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Not everything that is true can be proven. This discovery transformed infinity, changed the course of a world war and led to the modern computer. This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The first 200 people to sign up via https://brilliant.org/veritasium get 20% off a yearly subscription.

Special thanks to Prof. Asaf Karagila for consultation on set theory and specific rewrites, to Prof. Alex Kontorovich for reviews of earlier drafts, Prof. Toby ‘Qubit’ Cubitt for the help with the spectral gap, to Henry Reich for the helpful feedback and comments on the video.

Continue reading “Math Has a Fatal Flaw” | >

Not just the results, but the vector used. I’ll post the paper below.

In this video we cover an experiment where gene therapies to overexpress TERT and Follistatin were used in a mouse model. The mice saw a 41 and 32% increase in median life span. The study also used a novel viral vector, cytomegalovirus for the delivery. Please note that this a preprint which is not peer-reviewed yet.

Papers referred to in this newsletter.
New intranasal and injectable gene therapy for healthy life extension.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.26.449305v1.full.

Continue reading “Gene Therapy Basics” | >

New research shows how the fundamental law of conservation of charge could break down near a black hole.

Singularities, such as those at the centre of black holes, where density becomes infinite, are often said to be places where physics ‘breaks down’. However, this doesn’t mean that ‘anything’ could happen, and physicists are interested in which laws could break down, and how.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London, the Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University have proposed a way that singularities could violate the law of conservation of charge. Their theory is published in Annalen der Physik.

Continue reading “Throwing an “Axion Bomb” Into a Black Hole Could Break a Fundamental Law of Physics” | >

Wally Funk was one of 13 female aviators who lobbied for women to become astronauts in the early days of spaceflight.

Aviator Wally Funk wanted to be an astronaut in the earliest days of spaceflight. Sixty years later, on July 20, she’ll finally go to space with Blue Origin.

Funk was one of 13 female aviators later dubbed the Mercury 13 who, in 1961, passed all the exams necessary for admission to NASA’s astronaut corps and lobbied the federal government to send women into space. NASA and Congress demurred and women were excluded from becoming U.S. astronauts for more than a decade; Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space in 1983.

Continue reading “Blue Origin will fly female aviator Wally Funk, one of the Mercury 13, on 1st crewed launch” | >

Researchers have created an unusual new alloy made up of not two, but five different metals, and put it to work as a catalyst. The new material is two-dimensional, and was able to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide effectively, potentially helping to turn the greenhouse gas into fuels.

The new alloy belongs to a class of materials called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), which are, as the name suggests, made up of combinations of transition metals and chalcogens. Extremely thin films of TMDCs have recently shown promise in a range of electronic and optical devices, but researchers on the new study wondered if they could also be used as catalysts for chemical reactions.

The thinking goes that because reactions occur on the surface of a catalyst, materials with high surface areas will be more effective catalysts. And as sheets only a few atoms thick, TMDCs are almost nothing but surface area.

Continue reading “New five-metal alloy makes for 2D catalyst to convert CO2 into fuels” | >

It’s not hard to kill cancer cells,” says Dr. Marianne Koritzinsky, who led the study. “It’s hard to kill cancer cells without harming the cancer patient.

By better understanding the way cancer cells are able to thrive in the human body, scientists continue to learn where their vulnerabilities lie, and with that comes potential new forms of treatment. Researchers in Canada taking this approach have made a significant discovery around pancreatic cancer, pinpointing a protein the cells rely on for growth and targeting it to inhibit tumor growth in the lab.

Led by scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, the study focuses on the unique biology of pancreatic cancer cells, which drive a particularly deadly form of the disease with a five-year survival rate of just eight percent. The scientists knew that these cancer cells increase levels of a key metabolite called NADPH that helps fuel their growth, so they carried out genomic analysis to shed more light on the process.

This revealed that the cells with high levels of NADPH and undergoing uncontrolled growth as a result also suffered from oxidative stress, but an antioxidant protein called PRDX4 was able to combat these effects and enable the cells to survive. In this sense, the cancer cells are highly dependent on, or “addicted to”, the protein, something the scientists hoped to leverage for their purposes.

Continue reading “Addicted pancreatic cancer cells die when denied key protein” | >