Menu

Blog

Page 5244

Jun 15, 2021

Vegans Diets and Longevity: What Existing Science Actually Says

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, life extension, science

The World Health Organization classifies processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen. Processed meat includes ham, sausage, bacon, pepperoni; they’re meats that have been preserved with salt or smoke, meat that has been cured, and meat treated with chemical preserves. Other Group 1 carcinogens include formaldehyde, tobacco, and UV radiation. Group 1 carcinogens have ‘enough evidence to conclude that it can cause cancer in humans.’


There is no question whether or not our current meat production complex is inhumane, unsanitary, or bad for the environment. Almost all chickens (99.9%), turkeys (99.8%), and most cows (70.4%) eaten in the United States are raised on factory farms. There are horrific consequences to this practice.

For example, the EPA estimates agriculture is the biggest contaminator of rivers and streams, to the point where feedlots, crop production, and manure runoff have led almost half (46%) of the U.S.’s rivers to be “in poor biological condition.”

Continue reading “Vegans Diets and Longevity: What Existing Science Actually Says” »

Jun 15, 2021

100,000 Star Nurseries Mapped in First-Of-Its-Kind Survey

Posted by in categories: habitats, space

Livescience.com|By LiveScience


The five-year survey, conducted across a section of the cosmos known as the nearby universe because of its proximity to our own galaxy, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. By conducting their survey in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, rather than the optical part, the astronomers could focus on the faint glow from the dust and gas of the dark and dense molecular clouds, as opposed to the visible light from the young stars birthed by them.

This allowed the researchers to study how a star’s home cloud shapes its formation.

Jun 15, 2021

American honey contains traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests

Posted by in category: nuclear weapons

Jun 15, 2021

Selenium: How Much Is Optimal For Health?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, life extension

For those who track their diet, eating only the RDA for many nutrients may not optimize health. For example, the RDA for selenium is 55 micrograms per day, but is that amount optimal for reducing risk of death for all causes?


Papers referenced in the video:

Continue reading “Selenium: How Much Is Optimal For Health?” »

Jun 15, 2021

NASA just took another step in getting more private citizens to space

Posted by in category: space

The agency has put out a request for mission proposals to send people to the International Space Station.

Jun 14, 2021

DNA scanning in the palm of your hand

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Circa 2013 o.,.o.


Inked fingerprints on paper forms. We’ve come a long way from the days when that was the height of forensic technology.

GE is light years ahead after launching a breakthrough portable DNA scanner at the 25th World Congress of the International Society for Forensic Genetics in Melbourne in early September.

Continue reading “DNA scanning in the palm of your hand” »

Jun 14, 2021

Facebooks AI Can Copy & Replicate the Style of a Text Using a Picture

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Only one photo is needed to extract the information about the font and imitate it on any other word you choose to type in.

Jun 14, 2021

Scientists Grew Human Cells in Monkey Embryos, and Yes, Its an Ethical Minefield

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

The way the team made the human–monkey embryo is similar to previous attempts at half-human chimeras.

Here’s how it goes. They used de-programmed, or “reverted,” human stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells often start from skin cells, and are chemically treated to revert to the stem cell stage, gaining back the superpower to grow into almost any type of cell: heart, lung, brain…you get the idea. The next step is preparing the monkey component, a fertilized and healthy monkey egg that develops for six days in a Petri dish. By this point, the embryo is ready for implantation into the uterus, which kicks off the whole development process.

This is where the chimera jab comes in. Using a tiny needle, the team injected each embryo with 25 human cells, and babied them for another day. “Until recently the experiment would have ended there,” wrote Drs. Hank Greely and Nita Farahany, two prominent bioethicists who wrote an accompanying expert take, but were not involved in the study.

Jun 14, 2021

Bringing nuclear power to new level: Russia starts building worlds first fast-neutron reactor

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, sustainability

The BREST-OD-300 reactor is planned to start operating in 2026. A fuel production facility will be built by 2023 and the construction of an irradiated fuel reprocessing module is scheduled to start by 2024, Rosatom said. The design of the lead-cooled reactor is based on the principles of so-called natural safety, which makes it possible to abandon the melt trap.


“The successful implementation of this project will allow our country to become the world’s first owner of the nuclear power technology which fully meets the principles of sustainable development in terms of environment, accessibility, reliability, and efficient use of resources,” said Rosatom’s Director General Alexey Likhachev. “Today, we reaffirm our reputation as a leader in world progress in the nuclear technologies, that offers humanity unique solutions aimed at improving people’s lives,” he added.

According to President of the Kurchatov Institute Mikhail Kovalchuk, the project is aimed at bringing nuclear power to a new level.

Jun 14, 2021

Manufacturing silicon qubits at scale

Posted by in categories: chemistry, engineering, finance, information science, quantum physics, supercomputing

Circa 2019


As quantum computing enters the industrial sphere, questions about how to manufacture qubits at scale are becoming more pressing. Here, Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba, Tsung-Yeh Yang and Alessandro Rossi explain why decades of engineering may give silicon the edge.

In the past two decades, quantum computing has evolved from a speculative playground into an experimental race. The drive to build real machines that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics, and to use such machines to solve certain problems much faster than is possible with traditional computers, will have a major impact in several fields. These include speeding up drug discovery by efficiently simulating chemical reactions; better uses of “big data” thanks to faster searches in unstructured databases; and improved weather and financial-market forecasts via smart optimization protocols.

Continue reading “Manufacturing silicon qubits at scale” »