Bill Andrews gives us the simplest definition of aging as well as what he thinks to be accomplished to really admit aging has been cured.
This is an excerpt of a presentation he made last year at the NHIMA. See the description of the video for details.
Not sure if this is new or not. We all know about the Carrington event, but it looks like tree rings reveal a number of much more massive events in the past 10,000 years — perhaps 10 times as strong as the Carrington event, perhaps 100 times or more. (This particular article only references the lower estimates.)
Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the Sun.
The search for a fountain of youth has obsessed humankind for millennia, but a new wave of research is showing that the secret may have been running through our veins all along.
Feeding the world uses enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, pesticide, and fuel. In a step towards a more sustainable solution, researchers have designed a method to make starches from carbon dioxide more efficiently than plants do (Science 2,021 DOI: 10.1126/science.abh4049).
The new technique, which relies on chemical catalysts and a curated combination of natural and engineered enzymes, converts CO2 to starch 8.5 times as efficiently as corn plants can.
The advance hints at sustainable, efficient factory production of food and industrial chemicals by.
Continue reading “New method makes starch from CO₂ faster than plants can” »
Last year, computer engineers from Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play.
The same team now introduces a new platform that enables makers, hobbyists and novice programmers to build their own battery-free electronic devices that run with intermittent, harvested energy.
Continue reading “Now everyone can build battery-free electronic devices” »
SARS-CoV-2 remains a global threat to human health particularly as escape mutants emerge. There is an unmet need for effective treatments against COVID-19 for which neutralizing single domain antibodies (nanobodies) have significant potential. Their small size and stability mean that nanobodies are compatible with respiratory administration. We report four nanobodies (C5, H3, C1, F2) engineered as homotrimers with pmolar affinity for the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Crystal structures show C5 and H3 overlap the ACE2 epitope, whilst C1 and F2 bind to a different epitope. Cryo Electron Microscopy shows C5 binding results in an all down arrangement of the Spike protein. C1, H3 and C5 all neutralize the Victoria strain, and the highly transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7 first identified in Kent, UK) strain and C1 also neutralizes the Beta (B.1.35, first identified in South Africa). Administration of C5-trimer via the respiratory route showed potent therapeutic efficacy in the Syrian hamster model of COVID-19 and separately, effective prophylaxis. The molecule was similarly potent by intraperitoneal injection.
Neutralizing nanobodies bind SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD and block interaction with ACE2. Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 27 846–854 (2020).
Last year, physicists reported that an experimental dark matter detector picked up a strange signal that could hint at new physics, with several suspects highlighted. Now, Cambridge scientists have proposed an answer that wasn’t considered at the time – the experiment may have picked up the first direct detection of dark energy, the mysterious force that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Although it’s thought to outnumber regular matter five to one, dark matter remains elusive. It doesn’t interact with light and seems to mostly make itself known through gravitational influence on cosmic scales, like stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. But once in a while, a dark matter particle might bump into a regular matter particle in a way that we could detect, with the right equipment.
XENON1T was one version of that equipment. Running in Italy between 2016 and 2,018 the experiment was essentially a big tank full of liquid xenon, kept deep underground. The idea was that if a dark matter particle zipped through the tank, it would excite the xenon atoms to produce a flash of light and free electrons, which a suite of sensors can detect.
Circa 2020
Like watching a movie in reverse, physicists have just demonstrated a new technique for the time-reversal of a wave of optical light.
Continue reading “Physicists Create Time-Reversed Waves of Optical Light in Head-Spinning First” »
Thu, Sep 30 at 4 PM PDT.
Black holes are cosmic objects so small and dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Until recently, no one had ever seen what a black hole actually looked like. Einstein’s theories predict that a distant observer should see a ring of light encircling the black hole, which forms when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity near the event horizon. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global array of radio dishes, linked together by a network of atomic clocks to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope that can resolve the nearest supermassive black holes where this ring feature may be measured. On April 10th, 2,019 the EHT project reported success: we imaged a black hole, and saw the predicted strong gravitational lensing that confirms the theory of General Relativity at the boundary of a black hole. This talk will cover how this was accomplished, details of the first results, as well as future directions that will enable real-time black hole movies.
About Dr. Shep Doeleman:
Researchers have rediscovered a century-old cancer treatment, injecting dead bacteria into tumors to help the immune system target and kill the cancerous cells. Preclinical tests and early human trials indicate the treatment is safe and potentially effective.
In the late 19th century a scientist by the name of William Coley suspected an unusual relationship between bacterial infection and cancer remission. Coley began experimenting with different bacterial formulations to treat cancer.
These formulations became known as “Coley’s toxins” and Coley inadvertently, and unknowingly, became a pioneer of cancer immunotherapy. For much of the 20th century Coley’s research was relegated to a footnote in science history. His experiments were somewhat erratic and lacked any standardization, so very few researchers were able to replicate his results.
