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Feb 7, 2023

Harvesting big energy from small movement

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

A new material designed to harvest up to 400 times more energy from movement than currently possible has potential applications in biomedicine and geospatial monitoring.

By Dr Peter Sherrell and Professor Amanda Ellis, University of Melbourne.

Feb 7, 2023

‘Time is not what it used to be’: Children and adults shown to experience time differently

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University have investigated whether the perception of time changes with age, and if so, how, and why we perceive the passage of time differently. Their study was published in Scientific Reports.

Time can play tricks on us. Many of us experienced the illusion that those long summers during childhood felt so much longer than the same 3 months feel like now as an adult. While we can argue why one summer may appear longer than the other and how the perception of time can compress and dilate durations depending on various factors, we can easily set up an experiment to gain more insights.

The researchers just did that. They asked how eventfulness affects our duration estimates when probing at different milestones during our cognitive development. They set aside three , 4–5, 9–10, and 18 years and older, and made them watch two videos, 1 minute each. The two videos were extracted from a popular animated series, balanced in visual and acoustic features, except for one feature: eventfulness.

Feb 6, 2023

New cell death mechanism could offer novel cancer treatment strategies

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A study from researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, published today in Nature Cell Biology, details a previously unexplained type of cell death called disulfidptosis that could open the door for novel cancer therapeutic strategies.

As described in the study, disulfidptosis is triggered when cells with high levels of the SLC7A11 protein are subjected to glucose starvation. In preclinical models, treatment with glucose inhibitors induced disulfidptosis in cancer cells with high SLC7A11 expression, effectively suppressing without significant toxicity in normal tissues.

The study was led by Boyi Gan, Ph.D., and Junjie Chen, Ph.D., both professors of Experimental Radiation Oncology.

Feb 6, 2023

Entrepreneur Turns 500 Tonnes of Waste into ‘Black Gold’, Earns Turnover of Crores

Posted by in category: futurism

Watch this video to see how UP resident Sana Khan turned her fascination with earthworms into S J Organics, a vermicomposting venture that sees an annual turnover of Rs 1 crore.

Feb 6, 2023

Scaling and diversifying the talent pipeline will accelerate quantum opportunities

Posted by in categories: business, computing, nanotechnology, quantum physics

The emerging quantum technology industry offers a dynamic career pathway for creative and adaptable physical scientists, as Stuart Woods of Oxford Instruments NanoScience explains.

As quantum technology companies shift gears to translate their applied research endeavours into commercial opportunities – at scale – they’re going to need ready access to a skilled and diverse quantum workforce of “all the talents”. A case study in this regard is Oxford Instruments NanoScience, a division of parent group Oxford Instruments, the long-established UK provider of specialist technologies and services to research and industry.

The NanoScience business unit, for its part, designs and manufactures research tools to support the development, scale-up and commercialization of next-generation quantum technologies. Think cryogenic systems (operating at temperatures as low as 5 mK) and high-performance magnets that enable researchers to harness the exotic properties of quantum mechanics – entanglement, tunnelling, superposition and the like – to yield practical applications in quantum computing, quantum communications, quantum metrology and quantum imaging.

Feb 6, 2023

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

Posted by in category: futurism

Most biologists will answer confidently when asked ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg? but the answer may depend on what type of egg you’re talking about.

Feb 6, 2023

Scientists pinpoint protein that helps cancer-causing viruses evade immune response

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The viruses Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) have been linked to several cancers. For the first time, UNC School of Medicine scientists have discovered that these viruses use a human protein called barrier-to-autointegration factor 1, or BAF, to evade our innate immune response, allowing the viruses to spread and cause disease.

These findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that BAF and related proteins could be therapeutic targets to prevent these viruses from spreading and leading to cancers, such as Kaposi sarcoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, multicentric Castleman disease, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and gastric cancer.

“Viruses are in a constant battle with the cellular immune system, which includes the protein cyclic GMP-AMP synthase, or cGAS, which binds to viral DNA and sounds the alarm to trigger immune responses and fight the viral invaders,” said senior author Blossom Damania, Ph.D., the Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. “We’ve discovered that KSHV and EBV use a different host cell protein, BAF, to prevent cGAS from sounding the alarm.”

Feb 6, 2023

The Brain Works Like a Resonance Chamber

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Summary: Using advanced neuroimaging techniques, researchers discovered distant brain regions oscillate together in time.

Source: champalimaud centre for the unknown.

It’s been over 20 years since neuroimaging studies – using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a widely-used technology to capture live videos of brain activity – have been detecting brain-wide complex patterns of correlated brain activity that appear disrupted in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Feb 6, 2023

BuzzFeed’s CEO says AI could usher in a ‘new model for digital media,’ but warns against a ‘dystopian’ path

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

It seems more companies will be using AI to write their articles and other content. 😀


Over the holidays, while most media executives were perhaps looking to get a reprieve from work, Jonah Peretti was online, fully immersed in experimenting with artificial intelligence.

Feb 6, 2023

What to know about the big quake that hit Turkey and Syria

Posted by in category: futurism

NEW YORK (AP) — A major 7.8 magnitude earthquake followed by another strong quake devastated wide swaths of Turkey and Syria Monday, killing thousands of people.