Cigarette smoking is overwhelmingly the main cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. A study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published online on April 11, 2022, in Nature Genetics suggests that some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations. The findings could help identify those smokers who face an increased risk for the disease and therefore warrant especially close monitoring.
“This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the current herculean efforts needed to battle late-stage disease, where the majority of health expenditures and misery occur,” said Simon Spivack, M.D., M.P.H., a co-senior author of the study, professor of medicine, of epidemiology & population health, and of genetics at Einstein, and a pulmonologist at Montefiore Health System.
New research suggests that socioeconomic hardship during childhood leaves children vulnerable to lower cognitive ability in adolescence and increased trait anxiety during adulthood. The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, further suggest that these effects are driven by the recruitment of the right lateral prefrontal cortex.
Growing up in poverty can have negative repercussions on mental health. For example, children who grow up in socioeconomic deprivation demonstrate lower cognitive ability and report higher trait anxiety as young adults. Researchers Pavla Čermáková and her team launched a study to investigate this interplay between early socioeconomic difficulty, cognitive ability, and trait anxiety and to shed light on the neural mechanism behind these relationships.
“I have always found fascinating how early life influences our mental health when we are adults. I see a huge opportunity for prevention of later mental disorders if we focus on what is happening in the earliest stages of human life,” Čermáková, an associate professor at Charles University in Prague and head of the Department of Epidemiology at the Second Faculty of Medicine.
PG&E announced that they have turned on their giant Tesla Megapack project with 730 MWh of capacity, and the electric grid company expects that it will “enhance the overall reliability of California’s ever-changing energy supply.”
We first learned of the project at PG&E’s Moss Landing substation when it submitted it to CPUC and the company was in talks with Tesla in 2017. It involves four separate energy storage projects, and two of them, including the one using Tesla Megapack, should become the world’s largest battery systems.
In 2018, we obtained Tesla’s proposal for the project, and it showed that the company plans to use “Megapack” instead of its usual Powerpack for large utility-scale projects. It was one of the first projects announced to use the new battery system, but the actual deployment took so much time that many more Megapack projects came online since.
MetaMask has published a warning for their iOS users about the seeds of cryptocurrency wallets being stored in Apple’s iCloud if app data backup is active.
MetaMask is a “hot” cryptocurrency wallet used by over 21 million investors to store their wallet tokens and manage their digital assets.
In cryptocurrency lingo, a seed is a secret recovery phrase consisting of 12 words that protect access to the wallet’s content.
The Hubble space telescope has a primary mirror of 2.4 meters. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope also has a mirror measuring 2.4 meters, and the James Webb Space Telescope has a whopping 6.5 meter primary mirror. They get the job done that they were designed to do, but what if… we could have even bigger mirrors?
The larger the mirror, the more light is collected. This means that we can see farther back in time with bigger mirrors to observe star and galaxy formation, image exoplanets directly, and work out just what dark matter is.
But the process for creating a mirror is involved and takes time. There is casting the mirror blank to get the basic shape. Then you have to toughen the glass by heating and slow cooling. Grinding the glass down and polishing it into its perfect shape comes next followed by testing and coating the lens. This isn’t so bad for smaller lenses, but we want bigger. Much bigger.
Remote work is expanding into many other areas besides office work. Robots and remote-control technology make a greater range of tasks possible, from stocking convenience stores, to operating heavy machinery and even serving as a labor force in space. A key advantage of remote-controlled robots is that they do not require the kind of complex programming found in automated robots, such as industrial robots that work in factories. This means that remote-controlled robots are more flexible, easily adapting to work that cannot be programmed. Greater use of this technology can allow robots to take over dangerous and exhausting work, subsequently helping to deal with labor shortages and improve work environments. In this episode, we’ll look at the forefront of remote robotics, and see examples of how this technology could transform work.
Perovskites, which have shown enormous potential as a new semiconductor for solar cells, are gaining attention as well as a potential next-generation technology to also power spacefaring missions. As scientists around the globe continue efforts toward harnessing the potential of perovskites on Earth, others are looking into how well the technology might work in the planet’s orbit.
A collaborative research effort to collectively address this important issue involving scientists from the National Renewable Laboratory (NREL) lays out guidelines to test the radiation-tolerating properties of perovskites intended for use in space.
“Radiation is not really a concern on Earth, but becomes increasingly intense as we move to higher and higher altitudes,” said Ahmad Kirmani, a postdoctoral researcher at NREL and lead author of the new paper, “Countdown to perovskite space launch: Guidelines to performing relevant radiation-hardness experiments,” which appears in Joule.
Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria — Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D., Chief of Research & Development, and Kevin Outterson, ESQ., Executive Director, CARB-X.
The Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X — https://carb-x.org/) is a global non-profit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address drug-resistant bacteria, a leading cause of death around the world. 1.27 million deaths worldwide were attributed to resistant bacterial infections in 2019.
The CARB-X portfolio is the world’s most scientifically diverse, early development pipeline of new antibiotics, vaccines, rapid diagnostics and other products and represents the only global partnership that integrates solutions for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections, translating innovation from basic research to first-in-human clinical trials.
Dr. Erin Duffy, PhD., is Chief of Research & Development at CARB-X and she has two decades of drug-discovery and problem-solving experience in the antibiotic arena. She was previously with Rib-X Pharmaceuticals (now Melinta Therapeutics) where in increasing roles she helped to build and sustain a team of researchers that translated the company’s scientific platform into next-generation and novel antibiotics that target the ribosome. Her team’s most recent achievements include the de novo design and optimization of a completely new class of antibiotics, the pyrrolocytosines, which were supported in part by CARB-X. Prior to Rib-X, Erin was the Associate Director of Innovative Discovery Technologies at Achillion Pharmaceuticals, responsible for building the structure and computational teams and platform for their antiviral efforts. She began her industrial career at Pfizer Central Research, in Groton, Connecticut, where she joined a team of computational and structural drug designers in multiple therapeutic areas. Erin was trained formally at Yale University, where she became a physical-organic chemist focused on defining computationally how small molecules interact and react in the group of Professor William L. Jorgensen. She expanded her experience to large molecules under the mentorship of Professor Axel Brunger, whose group at Yale was transitioning to a mix of computational and laboratory structural biology.
Kevin Outterson, ESQ., is Executive Director of CARB-X and is a global thought leader on business models for antibiotic development and use. He is Professor of Law and N. Neil Pike Scholar of Health and Disability Law at Boston University School of Law, where he leads multi-disciplinary teams to solve global health issues. Professor Outterson is the Executive Director and Principal Investigator of CARB-X and a partner in DRIVE-AB (aka Driving Reinvestment In Research And Development And Responsible Antibiotic Use) a project composed of 15 public and 7 private partners from 12 countries that is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) joint undertaking between the European Union and the European Pharmaceutical Industry Association (EFPIA). He also leads the Social Innovation on Drug Resistance program at Boston University.
Targeting Root Causes Of Diseases And Aging — Dr. Andrew Adams, Ph.D., Vice President, Neurodegeneration Research; Co-Director, Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine, Eli Lilly.
Dr. Andrew Adams, Ph.D. is Vice President of Neurodegeneration Research at Eli Lilly (https://www.lilly.com/) and Co-Director of their new Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine (https://lilly.mediaroom.com/2022-02-22-Lilly-Announc…ort-Site), a $700 million initiative to establish an institute for researching and developing genetic medicines, specifically acting at the nucleic acid level, to advance an entirely new drug class that target the root cause of diseases, an approach that is fundamentally different than medicines available today.
In this role, Dr. Adams will be responsible for leading the discovery of various new types of therapies, via both internal research, and robust collaborations with external partners.
These novel approaches will also allow Lilly access to previously “undruggable” targets across the breath of therapeutic areas at Lilly, as well as potentially opening up novel avenues of clinical investigation.
In addition to these major roles, Dr. Adams over the recent years also took on scientific leadership of Lilly’s COVID-19 neutralizing antibody projects, as well as serving as Vice President for Lilly Genetic Medicine, and during his time at Lilly has served in roles across early discovery, external innovation, and as a leader of Lilly’s early trailblazer teams, championing new ways to bring Lilly science to patients with speed.
