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O,.o! Amazing 👏🙀😼

A new multicomponent, partially-superconducting electromagnet—currently the world’s strongest DC magnet of any kind—is poised to reveal a path to substantially stronger magnets still. The new magnet technology could help scientists study many other phenomena including nuclear fusion, exotic states of matter, “shape-shifting” molecules, and interplanetary rockets, to name a few.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida is home to four types of advanced, ultra-strong magnets. One supports magnetic resonance studies. Another is configured for mass spectrometry. And a different type produces the strongest magnetic fields in the world. (Sister MagLab campuses at the University of Florida and Los Alamos National Laboratory provide three more high-capacity magnets for other fields of study.)

It’s that last category on the Tallahassee campus—world’s strongest magnet—that the latest research is attempting to complement. The so-called MagLab DC Field Facility, in operation since 1999, is nearing a limit in the strength of magnetic fields it can produce with its current materials and technology.

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Doug Liman Opines On Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Rocket: “It’s Not Going Very High. I Really Think The Moon Or Beyond Is Space” — Tribeca Festival

Director Doug Liman likes that there’s so much buzz about space these days and takes a teensy part of the credit after news (broken by Deadline) last year that he plans to shoot a film up there with Tom Cruise in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and NASA.

“It’s good. If we can inspire kids to study science. I grew up dreaming about going into space,” said Liman, who also directed Cruise on American Made and Edge of Tomorrow and has helmed hits from Mr. & Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity to Go and Swingers. He spoke Tuesday on a sunny roof deck at Spring Studios in downtown Manhattan during a Directors Talk Q&A at the Tribeca Festival.

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Circa 2014 o,.o.

Two issues preventing the widespread uptake of electric vehicles are recharging time and lack of range. Now, scientists have shown one potential means of negating these issues. Their demonstration of electric power transfer via the car-wheel is claimed as the world’s first.

Electric vehicles can already be powered via infrastructure in the road. The South Korean city of Gumi uses a means of electromagnetic induction to power some of its buses. This newly-demonstrated method, however, uses radio frequency transmission.

The concept has been developed by Masahiro Hanazawa of Toyota Central R&D Labs and Takashi Ohira of Toyohashi University of Technology. It avoids the need for potentially dangerous contact conductivity devices by up-converting energy from power lines into radio frequency using high-speed inverters.

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Circa 2020

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a rapid test for SARS-CoV-2 that uses an enzyme to cleave viral RNA, initiating a fluorescent signal that can be detected using a smartphone camera, and which can provide a quantitative measurement of the level of viral particles in the sample. The test produce a result in as little as 30 minutes and does not require bulky or expensive laboratory equipment.

Rapid testing is key to measuring and stopping the spread of COVID-19, but current tests, such as PCR, are time consuming and require expensive laboratory equipment, creating a bottleneck in obtaining results. Researchers have been developing alternatives, and this latest technology was rapidly repurposed when the pandemic began. Originally intended to detect HIV in blood samples, the Berkeley researchers have pivoted to allow the device to detect SARS-CoV-2 in nasal swab samples.

The test relies on CRISPR-Cas, originally developed as a gene editing technology. When a pre-programmed Cas13 enzyme is added to the sample, it can cleave RNA sequences from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This results in other nearby sequences being cleaved also, including a probe that releases fluorescent light when cleaved. The device uses a laser to excite this fluorescence and a smartphone camera can then detect the light, providing a quantitative measurement of the viral particles present in the sample.

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Stimulation of the nervous system with neurotechnology has opened up new avenues for treating human disorders, such as prosthetic arms and legs that restore the sense of touch in amputees, prosthetic fingertips that provide detailed sensory feedback with varying touch resolution, and intraneural stimulation to help the blind by giving sensations of sight.

Scientists in a European collaboration have shown that optic nerve stimulation is a promising neurotechnology to help the blind, with the constraint that current technology has the capacity of providing only simple visual signals.

Nevertheless, the scientists’ vision (no pun intended) is to design these simple visual signals to be meaningful in assisting the blind with daily living. Optic nerve stimulation also avoids invasive procedures like directly stimulating the brain’s visual cortex. But how does one go about optimizing stimulation of the optic nerve to produce consistent and meaningful visual sensations?

Now, the results of a collaboration between EPFL, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, published today in Patterns, show that a new stimulation protocol of the optic nerve is a promising way for developing personalized visual signals to help the blind–that also take into account signals from the visual cortex. The protocol has been tested for the moment on artificial neural networks known to simulate the entire visual system, called convolutional neural networks (CNN) usually used in computer vision for detecting and classifying objects. The scientists also performed psychophysical tests on ten healthy subjects that imitate what one would see from optic nerve stimulation, showing that successful object identification is compatible with results obtained from the CNN.

“We are not just trying to stimulate the optic nerve to elicit a visual perception,” explains Simone Romeni, EPFL scientist and first author of the study. “We are developing a way to optimize stimulation protocols that takes into account how the entire visual system responds to optic nerve stimulation.”

“The research shows that you can optimize optic nerve stimulation using machine learning approaches. It shows more generally the full potential of machine learning to optimize stimulation protocols for neuroprosthetic devices,” continues Silvestro Micera, EPFL Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Translational Neural Engineering and Professor of Bioelectronics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

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Several different causes of aging have been discovered, but the question remains whether there are common underlying mechanisms that determine aging and lifespan. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Ageing research at the University Cologne have now come across folate metabolism in their search for such basic mechanisms. Its regulation underlies many known aging signaling pathways and leads to longevity. This may provide a new possibility to broadly improve human health during aging.

In recent decades, several cellular signaling pathways have been discovered that regulate the lifespan of an organism and are thus of enormous importance for aging research. When researchers altered these signaling pathways, this extended the lifespan of diverse organisms. However, the question arises whether these different signaling pathways converge on common metabolic pathways that are causal for longevity.

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We probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints, an unprecedented study of lifespan statistics in human and non-human primates has confirmed.

The study set out to test the ‘invariant rate of aging’ hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of aging from adulthood. An international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries, including JosĂ© Manuel Aburto from Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, analyzed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents. Led by Fernando Colchero, University of Southern Denmark and Susan Alberts, Duke University, North Carolina, the study was a huge endeavor requiring monitoring wild populations of primates over several decades.

Jose Manuel Aburto says, Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages. We compared birth and death data from humans and and found this general pattern of mortality was the same in all of them. This suggests that biological, rather than environmental factors, ultimately control longevity.

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Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

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