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Blog – Page 11258

Since the arrival of flat-screen TVs, there’s not been a whole lot to get excited about in the world of televisions — how many ways can you improve on a big slab of glass, after all? Well, how about by making it almost invisible when you’re not using it?

That’s the thinking behind a new prototype from Panasonic that’s just been shown off at the CEATEC electronics expo in Japan this week. When switched on, it’s just like a normal TV. When switched off, it’s as transparent as glass, meaning you can see the wall or shelving behind.

Panasonic describes it as the “future of display screens” — although as you might expect, the company’s staying tight-lipped about the technology behind its transparent TV, just in case its competitors have something similar in mind.

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Just last month, physicists made the best case yet for why time crystals — hypothetical structures that have movement without energy — could technically exist as physical objects.

And now, four years after they were first proposed, scientists have managed to add a fourth dimension — the movement of time — to a crystal for the first time, giving it the ability to act as a kind of perpetual ‘time-keeper’.

First proposed by Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek back in 2012, time crystals are hypothetical structures that appear to have movement even at their lowest energy state, known as a ground state.

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Scientists have succeeded in creating the world’s smallest transistor, producing a switch with a working 1-nanometre gate. If you want to know how incredibly tiny that is, a human hair is around 80,000 to 100,000 nanometres wide.

Unlike regular transistors, the researchers’ new prototype isn’t made out of silicon – and the smaller size means we can still improve performance in integrated circuits by populating them with greater amounts of incredibly small components.

And it could help us keep Moore’s Law alive too.

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A great new biomarker for senescent cells is available and will allow researchers to more measure levels of aged cells easier and faster. Great news for gerontologists wishing to demonstrate changes to aged cell populations after therapies.

Scientists have discovered a new way to look for ageing cells across a wide range of biological materials; the new method will boost understanding of cellular development and ageing as well as the causes of diverse diseases.

Frustrated by the limitations of commercially available biomarkers — researchers led by The University of Manchester’s Professor Paul Townsend and senior author of the resulting paper, and honorary professor at Manchester, Professor Vassilis Gorgoulis, have developed a universally applicable method to assess senescence across biomedicine, from cancer research to gerontology.

Cellular senescence is a fundamental biological process involved in every day embryonic and adult life, both good – for normal human development – and, more importantly to researchers, dangerous by triggering disease conditions. Up to now available senescence detecting biomarkers have very limited and burdensome application. Therefore, a more effective, precise and easy-to-use biomarker would have considerable benefits for research and clinical practice.

Continue reading “New method to detect ageing cells – and aid rejuvenation therapies — developed” | >

You often hear people say we’re in the early days of artificial intelligence, probably the most important tech theme of the next century. It’s important to put real measurements on improvements to the technology. Google tried to do just that at a press event in San Francisco this morning. Here are the top lines:

• Image recognition has improved to 93.9% accuracy from 89.6% in 2014. It’s also more detailed; it can detect colors and analyze the content in images with more than one subject.

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Amazing Stories has resumed publishing original science fiction, and they just happened to have led with a story of mine. Amazing Stories was the first SF magazine, dating to 1926, and was edited by Hugo Gernsback (as in “Hugo Awards”). My story contains speculation about human-AI interaction, and the future of user interfaces (disguised as comedy).

Posting this with Eric Klien’s permission, as it’s self-promotional.

Never trust an app in the form of a woman you don’t know, even if you are a hipster knight. A Gernsback Contest winning short story.

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In Brief.

  • Every year, more than 795,000 people in the United States have a stroke.
  • A team of scientists has discovered a common mechanism chain leading to brain cell death which involves proteins eating away at a cell’s DNA.

A team of scientists has discovered that, despite having varied causes and symptoms, most brain diseases all share a common mechanism chain leading to brain cell death. The process, aptly named parthanatos after an enzyme called PARP and the Greek god of death, involves proteins eating away at the cell’s DNA.

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Rapamycin could lead to the development of drugs to delay some aspects of aging in particular the immune systems decline with age.

Nearly a decade of research showing that Rapamycin makes mice live up to 60% longer, scientists are trying it out as an anti-aging drug in dogs and humans.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Dog Aging Project gave rapamycin to 16 dogs and imaged their hearts.

“It started to function better. It started to look like a more youthful heart,” said Matt Kaeberlein, co-director of the Dog Aging Project, who has presented this research at conferences but hasn’t yet published it.

Continue reading “Side Effects of Antiaging drug Rapamycin can be managed with lower doses and appears to improve the immune system, restore vitality and delay heart disease and dementia” | >