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Boosting telomerase activity slows lung cell aging in pulmonary fibrosis study

Pulmonary fibrosis—also known in technical terms as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF)—is a rare but life-threatening disease. It causes scarring of the connective tissue between the functional tissue of the lungs, leading to increasing shortness of breath. Current treatments can slow the progression of fibrosis, but cannot cure it. The average life expectancy after diagnosis is only four to six years. New therapies are therefore urgently needed.

A research team led by Professor Christian Bär, research group leader at the Institute for Molecular and Translational Therapy Strategies at Hannover Medical School (MHH), and his colleague Dr. Shambhabi Chatterjee has turned its attention to the interior of cells, or more precisely to telomeres. These are protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, the carriers of our genetic information.

With each cell division, the telomeres shorten a little until they reach a critical length and the genes they protect could be damaged. Then the cell stops dividing and the tissue ages.

Perovskite photovoltaics prepare for their time in the sun

To capture more of the Sun’s spectrum, Steve Albrecht of the Technical University of Berlin and the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy added a third layer of perovskite to make a so-called triple-junction cell, which could potentially offer even higher efficiencies. “It is truly a product of the future,” he says.

Other researchers are teaming perovskites with organic solar cells, forming flexible tandems suitable for indoor applications, or to cover vehicles. Yi Hou of the National University of Singapore points out that the perovskite layer filters ultraviolet light that would damage the organic cell. His team made a flexible perovskite–organic tandem5 with a record efficiency of 26.7%, and he is commercializing the technology through his company Singfilm Solar.

Despite the promising efficiency results, there was broad consensus at the conference that long-term stability is the field’s most pressing issue. Collaboration between researchers from academia, industry and national labs will be vital to fix that, says Marina Leite at the University of California, Davis: “We can work together to finally resolve the problem of stability in perovskites and truly enable this technology in the near future.”

Rayleigh scattering

RAY-lee) is the scattering or deflection of light, or other electromagnetic radiation, by particles with a size much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. For light frequencies well below the resonance frequency of the scattering medium (normal dispersion regime), the amount of scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength (e.g., a blue color is scattered much more than a red color as light propagates through air). The phenomenon is named after the 19th-century British physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt). [ 1 ].

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