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Quantum computing has been hailed as a technology that can outperform classical computing in both speed and memory usage, potentially opening the way to making predictions of physical phenomena not previously possible.

Many see quantum computing’s advent as marking a paradigm shift from classical, or conventional, computing. Conventional computers process information in the form of digital bits (0s and 1s), while quantum computers deploy quantum bits (qubits) to store in values between 0 and 1.

Under certain conditions, this ability to process and store information in qubits can be used to design that drastically outperform their classical counterparts. Notably, quantum’s ability to store information in values between 0 and 1 makes it difficult for to perfectly emulate quantum ones.

A new study claims that low-frequency ultrasound can reverse aspects of replicative and chemically induced senescence in vitro [1].

The age-related increase in senescent cell burden is thought to contribute to many processes of aging. Most of the attempts to deal with it involve senolytics: drugs that eliminate senescent cells.

However, it may be possible to re-educate them instead. Senomorphics are compounds that change senescent cells in a way that renders them benign, but they are much less common. The authors of this new pre-print study (it has not yet been peer-reviewed) claim to have found an even more impressive way to solve the senescent cell problem: by rejuvenating them with ultrasound.

Last fall, NASA’s Mars rover spotted a massive spot on the surface of the Sun — and now, that ginormous maw is looking directly at the Earth.

First reported by SpaceWeather.com, the sunspot is expected to blast a coronal mass ejection (CME) out towards Earth and will be “not just a near miss, but an actual glancing blow.”

CMEs occur when storms on the surface of the Sun blast plasma out into the solar system, leaving planets in its path — including our own Earth — to handle the geomagnetic consequences.

Cells in the human body contain power-generating mitochondria, each with their own mtDNA—a unique set of genetic instructions entirely separate from the cell’s nuclear DNA that mitochondria use to create life-giving energy. When mtDNA remains where it belongs (inside of mitochondria), it sustains both mitochondrial and cellular health—but when it goes where it doesn’t belong, it can initiate an immune response that promotes inflammation.

Now, Salk scientists and collaborators at UC San Diego have discovered a novel mechanism used to remove improperly functioning mtDNA from inside to outside the mitochondria. When this happens, the mtDNA gets flagged as foreign DNA and activates a normally used to promote to rid the cell of pathogens, like viruses.

The findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, offer many new targets for therapeutics to disrupt the inflammatory pathway and therefore mitigate inflammation during aging and diseases, like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.

Nuclear fusion is a great idea, in principle. In principle, it could solve the energy worries of the world beautifully. The problem is that whenever we’ve tried, getting nuclear fusion to work takes up more energy than it creates. But a team from Japan and the United States just got us a bit closer to our dream of clean energy. They recently succeeded in controlling nuclear plasma in a stellarator by creating a virtual twin. What’s a stellarator, what is digital twin and what did they actually do? Let’s have a look.

The new paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159

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The operators of Raspberry Robin are now using two new one-day exploits to achieve local privilege escalation, even as the malware continues to be refined and improved to make it stealthier than before.

This means that “Raspberry Robin has access to an exploit seller or its authors develop the exploits themselves in a short period of time,” Check Point said in a report this week.

Raspberry Robin (aka QNAP worm), first documented in 2021, is an evasive malware family that’s known to act as one of the top initial access facilitators for other malicious payloads, including ransomware.