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Metals and insulators are the yin and yang of physics, their respective material properties strictly dictated by their electrons’ mobility — metals should conduct electrons freely, while insulators keep them in place.

So when physicists from Princeton University in the US found a quantum quirk of metals bouncing around inside an insulating compound, they were lost for an explanation.

We’ll need to wait on further studies to find out exactly what’s going on. But one tantalising possibility is that a previously unseen particle is at work, one that represents neutral ground in electron behaviour. They’re calling it a ‘neutral fermion’.

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Summary: Scientists have long marveled at the rejuvenating effects of heterochronic parabiosis. When you mix the blood of a young mouse and an old mouse by joining their circulatory systems, the older animal recovers some features of youth, while the young animal becomes functionally older. While many have assumed that these effects were driven by the infusion of pro-youth factors from the young parabiont into the older one, an alternative “Dilution Solution” hypothesis is possible: that the young blood is instead diluting pro-aging factors from the old animal’s blood, as well as allowing the young animal’s livers and kidneys to filter out metabolic toxins through the young animals’ livers and kidneys.

In heterochronic parabiosis, joining the circulatory systems of young and old mice causes the older animal to recover some features of youth. The effect has been widely assumed to be driven by pro-youth factors in younger blood, but an alternative hypothesis is possible: that the procedure is instead diluting pro-aging factors in the older partner.

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Aging research fans might like.

“In their work, Hamiliton’s team found that the Dunkin Hartley guinea pig was a good candidate for a muscle aging model due to the animal’s tendency to develop osteoarthritis (OA) at a young age.”

There are many components to aging, both mental and physical. When it comes to the infrastructure of the human body—the musculoskeletal system that includes muscles, bones, tendons and cartilage—age-associated decline is inevitable, and the rate of that decline increases the older we get. The loss of muscle function—and often muscle mass—is scientifically known as sarcopenia or dynapenia.

For adults in their 40s, sarcopenia is hardly noticeable—about 3% is lost each decade. For those aged 65 years and older, however, can become much more rapid, with an average loss of 1% muscle mass each year. More importantly, sarcopenia is also marked by a decrease in strength, impaired gait, reduced physical activity, or difficulty completing everyday tasks.

Continue reading “Researchers identify promising model for studying human aging” | >

Review: Meat Planet (2019) by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

In the words of the book’s author, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (2019) is “not an attempt at prediction but rather a study of cultured meat as a special case of speculation on the future of food, and as a lens through which to view the predictions we make about how technology changes the world.” While not serving as some crystal ball to tell us the future of food, Wurgaft’s book certainly does serve as a kind of lens.

Our very appetites are questioned quite a bit in the book. Wondering about the ever-changing history of food, the author asks, “Will it be an effort to reproduce the industrial meat forms we know, albeit on a novel, and more ethical and sustainable, foundation?” Questioning why hamburgers are automatically the default goal, he points out cultured meat advocates should carefully consider “the question of which human appetite for meat, in historical terms, they wish to satisfy.”

Continue reading “Artificial Flesh” | >

How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe? Astronomers can estimate the total number of galaxies by counting everything visible in a Hubble deep field and then multiplying them by the total area of the sky. But other galaxies are too faint and distant to directly detect. Yet while we can’t count them, their light suffuses space with a feeble glow.

To measure that glow, astronomical satellites have to escape the inner solar system and its light pollution, caused by sunlight reflecting off dust. A team of scientists has used observations by NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt to determine the brightness of this cosmic optical background. Their result sets an upper limit to the abundance of faint, unresolved , showing that they only number in the hundreds of billions, not 2 trillion galaxies as previously believed.

How dark does space get? If you get away from city lights and look up, the sky between the stars appears very dark indeed. Above the Earth’s atmosphere outer space dims even further, fading to an inky pitch-black. And yet even there, space isn’t absolutely black. The universe has a suffused feeble glimmer from innumerable distant stars and galaxies.

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Dr. Halima Benbouza is an Algerian scientist in the field of agronomic sciences and biological engineering.

She received her doctorate in 2004 from the University Agro BioTech Gembloux, Belgium studying Plant Breeding and Genetics and was offered a postdoctoral position to work on a collaborative project with the Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture in Stoneville, Mississippi.

Subsequently, Dr. Benbouza was funded by Dow Agro Science to study Fusarium wilt resistance in cotton. In 2009 she was awarded the Special Prize Eric Daugimont et Dominique Van der Rest by the University Agro BioTech Gembloux, Belgium.

Dr. Benbouza is Professor at Batna 1 University where she teaches graduate and postgraduate students in the Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Agronomy. She also supervises Master’s and PhD students.

Continue reading “Dr Halima Benbouza — Leading Biotech Development In Algeria For Health, Agriculture and Conservation” | >

A thermoelectric device is an energy conversion device that uses the voltage generated by the temperature difference between both ends of a material; it is capable of converting heat energy, such as waste heat from industrial sites, into electricity that can be used in daily life. Existing thermoelectric devices are rigid because they are composed of hard metal-based electrodes and semiconductors, hindering the full absorption of heat sources from uneven surfaces. Therefore, researchers have conducted recent studies on the development of flexible thermoelectric devices capable of generating energy in close contact with heat sources such as human skins and hot water pipes.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that a collaborative research team led by Dr. Seungjun Chung from the Soft Hybrid Materials Research Center and Professor Yongtaek Hong from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University (SNU, President OH Se-Jung) developed flexible with high power generation performance by maximizing flexibility and transfer efficiency. The research team also presented a mass-production plan through an automated process including a printing process.

The transfer efficiency of existing substrates used for research on flexible thermoelectric devices is low due to their very . Their heat absorption efficiency is also low due to lack of flexibility, forming a heat shield layer, e.g., air, when in contact with a heat source. To address this issue, organic-material-based thermoelectric devices with high flexibility have been under development, but their application on wearables is not easy because of its significantly lower performance compared to existing inorganic-material-based rigid thermoelectric devices.

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