Self Balancing Motorcycle
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Some exciting news from Lifespan.io about their current senescent cell therapy campaign.
While the CellAge campaign has done a great job thus far, with over 200 backers raising $11,000+ to better target dysfunctional “senescent” cells in the body, many supporters have let us know that the holidays, along with other concurrent fundraisers, have made it challenging to contribute.
In response we have decided to announce a 1-month extension for the CellAge campaign, and give the generous members of our community greater opportunity to support this important research.
If you are unfamiliar with the project: CellAge is developing tools to better target and remove harmful senescent cells that accumulate in the body with age and play a role in various diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and osteoarthritis, and which also complicate recovery after certain treatments like chemotherapy. Having the ability to selectively remove these cells is a critical component in the fight against age-related diseases and an important tool towards lifespans that are both long and healthy.
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According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum isn’t empty at all. It’s actually filled with quantum energy and particles that blink in and out of existence for a fleeting moment — strange signals that are known as quantum fluctuations.
For decades, there had only ever been indirect evidence of these fluctuations, but back in 2015, researchers claimed to have detected the theoretical fluctuations directly. And now the same team says they’ve gone a step further, having manipulated the vacuum itself, and detecting the changes in these strange signals in the void.
We’re entering the territory of high-level physics here, but what’s really important in this experiment is that, if these results are confirmed, the researchers might have just unlocked a way to observe, probe, and test the quantum realm without interfering with it.
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Sounds pretty neat, eh? Wouldn’t it be nice never to have to worry about running out of fuel or charge ever again? And also to not have to pay for it would be even better! Well, that is potentially what is about to happen over in Israel right now as testing continues into electric roads that can wirelessly charge electric vehicles as they’re moving along.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is in its crucial developmental stages and the government doesn’t seem to be to keen on shaping the way forward, according to experts during a senate inquiry into the dawn of AI.
The senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, under the helm of Texas Senator (R) Ted Cruz, convened November 30 to discuss the state of AI research and development, and its policy effects and implications on commerce. According to experts present at the hearing, the government isn’t doing much to provide guidelines and directions on AI research.
The experts, including Microsoft Research’s managing director Eric Horvitz, believe the government is in a unique position to shape the future of AI – especially since AI is still in its developmental stages. Horvitz said AI innovation can help in areas such as homelessness and addiction where there’s not much investment from the industry yet — which the government can help pursue.
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Nice.
Indian scientists have designed high precision DNA probes for breast cancer detection, which they claim can bring down costs of diagnostics ten-fold.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology — Guwahati relied on ‘magic bullets’ of science, a class of molecules called aptamers, that can bind to virtually any molecule, clasping it in a firm lock-and-key fit.
“Our team has found an alternative way to detect breast cancer. We have synthesised a special type of aptamer which has high specificity towards estrogen receptor alpha positive breast carcinomas. The aptamer recognises and binds to the receptor even in minute quantities,” Arghya Sett, lead author of the study, told IANS.
Dear men, beware! Prolonged exposure to work-related stress may increase likelihood of cancer. The findings indicate that the link was observed in men, who had been exposed to 15 to 30 years of work-related stress and in some cases, more than 30 years. According to the study published in journal of Preventive Medicine, prolonged exposure of men to work-related stress has been linked to an increased likelihood of lung, colon, rectal and stomach cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Researchers at INRS and Université de Montréal in Canada conducted the study to assess the link between cancer and work-related stress perceived by men throughout their working life. On average, the study participants had held four jobs, with some holding up to a dozen or more during their working lifetime. A link between work-related stress and cancer was not found in participants who had held stressful jobs for less than 15 years. Significant links to five of the eleven cancers considered in the study were revealed.
The most stressful jobs included firefighter, industrial engineer, aerospace engineer, mechanic foreman, and vehicle and railway-equipment repair worker and for the same individual, stress varied depending on the job held. The study also shows that perceived stress is not limited to high work load and time constraints. ‘One of the biggest flaws in previous cancer studies is that none of them assessed work-related stress over a full working lifetime, making it impossible to determine how the duration of exposure to work-related stress affects cancer development,’ the authors explained. ‘Our study shows the importance of measuring stress at different points in an individual’s working life,’ the authors noted.
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Interesting write up by Stanford on Astrocytes and neurodegenerative diseases. One area that I will be interested in finding research is any ties to Dystonia as Astrocytes own impact to the central nervous system.
Judging from the very terms used to designate brain research — neuroscience, neuro logy, neuro biology — you might figure nerve cells (or neurons, as brain scientists like to call them) are the only cells in the brain worth knowing about or, indeed, the only cells resident in that organ.
Not true. In fact, neurons account for a measly 10 percent of the cells in a healthy human brain. And over the past 25 years Stanford brain scientist Ben Barres, MD, PhD, has arguably done as much as any human on earth to advance the status of the 90 percent of cells in the brain that aren’t neurons. Among those are a particularly interesting group called astrocytes because of their star-shaped appearance, and they were the focus of a just-published study by Barres’ group.
As I describe in a news release on the Nature paper: