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Mar 9, 2023
‘Red matter’ superconductor could transform electronics — if it works
Posted by Raphael Ramos in categories: electronics, materials
Researchers have long attempted to produce a superconductor that works at room temperature and at a relatively low pressure. A team now claims that its material, dubbed “red matter”, has these properties.
By Leah Crane
Mar 9, 2023
Complex Learned Social Behavior Discovered in Bee’s Waggle Dance
Posted by Jose Ruben Rodriguez Fuentes in category: futurism
Summary: A bee’s “waggle dance”, an intricate series of motions that signals the location of critical resources to other bees, is improved by social learning and can be culturally transmitted.
Source: UCSD
Passing down shared knowledge from one generation to the next is a hallmark of culture and allows animals to rapidly adapt to a changing environment.
Mar 9, 2023
Fabulous Fungi: On the Endless Possibilities of the Mushroom
Posted by Jose Ruben Rodriguez Fuentes in categories: existential risks, food
Fungi are everywhere—in our lawns and forests, in and on our bodies, and even lurking in that forgotten Tupperware container in the back of the fridge. While some fungi are harmful, the vast majority are beneficial to their environments and serve important ecological roles.
Some fungi act as parasites, infecting their hosts and sickening or even killing them. Common human ailments such as ringworm and athlete’s foot are caused by fungi. Pathogenic fungi like rusts and mildews regularly cause costly damage to important agricultural crops. Chestnut blight, Cryphonectria parasitica, was inadvertently introduced to North America from Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century and in a few short decades wiped out billions of chestnut trees in the United States, nearly causing their extinction. Fungi even attack other fungi. Hypomyces lactifluorum parasitizes species of Lactarius and Russula, transforming them into the choice edible known as the lobster mushroom.
Hands down, though, the fungal parasites that infect insects have to be among the most bizarre. These fungi keep their insect hosts alive but take complete control of their actions, using them as zombie minions to spread their spores for them.
Mar 9, 2023
Perovskite nanocrystal computer components inspired by brain cells
Posted by Jose Ruben Rodriguez Fuentes in categories: computing, mathematics, neuroscience
Researchers at Empa, ETH Zurich and the Politecnico di Milano are developing a new type of computer component that is more powerful and easier to manufacture than its predecessors. Inspired by the human brain, it is designed to process large amounts of data fast and in an energy-efficient way.
In many respects, the human brain is still superior to modern computers. Although most people can’t do math as fast as a computer, we can effortlessly process complex sensory information and learn from experiences, while a computer cannot—at least not yet. And, the brain does all this by consuming less than half as much energy as a laptop.
One of the reasons for the brain’s energy efficiency is its structure. The individual brain cells—the neurons and their connections, the synapses—can both store and process information. In computers, however, the memory is separate from the processor, and data must be transported back and forth between these two components. The speed of this transfer is limited, which can slow down the whole computer when working with large amounts of data.
Mar 9, 2023
Google’s PaLM-E — a step towards artificial general intelligence (AGI)?
Posted by Will Fox in category: robotics/AI
This week, AI researchers at Google have revealed PaLM-E, an embodied multimodal language model with 562 billion parameters.
Mar 9, 2023
The Batteries You Are Familiar With Are Not The Ones Some Energy Providers Are Building
Posted by 21st Century Tech Blog in categories: chemistry, energy
Kinetic batteries are not your traditional chemical-based storage solutions.
Alternatives to chemical batteries can help fill the power generation drops caused by a grid largely using solar and wind sources.
Mar 9, 2023
Scientists unearth potential new therapeutic target for inflammatory diseases such as lupus and sepsis
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in categories: biotech/medical, innovation
Scientists working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough in understanding what goes wrong in our bodies during the progression of inflammatory diseases and—in doing so—unearthed a potential new therapeutic target.
The scientists have found that an enzyme called fumarate hydratase is repressed in macrophages, a frontline inflammatory cell type implicated in a range of diseases including lupus, arthritis, sepsis and COVID-19.
Professor Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity, is the lead author of the research article that has just been published in the journal, Nature. He said, “No one has made a link from fumarate hydratase to inflammatory macrophages before and we feel that this process might be targetable to treat debilitating diseases like lupus, which is a nasty autoimmune disease that damages several parts of the body including the skin, kidneys and joints.”
Mar 9, 2023
Fresh Understanding of Aging in the Brain Offers Hope for Treating Neurological Diseases
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience
Summary: As the brain ages, microglia adopt dysfunctional states that increase the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: TCD
Scientists from the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI) have shed new light on aging processes in the brain. By linking the increased presence of specialised immune cells to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury for the first time, they have unearthed a possible new target for therapies aimed at treating age-related neurological diseases.
Mar 9, 2023
Model illuminates environmental cues that may contribute to breast cancer recurrence
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in category: biotech/medical
Nearly 270,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer each year.
According to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, about 70%–80% of these individuals experience estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, where cancer cells need estrogen to grow. In terms of treatment, this presence of hormone receptors provides a nice handle for targeting tumors, say with therapies that knock out the tumor cell’s ability to bind to estrogen and prevent remaining breast cancer cells from growing.
However, even if treated successfully, on average, one in five individuals with ER+ breast cancer experience a late recurrence when dormant tumor cells in distant parts of the body, such as the bone marrow, reactivate anywhere from five to over 20 years after initial treatment.