes to break down or build up whatever they need under gentle conditions. New enzymes could put renewable chemicals and biofuels within reach,” said senior author David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine and recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

As reported Feb, 22 in the journal Nature, a team based at the Institute for Protein Design at UW Medicine devised algorithms that can create light-emitting enzymes called luciferases. Laboratory testing confirmed that the new enzymes can recognize specific chemicals and emit light very efficiently. This project was led by two postdoctoral scholars in the Baker Lab, Andy Hsien-Wei Yeh and Christoffer Norn.

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