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Sep 8, 2020

New Graphene-Based SuperBattery To Charge In 15 Seconds

Posted by in category: materials

Skeleton Technologies, a ultracapacitor speclialist, announced that together with the KIT, is working on a new groundbreaking graphene SuperBattery.

Sep 8, 2020

Facebook focuses on smart audio for AR glasses

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, virtual reality

Inspirational speaker and Amazon best-selling author Sanjo Jendayi once said, “Listening doesn’t always equate to hearing. Hearing doesn’t always lead to understanding, but active listening helps each person truly ‘see’ the other.”

Jendayi was providing a little philosophical advice during a motivational speech, and technology was likely the last thing on her mind. But her words in fact might best describe the notion behind groundbreaking advances by the Facebook Reality Labs Research (FRLR) team’s top scientists, programmers and designers.

A post on the FRLR web site last week provided a peek into where the social media giant is heading in the world of augmented reality and virtual reality.

Sep 8, 2020

A robot that controls highly flexible tools

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

How do you calculate the coordinated movements of two robot arms so they can accurately guide a highly flexible tool? ETH researchers have integrated all aspects of the optimisation calculations into an algorithm. A hot-wire cutter will be used, among other things, to develop building blocks for a mortar-free structure.

A newborn moves its arms and hands largely in an undirected and random manner. It has to learn how to coordinate them step by step. Years of practice are required to master the finely balanced movements of a violinist or calligrapher. It is therefore no surprise that the advanced calculations for the optimal movement of two robot arms to guide a tool precisely involve extremely challenging optimisation tasks. The complexity also increases greatly when the tool itself is not rigid, but flexible in all directions and bends differently depending on its position and movement.

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Sep 8, 2020

The Brain Can Induce Diabetes Remission in Rodents, but How?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience

Summary: Researchers demonstrate how a single injection of fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1) can restore blood sugar levels to normal for extended periods in rodent models of type 2 diabetes. Studies show how FGF1 affects specific neurons and perineuronal nets to help restore blood sugar levels to normal, thus sending diabetes into remission.

Source: UW Health

In rodents with type 2 diabetes, a single surgical injection of a protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 can restore blood sugar levels to normal for weeks or months. Yet how this growth factor acts in the brain to generate this lasting benefit has been poorly understood.

Sep 8, 2020

Bursting Earth’s Bubble

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI, space

An alert pops up in your email: The latest spacecraft observations are ready. You now have 24 hours to scour 84 hours-worth of data, selecting the most promising split-second moments you can find. The data points you choose, depending on how you rank them, will download from the spacecraft in the highest possible resolution; researchers may spend months analyzing them. Everything else will be overwritten like it was never collected at all.

These are the stakes facing the Scientist in the Loop, one of the most important roles on the Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission team. Seventy-three volunteers share the responsibility, working weeklong shifts at a time to ensure the very best data makes it to the ground. It takes a keen and meticulous eye, which is why it’s always been left to a carefully-trained human – at least until now.

A paper published recently in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences describes the first artificial intelligence algorithm to lend the Scientist in the Loop a (virtual) hand.

Sep 8, 2020

A Quantum Culture Shift

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

To maintain its leadership in quantum computing technology, the US must embrace a culture shift that fuses three important elements: science, a roadmap, and agility.

Sep 8, 2020

Men may have a slower immune response to the coronavirus than women, and that could explain their higher mortality rates

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Men’s delayed immune-system responses to the coronavirus could put them at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than women, according to a study from University of Washington researchers. They found that, for women under the age of 60, their immune systems produced a near immediate defense against the virus. However, for men of all ages, it took an average of three days for their bodies to deploy T cells (white blood cells that sense and destroy virus-infected cells) to fight the novel coronavirus. note: estrogen and progesterone are in clinical trials as treatment, along with over 300 drugs.


It took three days for men infected with COVID-19 to develop immune system responses, while women’s bodies began to fight the virus right away.

Sep 8, 2020

World must be better prepared for next pandemic, WHO says

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

The head of the World Health Organisation has called on countries to invest in their public health systems, as he stressed that the world must be better prepared for the next pandemic.

“This will not be the last pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference Monday, “but when the next pandemic comes, the world must be ready, more ready than it was this time.”

He said too many countries had neglected their basic public health systems in recent years and called on governments to “invest in public health as an investment in a healthier and safer future.”

Sep 8, 2020

New structural unit simplifies the process of custom-designing proteins

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

The new structure works by mapping the backbones of amino acids to locations of chemicals in the Protein Data Bank involved in interactions with them. The researchers note that only recently has the data bank come to hold enough information to allow for its use in such an application. And they also note that the technique and structure can also be used to produce delivery vehicles based on proteins and also small molecule applications…


A pair of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, has developed a new protein structure that allows for simplifying the process of custom-designing proteins. In their paper published in the journal Science, Nicholas Polizzi and William DeGrado discuss their structural unit and how they used it. Anna Peacock, with the University of Birmingham, has published a Perspective piece outlining the work by the team in California in the same journal issue.

One of the things that chemists are asked to do is custom design proteins for use in certain special applications. As the researchers note, doing so is considered to be very challenging. It usually involves a considerable amount of trial and error which generally translates to high development costs. In this new effort, the researchers have devised a new unit of to help with such projects. They call it a van der Mer and describe how it can be used to directly map ligand chemical group functionality to peptide residue backbone coordinates.

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Sep 8, 2020

Dietary AGE Products Impact Insulin Resistance, Inflammation, And Lifespan

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, health

Here’s my latest video!


Cooking foods at temperatures higher than boiling produces advanced glycation end (AGE) products, which induce insulin resistance and inflammation, and shorten lifespan in mice. Similar data exists in humans for the effect of AGE products on insulin resistance and inflammation, and a higher dietary AGE product intake is associated with cancer in both men and women. Accordingly, reducing dietary AGE product intake may be an important strategy for improving health and increasing lifespan in people.