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Bacteria are among the oldest life forms on Earth and exist nearly everywhere; in the soil, water, deep in the earth’s crust and in our own bodies. Actually, there are at least as many bacterial cells in the human body as human cells.

Bacteria tend to get a bad rap, but now, armed with new research on the bacterial world (or microbiome) in our bodies, we are starting to understand how important a role microorganisms play in our health (good as well as bad).

And beyond merely understanding the relationship between our bodies and the microorganisms inhabiting it, we’re on the cusp of significantly altering that relationship.

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2016-11-10-1478793217-7952831-PlasmaintheSTARTsphericaltokamakCulham.jpeg Tokamak Energy.

The world needs abundant, clean energy. Nuclear fusion — with no CO2 emissions, no risk of meltdown and no long-lived radioactive waste — is the obvious solution, but it is very hard to achieve.

The challenge is that fusion only happens in stars, where the huge gravitational force creates pressures and temperatures so intense that usually repulsive particles will collide and fuse; hence “fusion”. On Earth we need to create similar conditions, holding a hot, electrically-charged plasma at high enough pressure for long enough for fusion reactions to occur. The scientific and engineering challenges behind putting a star in a box are large, to say the least. Without proper confinement of the plasma, the reaction would stop. The plasma must be isolated from the walls of the reactor — a feat that can be performed most effectively by magnets. The most advanced machine for this purpose is the ‘tokamak’.

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Telegram has announced the first winners of its bot competition. The BotPrize was announced in April and will see $1 million awarded to developers of the best Telegram bots submitted. The first winners come from the worlds of photo-editing, productivity, games, dating and finance.

Telegram is a messaging service with a focus on speed and security. Launched in 2013, it is cloud-based, meaning that user content syncs instantly across the platforms on which the service can be used, including PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

The firm’s BotPrize will help to increase the number of bots available on the service and accelerate the speed with which the number is increased. For the uninitiated, bots are effectively apps in themselves with which users can interact via messaging. They typically run inside messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or, in this instance, Telegram.

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For most people, icy conditions mean a slippery pavement or trying to chip the car out of a freezing glaze, but icing can also bring down aircraft, snap power lines, and cause a surprising amount of structural damage. Now scientists at the University of Houston (UH) have come up with a surprising solution – and it involves magnets.

The problem with icing is that when droplets of freezing or supercooled water strike a surface, they wet or adhere to it, so more and more droplets can join the party. To de-ice a surface, you need to either melt the ice, break it off, dissolve it, or alter the surface so the ice can’t stick to it in the first place.

According to Hadi Ghasemi from the UH Department of Mechanical Engineering, “icephobic” surfaces that are non-wetting or liquid infused have shown promise in the past, but suffer from high freezing temperatures, high ice adhesion strength, and high cost.

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More reasons for supporting scientific research and how your money fuels real and tangible progress.

Become a SENS patron, and we’ll match a year of your donations

The 2016 year end SENS rejuvenation research fundraiser started on November 1st. This year we’re trying something a little different, with a longer term view. This is the time for it! Newly formed companies are now working on the first SENS therapies, and longer-term non-profit research projects are also underway. These initiatives will come to fruition some years from now: the SENS Research Foundation recently launched Project|21 with a five year timeline, for example. So this year we’re looking for more members of our community to become SENS Patrons for the long term, by signing up for a recurring monthly donation to the SENS Research Foundation, and then keeping that going until the job is done and the first rejuvenation therapies are deployed. As an encouragement, we will match the next year of donations for anyone who signs up before the end of 2016, from a fund of $24,000 provided by Josh Triplett and Fight Aging!

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In Brief:

  • The AI, called MogIA, based its analysis on 20 million data points from platforms such as Google, Twitter, and YouTube.
  • The AI aims at learning from the environment, developing its own rules at the policy layer, and developing expert systems without discarding any data.

MogIA, an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by an Indian start-up, correctly predicted the outcome of this year’s elections. It based its analysis on 20 million data points from platforms such as Google, Twitter, and YouTube, reviewing public engagement across various posts in relation to individual candidates.

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Google has built machine learning systems that can create their own cryptographic algorithms — the latest success for AI’s use in cybersecurity. But what are the implications of our digital security increasingly being handed over to intelligent machines?

Google Brain, the company’s California-based AI unit, managed the recent feat by pitting neural networks against each other. Two systems, called Bob and Alice, were tasked with keeping their messages secret from a third, called Eve. None were told how to encrypt messages, but Bob and Alice were given a shared security key that Eve didn’t have access too.

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In the majority of tests the pair fairly quickly worked out a way to communicate securely without Eve being able to crack the code. Interestingly, the machines used some pretty unusual approaches you wouldn’t normally see in human generated cryptographic systems, according to TechCrunch.

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Party for Science with Steve Aoki and help raise awareness and funds for the SENS Research Foundation.

Hang with DJ Steve Aoki at a nightclub and you can expect an earful of his electronic bangers and confetti in your hair. Cozy up to Steve Aoki at Brooklyn Bowl on November 15 and you’ll get to hit pins alongside neuroscientists, bid on one-of-a-kind experiences in live and silent auctions (think jumping into the foam pit at Aoki’s Las Vegas “playhouse”) and catch him outside the booth as he hosts the Aoki Foundation’s Bowling for Brains fundraiser. The inaugural event supports the Buck Institute on Aging, SENS Research Foundation and Las Vegas’ own Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, continuing the foundation’s ongoing support of regenerative science.

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