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A research team from TU Wien together with US research institutes came across a surprising form of ‘quantum criticality’; this could lead to a design concept for new materials.

In everyday life, phase transitions usually have to do with temperature changes — for example, when an ice cube gets warmer and melts. But there are also different kinds of phase transitions, depending on other parameters such as magnetic field. In order to understand the quantum properties of materials, phase transitions are particularly interesting when they occur directly at the absolute zero point of temperature. These transitions are called “quantum phase transitions” or a “quantum critical points.”

Such a quantum critical point has now been discovered by an Austrian-American research team in a novel material, and in an unusually pristine form. The properties of this material are now being further investigated. It is suspected that the material could be a so-called Weyl-Kondo semimetal, which is considered to have great potential for quantum technology due to special quantum states (so-called topological states). If this proves to be true, a key for the targeted development of topological quantum materials would have been found. The results were found in a cooperation between TU Wien, Johns Hopkins University, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Rice University and has now been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Drug Delivery.

Covid-19

Without these lipid shells, there would be no mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.

Fragile mRNA molecules used in COVID-19 vaccines can’t get into cells on their own. They owe their success to lipid nanoparticles that took decades to refine by.

Ryan Cross

Continue reading “Without these lipid shells, there would be no mRNA vaccines for COVID-19” | >

It’s been nearly two decades since medical science has produced a new treatment for Alzheimer’s. Is that drought about to end?

June 7 will be a big day in the life of Jeff Borghoff — not to mention the more than 6 million other Americans living with Alzheimer’s disease.

On that date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to announce whether it will give its blessing to the first new drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s since 2003.

Borghoff fervently hopes the answer is yes. The 57-year-old resident of Forked River has been taking the drug for several years now, and he’s convinced it has helped significantly slow the progression of his dementia.

Continue reading “A breakthrough at last? Millions with Alzheimer’s anxiously await FDA decision on new drug” | >

I could find hardly any scientific studies that showed negative results from the Mediterranean Diet for longevity, which honestly makes me a little wary of scientific establishment groupthink.

That said, I think I am going to start taking shots of olive oil after all my research…

Is the Mediterranean Diet the key to longevity? Lots of research suggests olive oil and other Mediterranean foods can help you live longer.

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A team of researchers from Verve Therapeutics and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a CRISPR gene-editing technique that lowered the levels of cholesterol in the blood of test monkeys. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their technique.

Prior research has shown that in some people, the PCSK9 gene codes excess PCSK9 protein production (which occurs mostly in the liver)—leading to an increase in lipoprotein cholesterol levels in the bloodstream. This is because it interferes with blood cells with LDL receptors that “grab” LDL and remove it. For this reason, have developed therapies that reduce the production of PCSK9 protein. However, most do not work well enough, which is why there is still so much atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. In this new effort, the researchers have tried another approach—altering the PCSK9 gene to make it stop coding for PCSK9 protein production.

The approach involved using a base editing technology made up of messenger RNA encoding for an along with guided RNA that was packaged in a lipid nanoparticle. Notably, the base editing technique was able to substitute a single nucleotide with another in the DNA without cutting the double helix. Prior research has shown the technique to be more precise, which means fewer errors than other CRISPR techniques. In their work, the researchers replaced an adenine with a guanine and a thymine with a cytosine, completely incapacitating the gene. Implementation of the therapy involved a one-time injection into the liver of cynomolgus monkeys.

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The scale-free complexity associated with the biological system in general, and the neuron in particular, means that within each cell there is a veritable macromolecular brain, at least in terms of structural complexity, and perhaps to a certain degree functional complexity as well—a fractal hierarchy. This means that the extremely simplistic view of the synapse as a single digital bit is misrepresenting the reality of the situation—such as, if we were to utilize the parlance of the neurocomputational model, each ‘computational unit’ contains a veritable macromolecular brain within it. There is no computer or human technology yet equivalent to this.\.

A study published in the journal Science has upended 80 years of conventional wisdom in computational neuroscience that has modeled the neuron as a simple point-like node in a system, integrating signals and passing them along.

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Using a robotic ‘Third Thumb’ can impact how the hand is represented in the brain, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The team trained people to use a robotic extra and found they could effectively carry out dextrous tasks, like building a tower of blocks, with one hand (now with two thumbs). The researchers report in the journal Science Robotics that participants trained to use the thumb also increasingly felt like it was a part of their body.

Designer Dani Clode began developing the device, called the Third Thumb, as part of an award-winning graduate project at the Royal College of Art, seeking to reframe the way we view prosthetics, from replacing a lost function, to an extension of the human body. She was later invited to join Professor Tamar Makin’s team of neuroscientists at UCL who were investigating how the can adapt to body augmentation.

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