Nature is the ultimate quantum computer.
A team of researchers is designing novel systems to capture water vapor in the air and turn it into liquid.
University of Waterloo professor Michael Tam and his Ph.D. students Yi Wang and Weinan Zhao have developed sponges or membranes with a large surface area that continually capture moisture from their surrounding environment. In the journal Nature Water Tam and his team discuss several promising new water collection and purification technologies.
Hypotension is a common complication during general anesthesia associated with increased postoperative mortality and morbidity. Every episode of intraoperative hypotension, regardless of duration, is linked to the risk of acute kidney injury and cardiovascular events. The vulnerability to hemodynamic disturbances increases with age, underscoring the need for prompt interventions for elderly patients who experience hypotension during anaesthesia.
Using ephedrine resulted in a notable rise in mean arterial pressure (MAP) and cardiac output (CO). Still, no meaningful correlation with age was detected in patients aged 45 years or older. These results imply that ephedrine is reliable for managing low blood pressure during general anaesthesia, even in elderly patients, says Yuta Uemura in a recent study published in BMC Anesthesiology.
Ephedrine is a mixed α- and β-agonist vasopressor for correcting hypotension during general anaesthesia. β-responsiveness decreases with age; therefore, this study aimed to determine whether ageing would reduce the pressor effect of ephedrine on hypotension during general anaesthesia.
HBP researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Cologne (Germany) have uncovered how neuron densities are distributed across and within cortical areas in the mammalian brain. They have unveiled a fundamental organisational principle of cortical cytoarchitecture: the ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities.
Numbers of neurons and their spatial arrangement play a crucial role in shaping the brain’s structure and function. Yet, despite the wealth of available cytoarchitectonic data, the statistical distributions of neuron densities remain largely undescribed. The new HBP study, published in Cerebral Cortex, advances our understanding of the organisation of mammalian brains.
The team based their investigations on nine publicly available datasets of seven species: mouse, marmoset, macaque, galago, owl monkey, baboon and human. After analysing the cortical areas of each, they found that neuron densities within these areas follow a consistent pattern – a lognormal distribution. This suggests a fundamental organisational principle underlying the densities of neurons in the mammalian brain.
A recent study in mice adds to the evidence suggesting that Parkinson’s disease may actually start in the gut rather than the brain.
Scientists have found a way to reprogram human cells so that they mimic the highly plastic embryonic stem cells that have so much promise for use in regenerative medicine. By essentially wiping the cell’s “memory”, the team have created so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which could be used to regenerate or repair diseased tissue and organs.
IPS cells are a type of pluripotent cell that can be obtained by reprogramming mature human adult cells (“somatic” cells) into an embryonic stem cell-like state. This means that they have the capacity to differentiate into any cell of the body. They were first demonstrated in 2006, and have myriad potential biomedical and therapeutic uses, including disease modeling, drug screening, and cell-based therapies.
Despite this promise, researchers have continually hit a stumbling block that has prevented iPS cells from realizing their potential. “A persistent problem with the conventional reprograming process is that iPS cells can retain an epigenetic memory of their original somatic state, as well as other epigenetic abnormalities,” Professor Ryan Lister, lead author of a paper presenting the latest breakthrough, said in a statement.
I’m excited to share my new opinion article for Newsweek. It advocates for transforming America from a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex! Give it a read!
America spends 45 percent of its discretionary federal spending on defense and wars, while around us, the world burns in ways that have nothing to do with fighting or the military. Global warming has escalated into an enormous crisis. A fifth of everyone we know will die from heart disease. And an opioid crisis is reducing the average lifespans of Americans for the first time in decades. There’s plenty of tragedy, fear, and hardship all around us, but it has nothing to do with the need to make more bombs. It does, however, have to do with science.
It seems obvious America should do something different than spend so much of its tax dollars on defense. We should consider halving that money, and directing it to science, transforming America from a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex. Despite science and technological progress being broadly responsible for raising the standard of living around the world over the last 50 years, America spends only 3 percent of its GDP ($205 billion) on science and medical research across the federal government. Notably, this is dramatically less than the $877 billion the U.S. will spend on defense this year.
The famous designation of the term military-industrial complex comes from former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address, where he warned America and its economy could descend into being a conflict-driven nation. Over 60 years after his speech, we have become just that. A Brown University study found that since 2001, the U.S. has spent $5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia. For contrast, the 2023 budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a paltry $49 billion.
Scientists at the University of Sydney have, for the first time, used a quantum computer to engineer and directly observe a process critical in chemical reactions by slowing it down by a factor of 100 billion times.
Joint lead researcher and Ph.D. student, Vanessa Olaya Agudelo, said, It is by understanding these basic processes inside and between molecules that we can open up a new world of possibilities in materials science, drug design, or solar energy harvesting.
It could also help improve other processes that rely on molecules interacting with light, such as how smog is created or how the ozone layer is damaged.
A team of researchers reports they have succeeded in disproving a long-held tenet of modern physics–that useful work cannot be obtained from random thermal fluctuations–thanks in part to the unique properties of graphene.
The microscopic motion of particles within a fluid, otherwise known as Brownian motion for its discovery by Scottish scientist Robert Brown, has long been considered an impossible means of attempting to generate useful work.
The idea had been most famously laid to rest decades ago by physicist Richard Feynman, who proposed a thought experiment in May 1962 involving an apparent perpetual motion machine, dubbed a Brownian ratchet.
After decades of research the potential of regenerative medicine becomes a life-saving reality.
Renewing the aging gut microbiome holds promise for preventing inflammatory brain and eye degeneration.
