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Jun 28, 2022

Your liver is always less than three years old or younger

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Researchers have discovered that the human liver never ages beyond just three years old, no matter how old an individual is.


The liver is an amazing organ. Not only is it capable of regenerating itself to repair damage from toxins, like alcohol, but the liver apparently never ages, either.

According to new research, the liver is almost always just under three years old. The concept of liver age has been a medical conundrum for decades. Studying animal livers has yet to offer any kind of answer, so scientists with TU Dresden looked at human livers to try to discern more about our body’s filter.

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Jun 28, 2022

Messenger chatbots now used to steal Facebook accounts

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, robotics/AI

A new phishing attack is using Facebook Messenger chatbots to impersonate the company’s support team and steal credentials used to manage Facebook pages.

Chatbots are programs that impersonate live support people and are commonly used to provide answers to simple questions or triage customer support cases before they are handed off to a live employee.

In a new campaign discovered by TrustWave, threat actors use chatbots to steal credentials for managers of Facebook pages, commonly used by companies to provide support or promote their services.

Jun 28, 2022

NASA Astronauts Harvest Delicious Space Vegetables, Sans Soil

Posted by in categories: space, sustainability

Earthly space travelers have been trying to perfect orbital botany for a while now. Stable, sustainable off world agricultural practices are needed to make longer term exploration missions possible, and though the International Space Station (ISS) has seen a few successful low-orbit gardening endeavors, all have used some sort of soil or soil-replacing growth media.

Now, thanks to NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Watkins, that could be starting to change. According to a NASA blog published last week, Watkins has begun to harvest radishes and mizuna greens aboard the ISS — grown without any soil whatsoever.

Growing any edible plants in space is always exciting, but using dirt-like growth materials presents potential resource, mess, and sanitation problems. And that’s why Watkins’ triumphant soilless crop could be a thrilling step towards a new age of interstellar discovery.

Jun 28, 2022

After 19 years, the Mars Express spacecraft will get rid of Windows 98

Posted by in category: space travel

The Eurepean Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft’s software will be upgraded after 19 years, to make extended observations.

Jun 28, 2022

Researchers use GPUs to evaluate human brain connectivity

Posted by in categories: information science, neuroscience, robotics/AI

A new GPU-based machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) can help scientists better understand and predict connectivity between different regions of the brain.

The algorithm, called Regularized, Accelerated, Linear Fascicle Evaluation, or ReAl-LiFE, can rapidly analyze the enormous amounts of data generated from diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) scans of the human brain. Using ReAL-LiFE, the team was able to evaluate dMRI data over 150 times faster than existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

“Tasks that previously took hours to days can be completed within seconds to minutes,” says Devarajan Sridharan, Associate Professor at the Centre for Neuroscience (CNS), IISc, and corresponding author of the study published in the journal Nature Computational Science.

Jun 28, 2022

Development of a technology to produce dorsal cortical neurons

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Korea Brain Research Institute (KBRI, President Pann Ghill Suh) announced on Mar. 4 that its research team led by principal researcher Yoichi Kosodo has developed a technology to mass produce cerebral cortex neurons utilizing Induced pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS). The research outcome will be published in the March issue of Scientific Reports.

Scientists expect that it will be possible to treat diseases by restoring damaged area in the brain by mass producing neurons utilizing stem cells even though cerebral neurons die if one suffers from such as dementia and Parkinson’s Disease.

In fact, a research team of Kyoto University in Japan conducted clinical test of transplanting neurons made of iPS into the brain of a patient with Parkinson’s disease. In Parkinson’s disease, neurons that generate the neurotransmitter dopamine die, resulting in symptoms such as and tremor in hands and feet. Through the clinical test, the patient was treated with new neurons.

Jun 28, 2022

Building better brains—a bioengineered upgrade for organoids

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, neuroscience

A few years ago, Jürgen Knoblich and his team at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) have pioneered brain organoid technology. They developed a method for cultivating three-dimensional brain-like structures, so called cerebral organoids, in a dish. This discovery has tremendous potential as it could revolutionize drug discovery and disease research. Their lab grown organ-models mimic early human brain development in a surprisingly precise way, allowing for targeted analysis of human neuropsychiatric disorders, that are otherwise not possible. Using this cutting-edge methodology, research teams around the world have already revealed new secrets of human brain formation and its defects that can lead to microcephaly, epilepsy or autism.

In a new study published in Nature Biotechnology, scientists from Cambridge and Vienna present a new method that combines the organoid method with bioengineering. The researchers use special polymer fibers made of a material called PLGA) to generate a floating scaffold that was then covered with human cells. By using this ground-breaking combination of engineering and stem cell culture, the scientists are able to form more elongated organoids that more closely resemble the shape of an actual human embryo. By doing so, the organoids become more consistent and reproducible.

“This study is one of the first attempts to combine organoids with bioengineering. Our new method takes advantage of and combines the unique strengths of each approach, namely the intrinsic self-organization of organoids and the reproducibility afforded by bioengineering. We make use of small microfilaments to guide the shape of the organoids without driving tissue identity, ” explains Madeline Lancaster, group leader at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and first author of the paper.

Jun 28, 2022

Logic gate breaks speed record

Posted by in categories: computing, materials

The first logic gate to operate at femtosecond timescales could help usher in an era of information processing at petahertz frequencies – a million times faster than today’s gigahertz-scale computers. The new gate, developed by researchers at the University of Rochester in the US and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany, is an application of lightwave electronics – essentially, shuffling electrons around with light fields – and harnesses both real and virtual charge carriers.

In lightwave electronics, scientists use laser light to guide the motion of electrons in matter, then exploit this control to create electronic circuit elements. “Since light oscillates so fast (roughly a few hundred million times per second), using light could speed up electronics by a factor of roughly 10 000 as compared to computer chips,” says Tobias Boolakee, a laser physicist in Peter Hommelhoff’s group at the FAU and the first author of a study in Nature on the new gate. “With our present work, we have been able propose the idea for a first light field-driven logic gate (the fundamental building block for any computer architecture) and also demonstrate its working principle experimentally.”

In the work, Boolakee and colleagues prepared tiny graphene-based wires connected to two gold electrodes and illuminated them with a laser pulse lasting a few tens of femtoseconds (10-15 s). This laser pulse excites, or sets in motion, the electrons in graphene and causes them to propagate in a particular direction – so generating a net electrical current.

Jun 28, 2022

Kenya’s $100 billion hidden mineral deposits

Posted by in categories: energy, government, space

Eric KlienAdmin.

The U.S. government discouraging the opening of new mines is duplicating the problem that Europe had with energy and Russia. (It takes 10 years to get a new mine approved in the U.S.)

Omuterema AkhahendaAdmin.

Continue reading “Kenya’s $100 billion hidden mineral deposits” »

Jun 28, 2022

An Autonomous Ship Used AI to Cross the Atlantic Without a Human Crew

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI, solar power, sustainability, transportation

The differences? The new Mayflower—logically dubbed the Mayflower 400—is a 50-foot-long trimaran (that’s a boat that has one main hull with a smaller hull attached on either side), can go up to 10 knots or 18.5 kilometers an hour, is powered by electric motors that run on solar energy (with diesel as a backup if needed), and required a crew of… zero.

That’s because the ship was navigated by an on-board AI. Like a self-driving car, the ship was tricked out with multiple cameras (6 of them) and sensors (45 of them) to feed the AI information about its surroundings and help it make wise navigation decisions, such as re-routing around spots with bad weather. There’s also onboard radar and GPS, as well as altitude and water-depth detectors.

The ship and its voyage were a collaboration between IBM and a marine research non-profit called ProMare. Engineers trained the Mayflower 400’s “AI Captain” on petabytes of data; according to an IBM overview about the ship, its decisions are based on if/then rules and machine learning models for pattern recognition, but also go beyond these standards. The algorithm “learns from the outcomes of its decisions, makes predictions about the future, manages risks, and refines its knowledge through experience.” It’s also able to integrat e far more inputs in real time than a human is capable of.