This gene therapy treats LCA1, causing early childhood vision loss, affecting under 100,000 people:
“One patient reported for the first time being able to navigate at midnight outdoors only with the light of a bonfire,” said Cideciyan, who is also co-director of the Center for Hereditary Retinal Degenerations.
The clinical trials were co-led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Quantum Teleportation Over 44 Kilometers Achieved, Paving the Way for a Quantum Internet Revolution
A team from Fermilab and the University of Calgary has achieved long-distance quantum teleportation over 44 kilometers, setting a new record. This breakthrough, detailed in Physical Review, advances the goal of creating a quantum internet—where qubits can be shared instantly through entanglement. This new capability could revolutionize data storage, precision sensing, and computing. The research demonstrates the potential for scaling up quantum systems and contributes to developing a blueprint for a national quantum internet. The previous record was only six kilometers, highlighting the significant progress made.
The material displays characteristics across a wide temperature range aiding versatile applications:
There is always a trade-off when balancing strength and flexibility. One is achieved at the cost of the other. While a flexible, shape-shifting aircraft can deliver benefits for higher energy efficiency and faster transportation, these cannot be achieved by risking the safety of the passengers using a material that lacks proper strength.
Researchers at the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan may have just found a way to achieve both strength and flexibility in a material without making any sacrifices on either.
Posted in robotics/AI
Podcaster clones his voice, hooks it up to ChatGPT, & the bot does his phone calls & interviews.
One man secretly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone.
For the study, the researchers analysed blood samples and medical information from 27,939 healthcare providers living in the US, who participated in the Women’s Health Study. The women were on average aged 55 at the study’s start (1992−1995) and followed for 30 years.
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
A test based on an “epigenetic clock” is the latest basis for claims that calorie restriction slows down ageing – but the jury is still out on whether the dieting strategy really works.
A new method for preparing certain states on a quantum computer is predicted to take the same time regardless of the system size.
During the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us became accustomed to news reports on the reproduction number R, which is the average number of cases arising from a single infected case. If we were told that R was much greater than 1, that meant the number of infections was growing rapidly, and interventions (such as social distancing and lockdowns) were necessary. But if R was near to 1, then the disease was deemed to be under control and some relaxation of restrictions could be warranted. New mathematical modeling by Kris Parag from Imperial College London shows limitations to using R or a related growth rate parameter for assessing the “controllability” of an epidemic [1]. As an alternative strategy, Parag suggests a framework based on treating an epidemic as a positive feedback loop. The model produces two new controllability parameters that describe how far a disease outbreak is from a stable condition, which is one with feedback that doesn’t lead to growth.
Parag’s starting point is the classical mathematical description of how an epidemic evolves in time in terms of the reproduction number R. This approach is called the renewal model and has been widely used for infectious diseases such as COVID-19, SARS, influenza, Ebola, and measles. In this model, new infections are determined by past infections through a mathematical function called the generation-time distribution, which describes how long it takes for someone to infect someone else. Parag departs from this traditional approach by using a kind of Fourier transform, called a Laplace transform, to convert the generation-time distribution into periodic functions that define the number of the infections. The Laplace transform is commonly adopted in control theory, a field of engineering that deals with the control of machines and other dynamical systems by treating them as feedback loops.
The first outcome of applying the Laplace transform to epidemic systems is that it defines a so-called transfer function that maps input cases (such as infected travelers) onto output infections by means of a closed feedback loop. Control measures (such as quarantines and mask requirements) aim to disrupt this loop by acting as a kind of “friction” force. The framework yields two new parameters that naturally describe the controllability of the system: the gain margin and the delay margin. The gain margin quantifies how much infections must be scaled by interventions to stabilize the epidemic (where stability is defined by R = 1). The delay margin is related to how long one can wait to implement an intervention. If, for example, the gain margin is 2 and the delay margin is 7 days, then the epidemic is stable provided that the number of infections doesn’t double and that control measures are applied within a week.
Posted in robotics/AI
How an alga synchronizes its two flapping cilia to propel itself is revealed in a tabletop experiment with chains of mobile robots.
The freshwater alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii swims by flapping its two cilia in a motion akin to the breaststroke. Unlike a human, C. reinhardtii lacks a brain to coordinate its limbs. The synchronization is automatic. To uncover its origin, Mingcheng Yang of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his collaborators built mechanical algae whose cilia are made of chains of cockroach-sized toy robots [1]. By adjusting the cilia’s flapping frequency and other parameters, the researchers reproduced the alga’s swimming gaits and identified the conditions that favor them.
Yang’s mechanical algae each consists of a puck-like base, on the sides of which are attached two chains of four robots. Each robot’s underside bristles with elastic hairs set at an angle. When a mechanical alga is placed on a tabletop and an internal electric motor is switched on, each bristly robot vibrates vertically. On the upstroke, the hairs push the robot toward the base, setting up the possibility that the chains could buckle.
