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Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman who was the world’s oldest person according to Guinness World Records, has died, an Ashiya city official said Saturday. She was 116.

Yoshitsugu Nagata, an official in charge of elderly policies, said Itooka died on December 29 at a care home in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, central Japan.

Itooka, who loved bananas and a yogurt-flavored Japanese drink called Calpis, was born on May 23, 1908. She became the oldest person last year following the death of 117-year-old Maria Branyas, according to the Gerontology Research Group.

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The work, published today in Nature, marks a significant step forward in our ability to study how the human body takes shape during early development.

The notochord, a rod-shaped tissue, is a crucial part of the scaffold of the developing body. It is a defining feature of all animals with backbones and plays a critical role in organising the tissue in the developing embryo.

Despite its importance, the complexity of the structure has meant it has been missing in previous lab-grown models of human trunk development.

In this research, the scientists first analysed chicken embryos to understand exactly how the notochord forms naturally. By comparing this with existing published information from mouse and monkey embryos, they established the timing and sequence of the molecular signals needed to create notochord tissue.

There might not be a mysterious ‘dark’ force accelerating the expansion of the Universe after all. The truth could be much stranger – bubbles of space where time passes at drastically different rates.

The passage of time isn’t as constant as our experience with it suggests. Areas of higher gravity experience a slower pace of time compared with areas where gravity is weaker, a fact that could have some pretty major implications on how we compare rates of cosmic expansion according to a recently developed model called timescape cosmology.

Discrepancies in how fast time passes in different regions of the Universe could add up to billions of years, giving some places more time to expand than others. When we look at distant objects through these time-warping bubbles, it could create the illusion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

A sequence of stress signals among specialized clean-up cells in the brain could at last reveal why some immune responses can cause significant nerve degeneration that results in the loss of memory, judgement, and awareness behind Alzheimer’s disease.

Blocking this pathway in mouse brains modeled on Alzheimer’s prevented damage to their synapse connections and reduced the buildup of potentially toxic tau proteins – both hallmarks of the condition.

The researchers, led by a team from the City University of New York (CUNY), believe this pathway – called the integrated stress response (ISR) – causes brain immune cells called microglia to go ‘dark’ and start damaging rather than benefiting the brain.

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A blood test that can predict how long vaccine immunity will last so people can get a booster jab earlier, is being developed by scientists.

Researchers have previously been unable to predict why some vaccines produce antibodies to fight infections that last for decades while in others immunity only lasts a few months.

Now Stanford University has found tell-tale signs in the blood in the days after vaccination to indicate how quickly a person’s antibody protection will wane.

Researchers have discovered nanocrystals that toggle between luminescent states swiftly, offering a promising advancement toward optical computing.

This technology could revolutionize data processing and artificial intelligence, making devices faster and more energy-efficient while expanding capabilities in telecommunications and medical imaging.

Breakthrough in Nanocrystal Technology.

SCMP stated this latest achievement of 100Gbps transmission rate is said to be equivalent to transmitting ten full-length movies within a “single second.”

This development in satellite-to-ground laser communication will significantly enhance China’s space capabilities. It will pave the way for improved satellite infrastructure, including navigation, 6G internet, and remote sensing.