Physicists just can’t leave an incomplete theory alone; they try and repair it. When nature is kind, it can lead to a major breakthrough.
The field of aging research has made significant progress over the last three decades, reaching a stage where we now understand the underlying mechanisms of the aging process. Moreover, the knowledge has broadened to include techniques that quantify aging, decelerate its process, as well as sometimes reverse aging.
To date, twelve hallmarks of aging have been identified; these include reduced mitochondrial function, loss of stem cells, increased cellular senescence, telomere shortening, and impaired protein and energy homeostasis. Biomarkers of aging help to understand age-related changes, track the physiological aging process and predict age-related diseases [1].
Longevity. Technology: Biological information is stored in two main ways, the genomes consisting of nucleic acids, and the epigenome, consisting of chemical modifications to the DNA as well as histone proteins. However, biological information can be lost over time as well as disrupted due to cell damage. How can this loss be overcome? In the 1940s, American mathematician and communications engineer Claude Shannon came up with a neat solution to prevent the loss of information in communications, introducing an ‘observer’ that would help to ensure that the original information survives and is transmitted [2]. Can these ideas be applied to aging?
New breakthrough research shows that a simple blood test can flag symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease up to 15 years in advance.
Whether in listening to music or pushing a swing in the playground, we are all familiar with resonances and how they amplify an effect—a sound or a movement, for example. However, in high-intensity circular particle accelerators, resonances can be an inconvenience, causing particles to fly off their course and resulting in beam loss. Predicting how resonances and non-linear phenomena affect particle beams requires some very complex dynamics to be disentangled.
Rivian has officially gained access to Tesla’s Supercharger network and announced that it will start shipping an adapter to its owners for free next month.
When Tesla opened up its connector to other automakers in the hope of making it the new charging standard in North America, Rivian was one of the first to jump on board after Ford got the ball rolling.
Ford was the first to gain access to the Supercharger network with a new adapter that it started to offer for free to Mustand Mach-E and F-150 Lightning owners last month.
As part of its energy transition strategy, energy giant Shell plans to shed some of its retail locations, including gasoline stations, to focus more on EV charging sites.
“We are upgrading our retail network, with expanded electric vehicle charging and convenience offers, in response to changing customer needs,” Shell said in its 2024 Energy Transition Strategy report. The company plans to “divest around 500 Shell-owned sites (including joint ventures) a year in 2024 and 2025.” The company’s plans were first reported by Bloomberg News.
The closures will shrink the company’s retail footprint by 2.1%. In 2023, the company operated 47,000 locations.
Simulations of an elusive carbon molecule that leaves diamonds in the dust for hardness may pave the way to creating it in a lab.
Known as the eight-atom body-centered cubic (BC8) phase, the configuration is expected to be up to 30 percent more resistant to compression than diamond – the hardest known stable material on Earth.
Physicists from the US and Sweden ran quantum-accurate molecular-dynamics simulations on a supercomputer to see how diamond behaved under high pressure when temperatures rose to levels that ought to make it unstable, revealing new clues on the conditions that could push the carbon atoms in diamond into the unusual structure.
In a new paper published this month, Apple researchers reveal that they have developed new methods for training large language models using both text and visual information. According to Apple’s researchers, this represents a way to obtain state-of-the-art results.
Surgically removing tumors from sensitive areas, such as the head and neck, poses significant challenges. The goal during surgery is to take out the cancerous tissue while saving as much healthy tissue as possible. This balance is crucial because leaving behind too much cancerous tissue can lead to the cancer’s return or spread. Doing a resection that has precise margins—specifically, a 5mm margin of healthy tissue—is essential but difficult. This margin, roughly the size of a pencil eraser, ensures that all cancerous cells are removed while minimizing damage. Tumors often have clear horizontal edges but unclear vertical boundaries, making depth assessment challenging despite careful pre-surgical planning. Surgeons can mark the horizontal borders but have limited ability to determine the appropriate depth for removal due to the inability to see beyond the surface. Additionally, surgeons face obstacles like fatigue and visual limitations, which can affect their performance. Now, a new robotic system has been designed to perform tumor removal from the tongue with precision levels that could match or surpass those of human surgeons.
The Autonomous System for Tumor Resection (ASTR) designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, MD, USA) translates human guidance into robotic precision. This system builds upon the technology from their Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), which previously conducted the first fully autonomous laparoscopic surgery to connect the two intestinal ends. ASTR, an advanced dual-arm, vision-guided robotic system, is specifically designed for tissue removal in contrast to STAR’s focus on tissue connection. In tests using pig tongue tissue, the team demonstrated ASTR’s ability to accurately remove a tumor and the required 5mm of surrounding healthy tissue. After focusing on tongue tumors due to their accessibility and relevance to experimental surgery, the team now plans to extend ASTR’s application to internal organs like the kidney, which are more challenging to access.
