Lifeboat Foundation

Exercise: Good for your mind, body, and telomeres!

Introduction: Telomeres are DNA portions that are located on the two ends of the chromosome. Telomeres play an important role in cellular life. Exercise is one of the factors that contributes to their control. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of 8 weeks of high intensity interval training (HIIT) on telomere length and telomerase activity in non-athletic young men. Materials and methods: 30 inactive students were selected as sample and randomly divided into two groups of exercise (15 people) and control (15 people) in this semi-experimental study. The exercise group performed 8 weeks of HIIT exercise in 3 sessions per week with an intensity of 150 to 175% of their maximum power (Pmax). Control group subjects did not do regular sport activities. To measure telomere length and telomerase activity, 10 ml of blood was taken from the brachial vein of the subjects 24 hours before the first and after the last exercise session. The dependent t was used to analyze intra-group and independent t for within-group differences. Results: The findings of this study showed that 8 weeks of HIIT training in non-athlete young men resulted in a significant increase in telomere length (P = 0.001) and telomerase activity (P = 0.001). Conclusion: It seems that HIIT can alter telomerase activity and telomere length. Therefore, these training may have a positive effect on cell biology.

A technique developed at Western University to visually iron out the wrinkles and folds in one region of the brain may provide researchers a more accurate picture to understand brain disorders.

Continue reading “Unfolding the hippocampus” »

Intel is matching foundry rival, TSMC, node-for-node with its new process naming convention, but has also fired the first shot in the race for sub-nanometer terminology. Below 1nm, we’re moving into what it’s now calling the ‘angstrom era of semiconductors’.

At the Intel Accelerated event CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has unveiled a detailed process roadmap for its future nodes, all tied into a new way to reference them. “We are accelerating our innovation roadmap to ensure we are on a clear path to process performance leadership by 2025,” he says.

The U.S. dollar remains the world’s de facto monetary reserve, but with China going full speed ahead with its digital yuan, that could be in jeopardy. Researchers are digging into regulated online money called Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs, and what that could look like in the U.S.

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Continue reading “Could China Dethrone The U.S. Dollar With A Digital Yuan?” »

Humanity has a plastic problem, but who said the problem couldn’t also be tasty? Scientists are trying to come up with creative solutions to address the ever-growing issue every day, with some even converting plastic bottles into vanillin using bacteria. Most recently, two scientists have echoed this sentiment and won the $1.18 million (1 million euro) 2021 Future Insight Prize in the process by creating a food ‘generator’ concept that turns plastics into protein.

The names behind the project, which was initially funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cooperative agreement award for $7.2 million over four years, are Ting Lu, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Stephen Techtmann, associate professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University.

Their goal was to improve a process for converting plastic trash into protein powder and lubricants using a combination of chemicals and high heat (pyrolysis). The two scientists call their project a food ‘generator.’

Satya Nadella’s Microsoft has become easier for companies to work with, it hasn’t made deals that went bad, and its Teams and Azure assets are now common.

Artificially designed, amyloid-silk hybrid protein developed in Zhang lab even outperforms some spider silks.

Spider silk is said to be one of the strongest, toughest materials on the Earth. Now engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed amyloid silk hybrid proteins and produced them in engineered bacteria. The resulting fibers are stronger and tougher than some natural spider silks.

Their research was published in the journal ACS Nano.

Some of the greatest mysteries in cosmology revolve around antimatter, and it’s hard to study because it’s rare and hard to produce in the lab. Now a team of physicists has outlined a relatively simple new way to create antimatter, by firing two lasers at each other to reproduce the conditions near a neutron star, converting light into matter and antimatter.

In principle, antimatter sounds simple – it’s just like regular matter, except its particles have the opposite charge. That basic difference has some major implications though: if matter and antimatter should ever meet, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy. In fact, that should have destroyed the universe billions of years ago, but obviously that didn’t happen. So how did matter come to dominate? What tipped the scales in its favor? Or, where did all the antimatter go?

Unfortunately, antimatter’s scarcity and instability make it difficult to study to help answer those questions. It’s naturally produced under extreme conditions, such as lightning strikes, or near black holes and neutron stars, and artificially in huge facilities like the Large Hadron Collider.

For 2 decades, physicists have strived to miniaturize particle accelerators—the huge machines that serve as atom smashers and x-ray sources. That effort just took a big step, as physicists in China used a small “plasma wakefield accelerator” to power a type of laser called a free-electron laser (FEL). The 12-meter-long FEL isn’t nearly as good as its kilometers-long predecessors. Still, other researchers say the experiment marks a major advance in miniaccelerators.

Experiment demonstrates improvement in particle beams from plasma-based accelerators.