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Aug 17, 2021

Brain organoids develop optic cups that respond to light

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be used to generate brain organoids containing an eye structure called the optic cup, according to a study published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Aug 17, 2021

Scientists Brought To Life 100-Million-Year-Old Bacteria That Was Buried Under Marine Snow

Posted by in categories: genetics, life extension

Immortal bacteria genetic mechanisms could be used in crispr to make humans truly Immortal: 3.


Researchers successfully resuscitated bacteria from the South Pacific Gyre that were buried under marine snow for 100 million years.

Aug 17, 2021

Gene therapy uses SIRT6 variant found in centenarians

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

“So many genes are involved in DNA maintenance, FOXO3 for example, which is very interesting, but it cannot be a therapeutic target because it will trigger a lot of other things,” he explains. “SIRT6 is coding for only one protein and, because it’s a small protein, the cargo size is not too big and it can be easily delivered into cells, so it’s possible to use it as a gene therapy target.”

Some of the other factors that play in Genflow’s favour, says Leire, are that the world has reached a better understanding of the biology of aging, but also that gene therapy has also progressed well over the years.

Aug 17, 2021

Scientists Discover That Trees Have A “Heartbeat” Too

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

It seems everyday more and more information is being uncovered about trees and the many mysteries within them. We know that they are alive, but it seems they are even more alive than we may have thought. Trees are interconnected underground, we also now know that trees can communicate with one another, but recently scientists have discovered that trees actually have a sort of heartbeat, it is just so slow that they’ve never noticed before.

Up until recently scientists had thought that water moved through trees by the process of osmosis, in a sort of continuous matter, but now they’ve discovered that the trunks and branches of the trees are actually contracting and expanding and essentially pumping water up from the roots to the leaves, kind of like how our heart pumps blood throughout our bodies.

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Aug 17, 2021

This Guy Didn’t Want to Get a Haircut in Public, So He Built a Robot Barber

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Circa 2020 o.o


While some states have partially reopened and loosened restrictions on barber shops and hair salons, not everyone is ready to head out in public for a haircut just yet. That means many people around the world are still sporting shaggy quarantine cuts.

Continue reading “This Guy Didn’t Want to Get a Haircut in Public, So He Built a Robot Barber” »

Aug 17, 2021

3D Printed Solid-State Battery Rivals Lithium-Ion

Posted by in category: futurism

But start-up Sakuu is tight-lipped on the details.

Aug 17, 2021

Ripples in Saturn’s rings reveal the planet’s giant, slushy core

Posted by in category: space

Saturn’s core is an unexpectedly immense mixture of ice, rock, and gas, surprising scientists who are trying to figure out how the planet formed and evolved to the enigmatic world we see today.


Hidden inside the solar system’s god of plenty is an unexpected bounty: Saturn’s mammoth core, spanning up to 60 percent of the planet’s width. The newly measured core, revealed through subtle waves in Saturn’s rings, appears to be ice, rock, and gas, blended into a soupy mass with blurry edges.

“It’s huge,” says Chris Mankovich of the California Institute of Technology, one of the authors of a new study describing Saturn’s core in the journal Nature Astronomy. “It’s definitely not something we expected to find.”

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Aug 17, 2021

Table-top electron camera catches ultrafast dynamics of matter

Posted by in categories: electronics, particle physics

Scientists at DESY have built a compact electron camera that can capture the inner, ultrafast dynamics of matter. The system shoots short bunches of electrons at a sample to take snapshots of its current inner structure. It is the first such electron diffractometer that uses Terahertz radiation for pulse compression. The developer team around DESY scientists Dongfang Zhang and Franz Kärtner from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL validated their Terahertz-enhanced ultrafast electron diffractometer with the investigation of a silicon sample and present their work in the first issue of the journal Ultrafast Science, a new title in the Science group of scientific journals.

Electron diffraction is one way to investigate the inner structure of matter. However, it does not image the structure directly. Instead, when the electrons hit or traverse a solid sample, they are deflected in a systematic way by the electrons in the solid’s inner lattice. From the pattern of this diffraction, recorded on a detector, the internal lattice structure of the solid can be calculated. To detect dynamic changes in this inner structure, short bunches of sufficiently bright electrons have to be used. “The shorter the bunch, the faster the exposure time,” says Zhang, who is now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “Typically, ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) uses bunch lengths, or exposure times, of some 100 femtoseconds, which is 0.1 trillionths of a second.”

Such short electron bunches can be routinely produced with high quality by state-of-the-art particle accelerators. However, these machines are often large and bulky, partly due to the radio frequency radiation used to power them, which operates in the Gigahertz band. The wavelength of the radiation sets the size for the whole device. The DESY team is now using Terahertz radiation instead with roughly a hundred times shorter wavelengths. “This basically means, the accelerator components, here a bunch compressor, can be a hundred times smaller, too,” explains Kärtner, who is also a professor and a member of the cluster of excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” at the University of Hamburg.

Aug 17, 2021

New clean energy tech extracts twice the power from ocean waves

Posted by in category: energy

Researchers have developed prototype technology that can double the power harvested from ocean waves, in an advance that could finally make wave energy a viable renewable alternative.

The untapped potential of ocean wave is vast—it has been estimated that the power of coastal waves around the world each year is equivalent to annual global electricity production.

But the challenges of developing technologies that can efficiently extract that natural power and withstand the harsh ocean environment have kept wave energy stuck at experimental stage.

Aug 17, 2021

What AI researchers can learn from the self-assembling brain

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, robotics/AI

But one idea that hasn’t gotten enough attention from the AI community is how the brain creates itself, argues Peter Robin Hiesinger, Professor of Neurobiology at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin).

In his book The Self-Assembling Brain, Hiesinger suggests that instead of looking at the brain from an endpoint perspective, we should study how information encoded in the genome is transformed to become the brain as we grow. This line of study might help discover new ideas and directions of research for the AI community.

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