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Our gut microbiome helps us out every day by processing the fiber we can’t digest. The bacteria ferment the fiber into key chemicals known as short-chain fatty acids, or SCFAs, that are essential for human health. SCFAs fight inflammation, help kill dangerous bacteria, protect the lining of the gut, and can even help prevent cancer.

In a new study, the John Denu lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery has learned that the fatty acids butyrate and propionate also activate p300, a crucial human enzyme that promotes the unspooling of DNA. This unwound DNA allows more genes to become active and expressed, which ultimately affects human health.

A study by Wisconsin Institute for Discovery researchers challenges long-held beliefs, with potential implications for physiological processes and diseases such as propionic acidemia, autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.

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Down syndrome is the most common genetic disorder, impacting about 1 in 700 newborns around the world. At some point during their first hours and days of embryonic development, their dividing cells fail to properly wriggle a chromosome pair away from each other, leaving an extra copy where it shouldn’t be. Although scientists have known for more than six decades that this extra copy of chromosome 21 causes the cognitive impairment people with Down syndrome experience, exactly how it happens remains a matter of debate.

But in recent years, scientists using new RNA sequencing techniques to study cells from pairs of twins — one with Down syndrome and one without — have repeatedly turned up a curious pattern. It wasn’t just the genes on chromosome 21 that had been cranked way up in individuals with Down syndrome. Across every chromosome, gene expression had gone haywire. Something else was going on.

On Thursday, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported in Cell Stem Cell that it may have found a surprising culprit: senescent cells, the same types implicated in many diseases of aging. The study was small and preliminary, and some experts want to see it replicated in samples from more individuals before buying into its interpretations. But they are nevertheless intriguing.

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At the touch of a button, the car changes colors.

The surface coating of the BMW iX Flow featuring E Ink contains many millions of microcapsules, with a diameter equivalent to the thickness of a human hair. Each of these microcapsules contains negatively charged white pigments and positively charged black pigments. Depending on the chosen setting, stimulation by means of an electrical field causes either the white or the black pigments to collect at the surface of the microcapsule, giving the car body the desired shade.

Just don’t expect to see this at your local BMW dealership anytime soon: the automaker says this is just an “advanced research and design project.”

The innovative paint scheme can be triggered at the touch of a button. Right now, the colors are limited to white, black, and grey. But despite the constrained palette, BMW says it could have implications for the efficiency of its electric vehicles.

Continue reading “BMW debuts its new color-changing paint technology at CES: E Ink” | >

Even though solid state batteries are seen as technology that could drastically improve today’s fully-electric vehicles, it seems the first vehicles to feature one won’t actually be EVs. This is at least true in Toyota’s case since the manufacturer has now confirmed that its first solid state-equipped vehicles will be hybrids expected to debut in two or three years’ time.

The news comes from Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist and head of the Toyota Research Institute, who made the announcement during an interview for Autoline. He also mentioned that the manufacturer has made progress with its solid state project and that development is on schedule.

He did not say which hybrid Toyota will get a solid state battery, but he did go on to explain why it won’t immediately offer solid state EVs. The main reason has to do with the size of the battery pack, which for a hybrid vehicle that still has an internal combustion engine, is considerably smaller than what you see in pure EVs.

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Watch James Webb Space Telescope experts give real-time updates on the final step in the observatory’s deployment: the unfolding of the second of Webb’s two primary mirror wings. Engineers in mission control will send commands to deploy the wing and latch it into place, a process that takes several hours. The deployment will complete the mirror’s golden honeycomb-like structure, and will mark the end of an unprecedented 14-day unfolding process.

Webb launched on Dec. 25, 2021 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. An international collaboration with NASA partners including the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, it’s the most powerful and complex space telescope ever built. The mission is managed from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

For about the next six months, Webb will cool down, calibrate its instruments, and align its 18 primary mirror segments so it can begin to #UnfoldTheUniverse.

Track Webb in space: https://go.nasa.gov/whereiswebb.

Continue reading “James Webb Space Telescope: Primary Mirror Deployment — Mission Control Live” | >

Princess Cruises’ ship was at centre of 2020 outbreak in Sydney which resulted in over 900 cases and 28 deaths.

The Ruby Princess cruise ship sparked concerns about a Covid-19 outbreak in San Francisco after a dozen passengers were reported to test positive.

It is nearly two years since a Covid outbreak when the ship docked in Sydney resulting in over 900 infections and 28 deaths.

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Astronomers were first alerted to the star’s unusual activity 130 days before it went supernova. Bright radiation was detected in the summer of 2020 by the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS telescope on Maui’s Haleakalā.

Then, in the fall of that year, the researchers witnessed a supernova in the same spot.

They observed it using the W.M. Keck Observatory’s Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on Maunakea, Hawai’i, and named the supernova 2020tlf. Their observations revealed that there was material around the star when it exploded — the bright gas that the star violently kicked away from itself over the summer.

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Originally published on Towards AI the World’s Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses.

Could a human be the very thing he feared?

In this article, we will see that human beings are actually an advanced artificial intelligence that escaped the engineering of evolution. The story of a disobedient species that rebelled against nature and evolution after gaining consciousness and general abilities.

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