Lifeboat Foundation

Although people of European descent account for less than one-quarter of the world’s population, their DNA disproportionately drives genetics research. Between 2005 and 2018, the majority of genome-wide association studies were conducted with data from people living in just three countries — the United Kingdom, the United States, and Iceland.

“The paradox of precision medicine is that you have to have a ton of different kinds of people to figure out one person really well,” said Josh Denny, CEO of the All of Us research program. “There’s still so much we don’t understand about the human genome, especially about rare variation. Huge projects like ours are really helping to accelerate that understanding.”

All of Us has recruited more than 750,000 volunteers to provide survey responses about their health, medical records, and if they’re willing, biological samples for molecular and genetic testing. Genetic data from some participants have been available for researchers since 2020, but the new release this week includes the whole genome sequences of nearly 250,000 participants — half of whom are of non-European ancestry.

According to a recent study from the University of Helsinki, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a vortex of a superfluid that has been quantized four times has three ways of dividing, depending on the temperature.

The fluid transforms into a superfluid near the absolute zero point of temperature (approximately −273°C). Internal resisting forces, such as friction, disappear. At this point, the behavior of the fluid can no longer be described using classical mechanics; instead, quantum physics must be applied.

When a superfluid is spun, the resulting rotation should never slow down because superfluids have no viscosity or friction. This has been experimented with at the atomic level using helium at very slow rotation, and it was observed that the superfluid, however, eventually halted.

A collaborative project has made a breakthrough in enhancing the speed and resolution of widefield quantum sensing, leading to new opportunities in scientific research and practical applications.

By collaborating with scientists from Mainland China and Germany, the team has successfully developed a quantum sensing technology using a neuromorphic vision sensor, which is designed to mimic the human vision system. This sensor is capable of encoding changes in fluorescence intensity into spikes during optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) measurements.

The key advantage of this approach is that it results in highly compressed data volumes and reduced latency, making the system more efficient than traditional methods. This breakthrough in quantum sensing holds potential for various applications in fields such as monitoring dynamic processes in biological systems.

Canadian researchers led by Montreal radiologist Gilles Soulez have developed a novel approach to treat liver tumors using magnet-guided microrobots in an MRI device.

The idea of injecting microscopic robots into the bloodstream to heal the human body is not new. It’s also not science fiction. Guided by an external magnetic field, miniature biocompatible robots, made of magnetizable iron oxide nanoparticles, can theoretically provide medical treatment in a very targeted manner.

Until now, there has been a technical obstacle: the force of gravity of these microrobots exceeds that of the magnetic force, which limits their guidance when the tumor is located higher than the injection site. While the magnetic field of the MRI is high, the magnetic gradients used for navigation and to generate MRI images are weaker.

The development of innovative magnetic nanodevices is one step closer to reality thanks to the observation by RIKEN physicists of a type of rotation that can be realized in materials consisting of light elements.

The ability to use electric currents to turn revolving mechanical parts led to the development of electric motors and caused an explosion in electrical devices. Now, physicists are trying to do the same thing but on a nanoscale. However, the development of innovative magnetic nanodevices requires the efficient electrical generation of rotation, or torque.

Usually, torque is generated in magnetic systems by converting electric charge to spin by using the strong spin–orbit interaction of a heavy-metal layer. The resulting spin current is then injected into adjacent ferromagnetic layers. But heavy-element materials are often incompatible with scalable production processes, and their high resistance makes them unsuitable for some applications.

A joint research project of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the University of Siegen, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and the Elettra Synchrotron Trieste has achieved a new milestone for the ultra-fast control of magnetism. The international team has been working on magnetization configurations that exhibit chiral twisting. Chirality is a symmetry breaking, which occurs, for example, in nature in molecules that are essential for life. Chirality is also referred to as handedness, since hands are an everyday example of two items that—arranged in a mirror-inverted manner—cannot be superimposed onto each other. Magnetization configurations with a fixed chirality are currently investigated intensively due to their fascinating properties such as enhanced stability and efficient manipulation by current. These magnetic textures thus promise applications in the field of ultrafast chiral spintronics, for example in ultrafast writing and controlling of chiral topological magnetic objects such as magnetic skyrmions, i.e., specially twisted magnetization configurations with exciting properties.

The new insights published in Nature Communications shed light on the ultrafast dynamics after optical excitation of chiral spin structures compared to collinear spin structures. According to the researchers’ findings, the chiral order restores faster compared to the collinear order after excitation by an infrared laser.

The research team performed small angle X-ray scattering experiments on magnetic thin film samples stabilizing chiral magnetic configurations at the free electron laser (FEL) facility FERMI in Trieste in Italy. The facility provides the unique possibility to study the magnetization dynamics with femtosecond time resolution by using circular left polarized or right polarized light. The results indicate a faster recovery of chiral order compared to collinear magnetic order dynamics, which means that twists are more stable than straight magnetic configurations.

Researchers at Tohoku University and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have discovered a new spintronic phenomenon—a persistent rotation of chiral-spin structure.

Their discovery was published in the journal Nature Materials on May 13, 2021.

Tohoku University and JAEA researchers studied the response of chiral-spin structure of a non-collinear antiferromagnet Mn₃Sn thin film to electron spin injection and found that the chiral-spin structure shows persistent rotation at zero magnetic field. Moreover, their frequency can be tuned by the applied current.

There is now a new addition to the magnetic family: thanks to experiments at the Swiss Light Source SLS, researchers have proved the existence of altermagnetism. The experimental discovery of this new branch of magnetism is reported in Nature and signifies new fundamental physics, with major implications for spintronics.

Magnetism is a lot more than just things that stick to the fridge. This understanding came with the discovery of antiferromagnets nearly a century ago. Since then, the family of magnetic materials has been divided into two fundamental phases: the ferromagnetic branch known for several millennia and the antiferromagnetic branch.

The experimental proof of a third branch of magnetism, termed altermagnetism, was made at the Swiss Light Source SLS, by an international collaboration led by the Czech Academy of Sciences together with Paul Scherrer Institute PSI.

Scientists are investigating whether an oral drug sprinkled with gold nanoparticles could one day treat neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

The experimental medicine, called CNM-Au8, has now shown success in boosting the brain’s metabolism in phase II clinical trials.

Research on the safety and efficacy of the daily drug is still ongoing, but the initial results have researchers hopeful. The medicine contains suspended nanoparticles of gold that can apparently pass the blood-brain barrier and improve energy supply to neurons, preventing their decline.