Welcome to Rethinking the Foundations brought to you by Curt Jaimungal at Theories of Everything. Today, Professor Neil Turok answers questions from the audience! This is Part 2 to Neil’s Rethinking the Foundations episode. Part 1 can be seen here: • Rethinking the Foundations of Physics…
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“Periodic and regular monitoring of mangroves can provide useful data on survival and success of restoration efforts and can help devise adaptive management strategies as and when needed,” said Dr. Rupesh Bhomia.
What is the capacity of carbon storage for planted mangroves? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of international researchers led by the USDA Forest Service investigated the length of time that planted mangroves can store carbon, as such insights could provide steps to replenish mangrove populations throughout the world since these populations have seen a 35 percent decrease over the past 50 years. This study holds the potential to help mitigate the impacts of climate change by naturally storing carbon and keeping it from worsening climate change across the globe.
Image of mangrove nurseries in Maputo, Mozambique. (Credit: Vilma Machava, U.S. Forest Service International Programs)
For the study, the researchers used models to measure carbon storage capacity (also called carbon stock) from over a 40-year period and along with 684 planted mangroves that were 20 years old. In the end, the researchers found that the 20-year-old mangroves had carbon stocks between 71 to 73 percent compared to currently intact mangroves. Additionally, the researchers note these findings could help improve efforts for monitoring mangroves across the globe.
Researchers have devised a new model to predict human behavior taking into account our ‘sub-optimal’ decision-making.
Increased frailty, higher incidence of diseases, and death. As the population grows older, there is a need to reveal mechanisms associated with aging that could spearhead treatments to postpone the onset of age-associated decline, extend both healthspan and lifespan. One possibility is targeting the sirtuin SIRT1, the founding member of the sirtuin family, a highly conserved family of histone deacetylases that have been linked to metabolism, stress response, protein synthesis, genomic instability, neurodegeneration, DNA damage repair, and inflammation. Importantly, sirtuins have also been implicated to promote health and lifespan extension, while their dysregulation has been linked to cancer, neurological processes, and heart disorders. SIRT1 is one of seven members of sirtuin family; each requiring nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) as co-substrate for their catalytic activity. Overexpression of yeast, worm, fly, and mice SIRT1 homologs extend lifespan in each animal, respectively. Moreover, lifespan extension due to calorie restriction are associated with increased sirtuin activity. These findings led to the search for a calorie restriction mimetic, which revealed the compound resveratrol; (3, 5, 4′-trihydroxy-trans-stilbene) belonging to the stilbenoids group of polyphenols. Following this finding, resveratrol and other sirtuin-activating compounds have been extensively studied for their ability to affect health and lifespan in a variety of species, including humans via clinical studies.
Aging is associated with a progressive metabolic, physiological decline and can be genetically and environmentally modified (Helfand and Rogina, 2000). The search for the molecular basis of aging led to the identification of several pathways associated with longevity including insulin/IGF-1, target of rapamycin (TOR) and the Sirtuins (Kenyon, 2010; Chen et al., 2022). The sirtuins are a family of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+)-dependent histone deacetylases (Haigis and Sinclair, 2010; Hall et al., 2013; Bonkowski and Sinclair, 2016; Dai et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2018). Sirtuins are also categorized as deacetylases because they catalyze the post-translational modification of signaling molecules including decrotonylation, ADP-ribosylation, diacylation, desuccinylation, demalonylation, depropynylation, delipoamidation, and deglutarylation, and other long-chain fatty acid deacylations (Feldman, Baeza, and Denu, 2013; Choudhary et al., 2014; Fiorentino et al., 2022).
In mammals, there are seven members (SIRT1-SIRT7) including SIRT1, SIRT6 and SIRT7, which are localized to the nucleus, and SIRT3, SIRT4, and SIRT5 localized to the mitochondria, SIRT2 localized to the cytosol, and SIRT1 also localized to cytosol in some cell types (Bonkowski and Sinclair, 2016). As histone deacetylases, sirtuins function by removing acetyl groups from the target proteins resulting in either inhibition or activation. SIRT1, SIRT6 and SIRT7 have many functions including: regulators of transcription, control of cellular metabolism, DNA repair, cell survival, tissue regeneration, inflammation, circadian rhythms and neuronal signaling (Haigis and Sinclair, 2010). SIRT3-5 are important for switching to mitochondrial oxidative metabolism during CR and modulate stress tolerance (Verdin et al., 2010).
The neurons that produce a sick feeling and food aversion are distinct from those that induce a feeling of fullness.
By Mariana Lenharo & Nature magazine
Next-generation anti-obesity drugs such as Wegovy can melt away weight — but they can also cause intolerable nausea. Now scientists have pinpointed a brain pathway that is involved in this common side effect, raising the prospect of effective weight-loss drugs that don’t make people sick1.
Posted in space
An interplay of light and shadows cast the docking ports for Gateway, humanity’s first space station around the moon, into sharp relief.
WITH THE IDEA OF CONSCIOUS DIGITAL MINDS on the horizon, it could be that humans are the proverbial frog in a boiling pot of water, and it’s only been a few years since things have started to feel a bit steamy. But as Bostrom argues in his book, this might be a boiling pot we don’t want to jump out of.
“We need to rethink what it means to be human in such a world where AI has taken care of all the practical tasks and we have a kind of a solved world,” Bostrom says. “You might have a much more radical form of automation … where maybe working for money at all becomes completely unnecessary because AI and robots can do everything better than we can do.”
But Bostrom says this is really only one layer of the philosophical onion.
Apple supplier TSMC will begin trial production of 2nm chips next week for next year’s debut on iPhone 17 lineup.
