Lifeboat Foundation

In day-to-day life, light seems intangible. We walk through it and create and extinguish it with the flip of a switch. But, like matter, light actually carries a little punch—it has momentum. Light constantly nudges things and can even be used to push spacecraft. Light can also spin objects if it carries orbital angular momentum (OAM)—the property associated with a rotating object’s tendency to keep spinning.

Scientists have known that light can have OAM since the early 90s, and they’ve discovered that the OAM of light is associated with swirls or vortices in the light’s phase—the position of the peaks or troughs of the electromagnetic waves that make up the light. Initially, research on OAM focused on vortices that exist in the cross-section of a light beam—the phase turning like the propeller of a plane flying along the light’s path.

But in recent years, physicists at UMD, led by UMD Physics Professor Howard Milchberg, have discovered that light can carry its OAM in a vortex turned to the side—the phase spins like a wheel on a car, rolling along with the light. The researchers called these light structures spatio-temporal optical vortices (STOVs) and described the momentum they carry as transverse OAM.

Professor Ronjon Nag presents about his project on AI and healthcare, aiming at creating a multi-faceted approved therapy for extending lifespan and curing aging.

Dr. Ronjon Nag is an inventor, teacher and entrepreneur. He is an Adjunct Professor in Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine, becoming a Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute Fellow in 2016. He teaches AI, Genes, Ethics, Longevity Science and Venture Capital. He is a founder and advisor/board member of multiple start-ups and President of the R42 Group, a venture capital firm which invests in, and creates, AI and Longevity companies. As an AI pioneer of smartphones and app stores, his companies have been sold to Apple, BlackBerry, and Motorola. More recently he has worked on the intersection of AI and Biology. He has numerous interests in the intersection of AI and Healthcare including being CEO of Agemica.ai working on creating a therapy for aging.

Continue reading “Can We CURE AGING In 7 YEARS With Combination Therapy??” »

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While trying to slim down a bit for her wedding day, one woman decided to take gray market semaglutide — and it landed her in the emergency room.

That woman, whom Healthline refers to as Amy Jenson to protect her privacy in its report, learned she was nearing prediabetic levels of the hemoglobin A1C at a visit to her naturopathic doctor. The naturopath suggested Jenson try semaglutide, the active ingredient in the Ozempic and Wegovy injectables, to help reach her goal weight and head off full-blown diabetes.

She purchased some semaglutide with B12 shots, which are often sold together in injectable forms from online and in-person pharmacies that operate in a legal grey area, from a compounding facility. She was initially prescribed a low dose that increased by small increments each month.

“The only way to be happy is to do what you love,” Ron Gutman, cofounder of digital health company Intrivo, told Business Insider.

Powner’s team didn’t check whether its sulfur-based catalysts had a chiral bias. That’s where Donna Blackmond, an origin of life chemist at Scripps Research, and her colleagues Min Deng and Jinhan Yu grabbed the baton. They tested two of Powner’s sulfur compounds to see whether the catalysts were sensitive to chirality as they formed dipeptides. They were, but not in the way Blackmond had expected. The catalysts created about four times as many “heterochiral” dipeptides—those pairing a left-handed amino acid (L) with a right-handed (D) one—as fully chiral products. “We thought it was bad news,” Blackmond says, because it suggested that even if amino acids on early Earth started with a bias, it would have been scrambled as proteins formed.

But as Blackmond and her colleagues looked more deeply, the news got better. In a series of experiments, the Scripps researchers started with skewed proportions of L and D amino acids—for example, 60% Ls and 40% Ds. The L, D and D, L heterochiral dipeptides formed most quickly, and as they did they pulled equal numbers of L and D amino acids out of the mix. Because of the baseline bias, eventually a predominance of Ls remained in the pool of unreacted amino acids, raising the likelihood of forming fully lefthanded dipeptides. “It’s like a domino effect,” Powner says. The first heterochiral reaction eventually encourages more homochirals to form. “And it’s a general process that works with all amino acids,” Powner says. Joyce adds: “It’s just math.”

Follow-up experiments suggested a second bias that amplifies the effect. The team found that heterochiral dipeptides precipitate out of a solution more quickly than homochiral ones, speeding the way to a relative abundance of either homochiral L, L or D, D pairs, depending the starting mix. Just why this precipitation bias occurs isn’t yet clear, Blackmond says. However, Joyce says, together with the other effect, “it beautifully fits the [experimental] data.” Blackmond adds: “The wrong answer turned out to be the right answer to get us to homochirality.”