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Top environmental fund sees Japan key to AI energy challenge
Asia’s best-performing environmental fund has increased exposure to Japan as it expects the nation’s technology sector to prove increasingly pivotal in solving the artificial intelligence industry’s surging power demands.
The BNP Paribas Green Tigers Fund has returned 34% year-to-date, fueled by bets on Japanese equities that sit at the core of its stock-selection strategy, said Oscar Yang, senior portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management. The $208 million portfolio was the top-performing “dark green” strategy, the EU’s highest sustainability classification, in Asia through June 30, Bloomberg-compiled data show.
“A lot of the Japanese companies are so unique and they’re to some extent almost at a monopoly position,” Yang said. “If you cut Japanese companies’ products out of your supply chain, you just basically can’t operate, especially for leading-edge capacity.”
A Russian spy, suddenly cast into the spotlight, flees Japan
A Russian spy at the center of a secret operation to smuggle high-tech weapon components into Russia has left Japan after his activities were disclosed by The New York Times, a senior Ukrainian intelligence official said Thursday.
The operative, Maksim Vladimirovich Filchenkov, 49, had been working undercover in Japan as an employee of Russian state airline Aeroflot. Filchenkov’s role had been the focus of a Times investigation into how Russia exploited Japan’s weak espionage laws.
Filchenkov’s departure was first reported by the Yomiuri Shimbun, a major national newspaper in Japan. The newspaper said the Russian exited Japan after the Times published its investigation July 12. The Ukrainian official who confirmed the spy’s departure did so on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss intelligence publicly.
Synergistic senolyticregenerative therapy significantly extends healthspan and lifespan Translational Medicine
Current barriers to achieving radical life extension include the inability to use syngeneic, youthful mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and the anti-regenerative effects of senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) factors. We aim to overcome this by a combination approach in which senescent cell burden is reduced utilizing SenoVax™ a dendritic cell based senolytic immunotherapy combined with syngeneic pluripotent stem cell derived MSC.
We induced hepatic injury and accelerated aging using two established murine models: carbon tetrachloride (CCl₄) mediated liver injury and doxorubicin induced systemic senescence. Animals were treated with control, SenoVax, pMSCs or the combination. Outcomes included biochemical and histologic indices of liver injury, circulating and tissue biomarkers of senescence (IL-11, YKL-40, IL-6, IL-23 R) and regeneration (Klotho, FGF-2, neo-VEGF, GDF-11).
Both CCl₄ and doxorubicin induced a robust senescent phenotype characterized by increased pro-inflammatory and pro-fibrotic mediators and downregulation of regenerative biomarkers. Combined senolytic and pMSC therapy outperformed mono therapies and produced clear synergistic benefits, including significant biochemical improvement of liver failure parameters, reversal of accelerated aging features, and restoration of regenerative signaling pathways. Senolytic monotherapy yielded partial improvements, while pMSCs alone showed limited activity in the presence of a high senescent-cell burden.
Neutrophilderived itaconate facilitates tiered pulmonary inflammation via Kdm5bassociated epigenetic remodeling in alveolar macrophages
Lim et al. identify neutrophil-derived itaconate as a key environmental factor shaping tiered inflammatory responses in ALI. Itaconate metabolically promotes KDM5B-associated epigenetic activation of proinflammatory genes in alveolar macrophages, coordinating later-stage immune cell infiltration, including monocytes and T cells.
Wireless skin sensor could continuously track soft tissue disorders from home
Northwestern scientists have developed a novel wireless sensor device that can continuously monitor skin elasticity in patients with soft tissue disorders, including lymphedema and scleroderma, which can support early disease detection and better inform care strategies, as detailed in a study published in Science Advances.
The sensor, which is directly applied to the patient’s skin, can measure a patient’s tissue elasticity and then wirelessly transmit critical disease-progression data, enabling a health care provider to remotely access that data from the patient’s home and potentially eliminating the need for an in-person clinical examination.
“The great thing about the sensor is it’s small, the potential for home use is tremendous, and for patients who know that they are at risk and know that they need to be constantly monitoring and detecting, this could give them a really good home-based unit that could potentially communicate data directly to their physician. That’s our goal,” said Ann Marie Flores, PT, MSPT, MA, Ph.D., CLT, FAPTA, associate professor of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences and of Medical Social Sciences in the Division of Implementation Science, who was a co-corresponding author of the study.
Did The Future Already Happen? — The Quantum Mystery That Terrifies Physicists
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