Biotechnology companies and researchers are studying treatments that could help patients with spinal-cord injuries recover abilities to move and function that they have lost.
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Bacteria have been found exploiting quantum physics to survive.
Oxygen is life to animals like us. But for many species of microbe, the smallest whiff of the highly reactive element puts their delicate chemical machinery at risk of rusting up.
The photosynthesizing bacterium Chlorobium tepidum has evolved a clever way to shield its light-harvesting processes from oxygen’s poisonous effects, using a quantum effect to shift its energy production line into low gear.
A study conducted by scientists from the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis has shown how the bacterium throws a spanner into its quantum resonance to ‘tune’ its system so that it loses energy in the presence of oxygen, preventing it from wrecking its photosynthetic apparatus.
Global battery recycling industries are a new beginning for old energy storage.
When your kid looks at you with those big, innocent eyeballs and asks, “Where do lithium ion electric car batteries go when they die?” Without hesitation—because kids that age still believe you know everything—you read them this article:
Mighty Volkswagen—the carmaker that certainly looks like it is going to lead the world in the production of electric cars someday—now looks like it might lead the world in recycling electric car batteries, with the announcement that it has opened its first battery recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany. OK, at a projected 3600 batteries recycled a year, maybe it won’t lead the world, but it will certainly lead battery recycling in Lower Saxony, between Hildesheim and Braunschweig. Globally speaking, all this battery recycling stuff is still being sorted out.
Now scientists are hoping to use the knowledge about CRISPR systems to engineering phages to destroy dangerous bacteria.
As the world fights the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, another group of dangerous pathogens looms in the background.
Several years after scientists discovered what was considered the oldest crater a meteorite made on the planet, another team found it’s actually the result of normal geological processes.
During fieldwork at the Archean Maniitsoq structure in Greenland, an international team of scientists led by the University of Waterloo ’s Chris Yakymchuk found the features of this region are inconsistent with an impact crater. In 2012, a different team identified it as the remnant of a three-billion-year-old meteorite crater.
“Zircon crystals in the rock are like little time capsules,” said Yakymchuk, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “They preserve ancient damage caused by shockwaves you get from a meteorite impact. We found no such damage in them.”
The results of this study demonstrate a clear relationship between psychopathology and rate of aging. Remarkably, this relationship was obvious by the age of 45. By that time, those with the upper 10% of psychopathology factor (p-factor) scores had aged approximately 5.3 more years than those with the lowest 10% of p-factor scores.
Is a history of psychiatric illness associated with more rapid aging?
In the study, the researchers found that when AML cells were exposed to chemotherapy, a subset of the cells went into a state of hibernation, or senescence, while at the same time assuming a condition that looked very much like inflammation. They looked similar to cells that have undergone an injury and need to promote wound healing—shutting down the majority of their functions while recruiting immune cells to nurse them back to health.
Cancer cells can dodge chemotherapy by entering a state that bears similarity to certain kinds of senescence, a type of “active hibernation” that enables them to weather the stress induced by aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, according to a new study by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine. These findings have implications for developing new drug combinations that could block senescence and make chemotherapy more effective.
In a study published Jan. 26 in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the investigators reported that this biologic process could help explain why cancers so often recur after treatment. The research was done in both organoids and mouse models made from patients’ samples of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) tumors. The findings were also verified by looking at samples from AML patients that were collected throughout the course of treatment and relapse.
“Acute myeloid leukemia can be put into remission with chemotherapy, but it almost always comes back, and when it does it’s incurable,” said senior author Dr. Ari M. Melnick, the Gebroe Family Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. “A longstanding question in the field has been, ‘Why can’t you get rid of all the cancer cells?’ A similar question can be posed for many other types of aggressive cancer in addition to AML.”
The robotic exoskeletons can think and make control decisions on their own.
Robotics researchers are developing exoskeleton legs capable of thinking and making control decisions on their own using onboard cameras and sophisticated artificial intelligence technology.
As the name suggests, an exoskeleton leg is an external structure that can be used to support people who are otherwise unable to walk. But the things still do have limitations; most existing exoskeleton legs must be manually switched over to different modes – via smartphone applications or joysticks – for more complicated tasks, such as stepping over or around obstacles.
“That can be inconvenient and cognitively demanding,” said Brokoslaw Laschowski, a Ph.D. candidate in systems design engineering who leads a University of Waterloo research project called ExoNet. “Every time you want to perform a new locomotor activity, you have to stop, take out your smartphone and select the desired mode.”
“3D printing—I think the majority of what it does is allow us to make individualized treatment, when we never had that opportunity to do it before,” Ripley explained. “And I think we’re going to just keep growing with that.”
It’s rooted in the patient’s unique idea to use a drinking straw to open up his hearing pathway.
California, it seems, is leading the world here: the report counts at least 35 Californian cities with such a ban at the end of 2020.
In a cool and rare moment for the U.S., it’s a leader in something that may actually do some good for the planet. A new report shows that the U.S. currently has the most cities in the world that have enacted some sort of ban on fossil fuels at the local level.