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Dec 3, 2022

Germ-Killing Spray Protects Surfaces for Months

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

It’s hard to keep surfaces clean in public spaces, but what if they could be protected with a spray that eliminates illness-causing microorganisms? Now, a new antimicrobial option is in the works.

Dec 3, 2022

Interesting to me how many of the ChatGPT takes are either “this is AGI” (obviously not close, lol) or “this approach can’t really go that much further

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Trust the exponential. flat looking backwards, vertical looking forwards.

Dec 3, 2022

Updated version of my GPT3 powered iOS shortcut

Posted by in category: futurism

Now you can also follow up questions. Cc @bentossell

Dec 3, 2022

H.G. Wells: Time Traveler | Full Documentary | Biography

Posted by in categories: education, time travel

Interviews with two of H.G. Wells’s grandsons and his granddaughter jump us back in time and flesh out this chronicle of the life of the author who pioneered 20th century science fiction in Season 1, Episode 8.

#Biography.

Continue reading “H.G. Wells: Time Traveler | Full Documentary | Biography” »

Dec 3, 2022

Technology reveals the secrets of ancient Egyptian tattoos

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Anne Austin/University of Missouri-St. Louis, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (2022).

Because the second mummy was still wrapped, researchers analyzed it via infrared photography. It’s worth noting that archaeologists do not unwrap mummies at this point in time. The mummy turned out to be of a middle-aged woman and featured a different tattoo — a wedjat, or eye of Horus, and again an image of the god Bes, but now with a crown of feathers. The scientists also spotted a zigzag line below the other figures that probably depicted a marsh, which was associated with cooling waters used to relieve pain from menstruation or childbirth, as the researchers deduced from ancient medical texts. They propose that the two tattoos were essentially a request by the wearer for protection during childbirth.

Dec 3, 2022

Astronomers spot an incoming small asteroid — and make a big breakthrough

Posted by in categories: innovation, space

That meteor, now known as 2022 WJ1, was first noticed by the Catalina Sky Survey at around midnight Eastern on that date (the time zone in which it ended up landing). Catalina is one of the most prolific discoverers of asteroids and is a crucial link in the planetary defense chain. A NASA press release details the steps that come afterward that result in a successful landing prediction.

The 2022 WJ1 was pretty small, only about one meter wide, and posed no actual threat to anyone or anything on the ground. But the planetary defense network is designed to catch much bigger potential threats. The fact that it reacted with such speed shows that it is becoming more and more capable and will be much more likely to find any potentially devastating events, such as the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013, which caused 1,400 injuries and around $33 million in property damage.

Dec 3, 2022

Drinking coffee might lengthen life

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, sex

If your morning never starts without a cup of coffee, you may be intrigued to learn that drinking the wildly popular beverage could significantly lower your risk of dying within the next few years, a new study suggests.

The study, published online May 31, 2022, by Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed data about coffee consumption from more than 170,000 people (average age 56) from the United Kingdom who did not have cancer or cardiovascular disease at the study’s start. The researchers tracked participants over an average of seven years. They also accounted for such factors as lifestyle, diet, sex, age, and ethnicity.

People who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee each day, even with a teaspoon of added sugar per cup, were up to 30% less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. It didn’t appear to matter if the coffee contained caffeine or not, but the benefit tapered off for those drinking more than 4.5 cups each day.

Dec 3, 2022

Mom’s Dietary Fat Rewires Male and Female Brains Differently

Posted by in categories: chemistry, health, neuroscience, sex

Excess fat triggers immune cells to overeat serotonin in the brain of developing male mice, leading to depression-like behavior. More than half of all women in the United States are overweight or obese when they become pregnant. While being or becoming overweight during pregnancy can have potential health risks for moms, there are also hints that it may tip the scales for their kids to develop psychiatric disorders like autism or depression, which often affects one gender more than the other.

What hasn’t been understood however is how the accumulation of fat tissue in mom might signal through the placenta in a sex-specific way and rearrange the developing offspring’s brain.

To fill this gap, Duke postdoctoral researcher Alexis Ceasrine, Ph.D., and her team in the lab of Duke psychology & neuroscience professor Staci Bilbo, Ph.D., studied pregnant mice on a high-fat diet. In findings appearing November 28 in the journal Nature Metabolism, they found that mom’s high-fat diet triggers immune cells in the developing brains of male but not female mouse pups to overconsume the mood-influencing brain chemical serotonin, leading to depressed-like behavior.

Dec 3, 2022

Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer

Posted by in categories: cosmology, holograms, quantum physics, robotics/AI

Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space.

The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature.

The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel “wormhole teleportation protocol” using Google’s quantum computer, a device called Sycamore housed at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, California. With this first-of-its-kind “quantum gravity experiment on a chip,” as Spiropulu described it, she and her team beat a competing group of physicists who aim to do wormhole teleportation with IBM and Quantinuum’s quantum computers.”

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Dec 3, 2022

FDA approved a 1st-of-its-kind treatment made from human poop. What does it do?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food

The only time might be willing to take shit off someone.


— Cancer patients weren’t responding to therapy. Then they got a poop transplant.

— The same exact foods affect each person’s gut bacteria differently.

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