Until now, it was unclear as to whether drugs that clear amyloid, which accumulate in the brain during aging and accompany diseases such as Alzheimer’s, have any influence over cognitive decline.
Previous studies have aimed to find this out, but results have been inconclusive due to study designs, hard-to-interpret data, and other issues that muddy the waters. March 10-14th saw the 15th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases being held (virtually of course), where Dr. Mark Mintun of Eli Lilly presented data that, at least somewhat, affirmatively answers the question [1].
As researchers race to cultivate more of the intriguing cells from the deep seafloor, the few cells now growing in labs are giving us our best glimpses of the forerunners of all complex life.
In the math of particle physics, every calculation should result in infinity. Physicists get around this by just ignoring certain parts of the equations — an approach that provides approximate answers. But by using the techniques known as “resurgence,” researchers hope to end the infinities and end up with perfectly precise predictions.
Shortly after Max Planck shook the scientific world with ideas about the fundamental quantization of energy, researchers built and leveraged theories of quantum mechanics to resolve physical phenomena that had previously been unexplainable, including the behavior of heat in solids and light absorption on an atomic level. In the 120-plus years since, researchers have looked beyond physics and used quantum theory’s same perplexing — even “spooky,” according to Einstein — laws to solve inexplicable phenomena in a variety of other disciplines.
Today, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are applying quantum mechanics to biology to better understand of one of nature’s biggest mysteries — magnetosensitivity, an organism’s ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a tool to adjust some biological processes. And they’ve found some surprising results.
In a recent study, APL research engineer and scientist Carlos Martino and his APL colleagues Nam Le, Michael Salerno, Janna Domenico, Christopher Stiles, Megan Hannegan, and Ryan McQuillen, along with Ilia Solov’yov from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany, found that an enzyme that plays a central role in human metabolism has some of the same key features as a magnetically sensitive protein found in birds.
The search for the chemical origins of life represents a long-standing and continuously debated enigma. Despite its exceptional complexity, in the last decades the field has experienced a revival, also owing to the exponential growth of the computing power allowing for efficiently simulating the behavior of matter—including its quantum nature—under disparate conditions found, e.g., on the primordial Earth and on Earth-like planetary systems (i.e., exoplanets). In this minireview, we focus on some advanced computational methods capable of efficiently solving the Schrödinger equation at different levels of approximation (i.e., density functional theory)—such as ab initio molecular dynamics—and which are capable to realistically simulate the behavior of matter under the action of energy sources available in prebiotic contexts.
In 50 years of searching, mathematicians found only one example of a “subspace design” in a vector space. A new proof reveals that there are infinitely more out there.
Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is characterized by the accumulation of amyloid plaques and disordered protein fibers called tau tangles in the brain, which lead to cognitive impairment and dementia. Scientists have long been trying to understand the underlying mechanisms behind Alzheimer’s disease and find effective treatments for the condition.
Some classical computers have error correction built into their memories based on bits; quantum computers, to be workable in the future, will need error correction mechanisms, too, based on the vastly more sensitive qubits.
Cornell researchers have recently taken a step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing: they constructed a simple model containing exotic particles called non-Abelian anyons, compact and practical enough to run on modern quantum hardware. Realizing these particles, which can only exist in two dimensions, is a move towards implementing it in the real world.
Thanks to some creative thinking, Yuri Lensky, a former Bethe/Wilkins/Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) postdoctoral fellow in physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), collaborating with Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics (A&S), came up with a simple “recipe” that could be used for robustly computing with non-Abelian anyons, including specific instructions for executing the effect experimentally on devices available today.
