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Tohid Didar and Jeff Weitz had a solution, but they also had a problem.

Didar, an associate professor of engineering and Weitz, a hematologist, professor of medicine and executive director of the Thrombosis & Atherosclerosis Research Institute, had collaborated to create a novel and highly promising material to improve the success of vascular grafts, but they needed a better way to test how well it worked.

Their revolutionary idea was an engineered non-stick surface combined with biological components that can repel all but a targeted group of cells — those that form the natural lining of the body’s veins and arteries.

Making room for optimism.


2bsirius video about:
Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For Shermer:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shermers-last-law.
Full text of Shermers article:

Shermer’s Last Law

For background on Arthur C. Clarke:

Today, Deep Longevity, a company will launch its new software as a service (SaaS) antiaging platform, SenoClock. The culmination of years of biogerontological research, SenoClock will host all of Deep Longevity’s patented aging clocks that may be used in clinical practice and other healthcare-adjacent industries.

Aging clocks available on the platform will allow its users to receive comprehensive and actionable pace of aging reports based on various data types, such as blood tests, psychological surveys, gut flora composition and more.

Longevity. Technology: Hospitals and clinics are mostly reactive when it comes to treatment, a practice that is partly due to infrastructure and partly due to human nature. However, as we discussed in our interview with Sir John Bell earlier this week, prevention must be the new paradigm and its one that better serves individuals, healthcare systems and populations as a whole. Deep Longevity’s new product SenoClock unlocks a preventive, longevity-focused mode of healthcare; a new SaaS platform, SenoClock offers physicians a single portal in which to track the aging rate of their patients, enabling them to generate personalised health plans.

A tantalizing signal reported by the XENON1T dark matter experiment has sparked theorists to investigate explanations involving new physics.

On June 16, 2020, the collaboration running XENON1T—one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors—reported a signal it couldn’t explain (see today’s accompanying article, Viewpoint: Dark Matter Detector Delivers Enigmatic Signal). The signal has yet to reach the “5-sigma” bar for discovery, and a mundane explanation could still be the culprit. But theorists have been quick to explore whether exotic particles or interactions might be involved. Physical Review Letters followed a special procedure to get a coherent expert review of the proposals it received. Now, the journal is publishing five papers that represent the breadth of theories being pursued.

All of the reported scenarios explain two aspects of the signal, which was produced in the huge vat of ultrapure xenon that makes up XENON1T’s detector. First, the signal looks like it came from particles that collided mostly with the xenon atoms’ electrons. And second, each of these interactions dumped a few keV into the atom.