Lifeboat Foundation

“This is a fascinating study of gut microbiome in older adulthood,” wrote Barbara Bendlin from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “While the investigators did not look at brain health or cognitive outcomes, it’s interesting to see that they found that healthy aging was accompanied by gut microbiomes that became increasingly more unique to each person starting in middle age. This type of divergence is also observed in brain aging.” (Full comment below.)

Past studies have shown that the gut microbiome undergoes rapid changes in the first three years of life, followed by a longer period of relative stability, then more change once again in later years (Yatsunenko et al., 2012; O’Toole and Jeffery, 2015). Research has also found that centenarians have fewer of the gut microbes commonly seen in younger, healthy people. Instead, they live with an increasingly rarefied microbiota (Kim et al., 2019). This suggests that gut microbiomes become increasingly personalized as people get older, but little is known about how these gut profiles affect the aging process or longevity.

To find out, first author Tomasz Wilmanski and colleagues analyzed gut microbiomes, personal traits, and clinical data from more than 9000 people 18 to 101 years old. They came from three independent cohorts. One was a group of 3653 people aged 18 to 87 who had signed up with Arivale, a now-defunct scientific wellness company co-founded by systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood and Price. Arivale provided personalized wellness coaching by collecting and analyzing data on participants’ genomes and other systems, including their gut microbiomes. Hood founded the Institute for Systems Biology.

All of us, even physicists, often process information without really knowing what we’re doing.

Russia and China have unveiled plans for a joint lunar space station, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos saying it has signed an agreement with China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) to develop a “complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the moon”.

The CNSA, for its part, said the project was “open to all interested countries and international partners” in what experts said would be China’s biggest international space cooperation project to date.

You’re looking at the real deal images I used to make my pinpoint landing. This is how I quickly got my bearings and picked the safest target in the last three minutes before touchdown.

How it works: go.nasa.gov/3rBUbul

But Aspelmeyer and his colleagues could not declare victory quite yet: they still had to rule out the possibility that the source mass modulation was generating other forces on the test mass that would oscillate at precisely the same frequency. Periodic rocking of the table supporting the experimental apparatus, caused by recoil from the barely visible motion of the source mass, was just one of a host of confounders the researchers had to carefully quantify. In the end, they found that all known nongravitational forces would be at least 10 times smaller than the gravitational interaction.

Reaching toward Quantum Scales

Aspelmeyer believes that an improved torsion pendulum will be sensitive to gravity from masses 5000 times smaller still—lighter than a single eyelash. His ultimate goal is to experimentally test the quantum nature of gravity, a question that has perplexed physicists for nearly a century. Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful and precisely tested theories in all of science: it describes everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the semiconductor physics that makes modern computing possible. But attempts to develop a quantum theory of gravity have repeatedly been stymied by contradictory and nonsensical predictions.

MIT scientists demonstrate a hair-like plastic polymer cable that can transmit data 10 times as fast as USB.

How fast does data flow? The answer: not fast enough.

The search for more efficient data-transfer solutions to meet the ever-increasing demand for computation never ends. Even today, most data transmission happens via traditional copper cables, which are power-hungry, leading to a compromise between data exchange and energy consumed. Fiber-optic cables are an alternative, but they don’t work well with the silicon chips in our computing systems. Overcoming these limitations, while theoretically possible, can turn out to be prohibitively expensive, especially for electronics-rich applications like data centers, spacecraft, electric vehicles and so on.

Continue reading “Plastic Polymer Cables That Rival Fiber Optics” »

The smallest-scale measurements of gravity ever made show that a tiny gold ball weighing 90 milligrams can move another gold ball just a few nanometres through gravitational pull.

The Dutch engineer’s invention transformed the way people listened to music in the 20th Century.

Researchers have published a study revealing their successful approach to designing much quieter propellers.

The Australian research team used machine learning to design their propellers, then 3D printed several of the most promising prototypes for experimental acoustic testing at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s specialized ‘echo-free’ chamber.

Results now published in Aerospace Research Central show the prototypes made around 15dB less noise than commercially available propellers, validating the team’s design methodology.