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Solar Airship One embarks on a 24,854-mile zero-emissions world tour powered by the Sun and hydrogen. A game-changer in sustainable aviation.

Euro Airship unveiled its groundbreaking project, Solar Airship One, in a historic move towards sustainable aviation in a press release. This innovative venture promises to revolutionize long-distance aviation by completing a non-stop world tour spanning over 24,854 miles (40,000 kilometers), all while producing zero emissions. Set to take flight in 2026, Solar Airship One represents a significant leap forward in the quest for environmentally friendly transportation.

A massive ship in the sky

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Participants individually interacted with a conversational AI mental health chatbot for about 30 minutes to determine if they would recommend it to a friend.

As human beings, we rely on recommendations or warnings from our friends and family. It gives us an added perspective on what to expect from a particular service, a product, or another human being. As per the latest study, the same is true for the way in which we trust and perceive an AI chatbot.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Arizona State University conducted a study in which they found that even though every person in their sample size of 310 people interacted with the exact same chatbot, their interactions with it were influenced by what they had been told before.

Quantum entanglement is one of the most astonishing properties of quantum mechanics. If two particles are entangled, the state of one particle cannot be described independently from the other. This is a unique property of the quantum world and forms a crucial difference between classical and quantum theories of physics. It is so important, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

The large mass of the top quark, which is greater than any other particle, remains one of the most enduring mysteries of the Standard Model. Why this is so remains unexplained, however, the top quark has many unique properties to exploit as a result. The top quark is so heavy that it is extremely unstable and decays before it has time to hadronise, transferring all of its quantum numbers to its decay particles. Physicists can detect these decay particles and thus reconstruct the quantum state of a top quark, a feat that is impossible with any other quark. Most importantly, they can measure its spin and use it to show that entanglement can be studied in top-quark-pair production at the LHC.

Entanglement has indeed been measured in the past, but not quite like this. Most previous entanglement measurements involved low non-relativistic energies, typically utilising photons or electrons. The LHC collides protons with an incredibly high centre-of-mass energy. The data used in ATLAS’ new measurement were obtained from collisions at 13 TeV collected between 2015 and 2018. This means researchers are delving into an energy scale over 12 orders of magnitude (a thousand billion times) higher than typical laboratory experiments.

If you believe the headlines, seaweeds can do almost anything from storing tons of carbon and stopping cows from belching methane, to making biofuels and renewable plastics – all while sustaining vibrant coastal ecosystems and feeding communities.

Add to that list their potential wound-healing properties and possible anti-aging effects, and it’s no wonder the seaweed farming industry is booming.

A new study adds to that fanfare, with lab experiments based on human-like skin cells revealing extracts from two brown seaweeds can inhibit reactions linked to skin aging and boost collagen levels.

“New devices can read and manipulate our mental states to help us relax, learn and reduce pain. As they do this, they harvest data. Can businesses be trusted with this private information? How can we make use of this technology while protecting the last fortress of our humanity — our thoughts and emotions?”

As neurotechnology becomes widely accessible, do we need to legally protect our thoughts?

A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks a person’s healthy tissues.

The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen — a molecule being attacked by the immune system— with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease.

“In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity,” said Jeffrey Hubbell, the Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the new paper. “But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context.”

Purpose: Wolfiporia cocos is frequently used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat depression. However, antidepressant-like effects of the main active ingredients of Wolfiporia cocos, total triterpenes of Wolfiporia cocos (TTWC), are not well studied. This study aimed to investigate those effects and explore their specific mechanisms of action in depth. Methods: Chemical components of TTWC were analyzed using LC-MS. Depression-like behavior in rats were induced by chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS). The suppressive effects of TTWC (60120240 mg/kg) against CUMS-induced depression-like behavior were evaluated using the forced swimming test (FST), open field test (OFT) and sucrose preference test (SPT). Levels of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT), glutamate (GLU), corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), interleukin-1 beta (IL-1beta), interleukin-18 (IL-18), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) in different groups were determined by ELISA. Western blotting (WB) was used to detect the expression of NLRP3, ASC, pro-caspase-1, caspase-1, pro-IL-1beta, IL-1beta, pro-IL-18, and IL-18 in the prefrontal cortex. Additionally, the mRNA levels of NLRP3, ASC, caspase-1, IL-1beta and IL-18 were detected by RT-PCR. Results: A total of 69 lanostane-type triterpene acids of TTWC were identified. The results showed that TTWC exhibited an antidepressant-like effect in CUMS rats, reversed the decreased sugar preference in the SPT, reduction of immobility time in the FST, reduced the rest time, increased the total moving distance in the OFT. TTWC increased 5-HT levels and decreased GLU levels in the hippocampus. Moreover, TTWC decreased CRH levels in serum, indicating the regulation of over-activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. In addition, reduced serum levels of IL-1beta, IL-18, IL-6, and TNF-alpha. The WB results implied that TTWC inhibited the expression of NLRP3, ASC, caspase-1, IL-1beta, and IL-18 in the prefrontal cortex and enhanced the expression of pro-caspase-1, pro-IL-1beta, and pro-IL-18. Although most of the results were not significant, PCR results showed that TTWC inhibited the expression of NLRP3, ASC, caspase-1, IL-1beta, and IL-18 in the prefrontal cortex. Conclusion: TTWC treatment exerted an antidepressant-like effect and regulates neurotransmitters, HPA axis and NLRP3 signaling pathway. These results indicated the potential of TTWC in preventing the development of depression.

Keywords: NLRP3 pathway; Wolfiporia cocos (schwein.) ryvarden & gilb; chronic unpredictable mild stress; depression; hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis; neurotransmitter; triterpenes.

Copyright © 2022 Pan, Chen, Han, Luo, Zhang, Zhang, Zhang, Zhou, Li, Fang, Wang and Ye.

John Baez University of California, Riverside The 20th century was, arguably, the century of physics. While there was immense progress on so-called fundam…

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a fully indigenous gallium nitride (GaN) power switch that can have potential applications in systems like power converters for electric vehicles and laptops, as well as in wireless communications. The entire process of building the switch—from material growth to device fabrication to packaging—was developed in-house at the Center for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE), IISc.

Due to their high performance and efficiency, GaN transistors are poised to replace traditional silicon-based transistors as the building blocks in many electronic devices, such as ultrafast chargers for electric vehicles, phones and laptops, as well as space and military applications such as radar.

“It is a very promising and disruptive technology,” says Digbijoy Nath, Associate Professor at CeNSE and corresponding author of the study published in Microelectronic Engineering. “But the material and devices are heavily import-restricted … We don’t have gallium nitride wafer production capability at commercial scale in India yet.” The know-how of manufacturing these devices is also a heavily-guarded secret with few studies published on the details of the processes involved, he adds.