Astronaut Chris Cassidy captured a solar eclipse in 4K from the space station as it passed approximately 260 miles over China on June 21, 2020.
The recent killings of unarmed individuals such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade have sparked a national conversation about the treatment of Black people—and other minorities—in the United States.
“What we’re seeing today is a close examination of the hardships and indignities that people have faced for a very long time because of their race and ethnicity,” said Kyle Ratner, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara. As a social psychologist, he is interested in how social and biological processes give rise to intergroup bias and feelings of stigmatization.
According to Ratner, “It is clear that people who belong to historically marginalized groups in the United States contend with burdensome stressors on top of the everyday stressors that members of non-disadvantaged groups experience. For instance, there is the trauma of overt racism, stigmatizing portrayals in the media and popular culture, and systemic discrimination that leads to disadvantages in many domains of life, from employment and education to healthcare and housing to the legal system.”
The Kingsley team pored over genetic data repositories, searching for places in the genetic code near the KITLG gene that tell the gene what to do. They found a location in the DNA where proteins known as transcription factors bind to the sequence and carry out the instructions specified in the code.
They discovered that if the nucleotide guanine holds that spot, the transcription factor cannot bind as tightly to the DNA as when another nucleotide (adenine) is in the same position. This simple alteration – replacing A with G in the DNA sequence – reduces the expression of the gene and, ultimately, changes the colour of the hair.
Guenther’s blue-flecked mice prove that the Kingsley group found the spot on the genome that informs hair follicles how much melanin to incorporate into hair.
3 things:
1. The company claims that it has been successful in reducing the epigenetic age of participants(17 people) by an average of 8.5 years with its dietary supplement Rejuvant.
2. Obviously, this has yet to be proven conclusively in human trials, and the company is busy preparing to launch a larger-scale trial later this year to that end.
Continue reading “Pilot Study Results Suggest Epigenetic Age Reversal” »
New Zealand’s monster penguins, which lived 62 million years ago, had doppelgangers in Japan, the U.S. and Canada, a study published today in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research has found.
Scientists have identified striking similarities between the penguins’ fossilized bones and those of a group of much younger Northern Hemisphere birds, the plotopterids.
These similarities suggest plotopterids and ancient penguins looked very similar and might help scientists understand how birds started using their wings to swim instead of fly.
With every droplet that we can’t see, touch, or feel dispersed into the air, the threat of spreading COVID-19 persists. It’s become increasingly critical to keep these heavy droplets from lingering—especially on surfaces, which are welcoming and generous hosts.
Thankfully, our chemical cleaning products are effective, but using them to disinfect larger settings can be expensive, dangerous, and time-consuming. Across the globe there are thousands of warehouses, grocery stores, schools, and other spaces where cleaning workers are at risk.
Continue reading “MIT robot disinfects Greater Boston Food Bank” »
Ein neues Influenzavirus kann offenbar vom Schwein auf den Menschen übertragen werden und diese infizieren. Ob sich daraus allerdings eine weitere Pandemie entwickeln kann, bleibt abzuwarten.
Over the past decade or so, researchers have been trying to develop techniques that could enable effective collaborative strategies among teams of robots. One of the tasks that teams of robots could complete better than individual robots is simultaneously searching for several targets or objects in their surrounding environment.
The ability of a team of robots to collectively seek and identify numerous targets at once could be useful for a wide range of applications. For instance, it could aid surveillance applications and help to better track individuals or vehicles.
Researchers at Tongji University and University of Stuttgart have recently devised a systematic framework for enabling more effective multiple target search in swarm robots. This framework, presented in a paper published in IEEE Access, is based on the use of a mechanical particle swarm optimization method and artificial potential fields.
