Menu

Blog

Page 6282

Mar 11, 2021

Key Genes in the Brain Involved in Encoding Memories Identified

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Summary: Study identified 300 “hub genes” that appear to control separate gene networks in brain tissue samples. The SAMD3 gene appears to be a master regulator to control the activity of many of the gene hubs and the genes the hubs control.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center.

UT Southwestern scientists have identified key genes involved in brain waves that are pivotal for encoding memories. The findings, published online this week in Nature Neuroscience, could eventually be used to develop novel therapies for people with memory loss disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Mar 11, 2021

New data cable exceeds 100 Gbit/s

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, internet

Researchers have developed a new data transfer system that is 20 times faster than USB 3.0.

This combines high-frequency silicon chips with a polymer cable as thin as a strand of hair. The system could boost energy efficiency in data centres and lighten the loads of electronics-rich spacecraft. Researchers presented their breakthrough at the recent IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, held virtually.

“There’s an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips – cloud computing, the Internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventional copper wire,” says Jack Holloway, who led the research. Holloway completed his PhD in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science last year and currently works for Raytheon.

Mar 11, 2021

SpaceX launches 60 new Starlink satellites to orbit, nails rocket landing at sea

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

It was the 6th launch and landing for this Falcon 9 first stage.


A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a new batch of 60 Starlink internet satellites to orbit early this morning (March 11) and nailed its landing on a floating platform at sea.

Mar 11, 2021

Shape Your Microbiome. You’ll Live Longer, Scientists Say

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience

“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.

Mar 11, 2021

Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding

Posted by in category: quantum physics

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

Mar 10, 2021

China and Russia unveil joint plan for lunar space station

Posted by in category: space

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.

Mar 10, 2021

Lander Vision Images

Posted by in category: futurism

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

Mar 10, 2021

Physicists Measure the Gravitational Force between the Smallest Masses Yet

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

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.

Mar 10, 2021

Plastic Polymer Cables That Rival Fiber Optics

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, sustainability

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” »

Mar 10, 2021

Physicists have measured gravity on the smallest scale ever

Posted by in category: physics

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.