CRISPR is a way off being used in human therapeutics, but a new discovery could unlock its potential.
An injection given during some asthma and COPD attacks is more effective than the current treatment of steroid tablets, reducing the need for further treatment by 30%. The findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, could be “game-changing” for millions of people with asthma and COPD around the world, scientists say.
Asthma attacks and COPD flare-ups (also called exacerbations) can be deadly. Every day in the UK four people with asthma and 85 people with COPD will tragically die. Both conditions are also very common. In the UK, someone has an asthma attack every 10 seconds. Asthma and COPD cost the NHS £5.9B a year.
The type of symptom flare-up the injection treats are called “eosinophilic exacerbations” and involve symptoms such as wheezing, coughing and chest tightness due to inflammation resulting from high amounts of eosinophils (a type of white blood cell). Eosinophilic exacerbations make up to 30% of COPD flare-ups and almost 50% of asthma attacks. They can become more frequent as the disease progresses, leading to irreversible lung damage in some cases.
How long until humans are made redundant by the evolution of technology? Is there an inherent difference between men and women’s intelligence? Daniel Dennett answers questions from the audience following his talk. Watch the main event here: • Information, Evolution, and intellige…
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The concept of information is fundamental to all areas of science, and ubiquitous in daily life in the Internet Age. However, it is still not well understood despite being recognised for more than 40 years. In this talk, Daniel Dennett explored steps towards a unified theory of information, through common threads in evolution, learning, and engineering.
Continue reading “Q&A — Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design — With Daniel Dennett” »
Readily available thermoelectric generators operating under modest temperature differences can power CO2 conversion, according to a proof-of-concept study by chemists at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The findings open up the intriguing possibility that the temperature differentials encountered in an array of environments—from a typical geothermal installation on Earth to the cold, desolate surface of Mars—could power the conversion of CO2 into a range of useful fuels and chemicals.
“The environment on Mars really got me interested in the long-term potential of this technology combination,” says Dr. Abhishek Soni, postdoctoral research fellow at UBC and first author of the paper published in Device.
RoVi-Aug lets robots autonomously share skills, increasing efficiency and success by 30%, all without human input.
RoVi-Aug enables robots to autonomously share skills across models, boosting efficiency and success rates by 30% without human intervention.
The molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying ovarian aging are incompletely understood. Here the authors provide single-nuclei RNA and ATAC-seq of human ovarian tissue from four young and four reproductively aged donors, revealing coordinated transcriptomic and epigenomic changes across cell types and highlighting a role for mTOR signaling in reproductive aging.
To maintain a healthy immune system, doctors advise patients to take vitamins and minerals. Vitamins have many functions that benefit the body, including resisting infection, energy boost, aiding in blood clotting, improving brain function, generation of red blood cells, promoting a healthy gut microbiome, improving wound healing, preventing eye deterioration, and developing strong bones. We can get vitamins from various sources, including orange juice, which is rich in vitamin C, folate, and potassium. Physicians often recommend supplements for patients low on specific vitamins. However, dysregulation of vitamins can weaken the immune system and promote overall bad health. One vitamin in particular that helps maintain cellular function includes B12. This vitamin is essential to generate DNA and red blood cells, and aids in nerve function, energy conversion, and protein metabolism. When a patient has a B12 deficiency it can result in muscle weakness, numbness in hands and feet, difficulty walking, nausea, loss of appetite, and unintentional weight loss. In addition, it can allow the buildup of a small molecule known as methylmalonic acid (MMA).
In healthy tissues, vitamin B12 helps break down MMA. In B12 deficient patients, MMA is increased and can be measured through blood or urine samples. Methylmalonic acid is produced when proteins in your muscle, known as amino acids, are broken down. Tests to determine B12 deficiency or a genetic disorder are done by physicians at birth and after the appearance of symptoms related to B12 deficiency. Interestingly, a group of scientists have discovered a new deleterious role of MMA in lung carcinoma.
A recent publication from Oncogene, by Dr. Ana P. Gomes and others, demonstrated that MMA in aged patients weakens immune cell function and promotes lung cancer progression. Gomes is a professor of molecular oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida. Her work specifically focuses on understanding metabolic changes as we age and how this change in metabolism influences cancer risk.
An interview with Prof. Marya Schechtman from the Carboncopies Foundation Winter 2020 Workshop held on March 15, 2020.
Spacedock delves into relativity and the mean of reaching other stars without an FTL drive.
Initiative for Interstellar Studies art by Macrebisz for Project Hyperion:
https://linktr.ee/macrebisz.
https://www.projecthyperion.org/
Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing and Toshiba have succeeded in building a quantum computer gate based on a double-transmon coupler (DTC), which had been proposed theoretically by Hayato Goto, Senior Fellow at Toshiba, as a device that could significantly enhance the fidelity of quantum gates. Using this, they achieved a fidelity of 99.90 percent for a two-qubit device known as a CZ gate and 99.98 percent for a single-qubit gate. This breakthrough, which was carried out as part of the Q-LEAP project, not only boosts the performance of existing noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices but also helps pave the way for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computation through effective quantum error correction.
The DTC is a new kind of tunable coupler composed of two fixed-frequency transmons—a type of qubit that is relatively insensitive to charge noise—coupled through a loop with an additional Josephson junction. Its architecture addresses one of the most pressing challenges in quantum computing: the development of hardware to entangle qubits in a high-fidelity manner. High gate fidelity is essential for minimizing errors and enhancing the reliability of quantum computations. The DTC scheme stands out by achieving both suppressed residual interaction and rapid high-fidelity two-qubit gate operations, even for highly detuned qubits. Though fidelity of 99.9 percent has been routinely achieved for single-qubit gates, error rates for two-qubit gates are typically 0.5 percent or more, mainly due to interactions between the qubits known as the ZZ interaction.
The key to the current work, published in Physical Review X, is the construction of qubits using state-of-the-art fabrication techniques and gate optimization using a type of machine learning known as reinforcement learning. These approaches allowed the researchers to translate the theoretical potential of the DTC into practical application. They used these approaches to balance two types of remaining errors—leakage error and decoherence error—that remained within the system, selecting a length of 48 nanoseconds as an optimal compromise between the two error sources. Thanks to this, they achieved fidelity levels among the highest reported in the field.
