Lifeboat Foundation

An underlying assumption of research on aging holds that dietary restriction (and drugs that mimic its effects) will slow aging to extend both lifespan and healthspan jointly. While eating a Spartan diet has been shown to robustly extend lifespan and delay age-related diseases in many species, a genome-wide analysis of 160 genetically distinct strains of the fruit fly D. melanogaster shows that lifespan and healthspan are not linked under dietary restriction. Results are published in Current Biology.

Though on average lifespan was extended and healthspan was increased, researchers from the Kapahi lab at the Buck Institute say the devil is in the details. In the study researchers measured nutrient-dependent changes in lifespan and tracked age-related changes in physical activity to measure healthspan. While 97 percent of strains showed some lifespan or healthspan extension in response to dietary restriction, only 50 percent of strains showed a significantly positive response to dietary restriction for both. Thirteen percent of the strains were more vigorous, yet died sooner with dietary restriction; 5 percent lived longer, but spent more time in poor health. The remaining 32 percent of the strains showed no benefits or detriments to lifespan or healthspan, or negative responses to both.

“Dietary restriction works, but may not be the panacea for those wanting to extend healthspan, delay age-related diseases, and extend lifespan,” said Pankaj Kapahi, Ph.D., Buck professor and senior author on the paper. “Our study is surprising and gives a glimpse into what’s likely going to happen in humans, because we’re all different and will likely respond differently to the effects of dietary restriction. Furthermore, our results question the idea that lifespan extension will always be accompanied by improvement of healthspan.”

Summary: Certain personality traits could increase the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, a new study reports. Openness was associated with a 6% reduced risk of developing a pre-dementia condition, while those who scored higher for neuroticism had a 6% increased risk of MCI.

Source: Wiley

A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society examined five personality traits–neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness–and their links to pre-dementia conditions called motoric cognitive risk (MCR) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) syndromes.

A team of researchers at California Institute of Technology has found that arrays of strontium Rydberg atoms show promise for use in a quantum computer. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the researchers describe their study of quantum entangled alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms arranged in arrays and what they learned about them. In the same issue, Wenhui Li, with the National University of Singapore, has published a News & Views piece exploring the state of quantum computing research, and outlines the work done by the team at CIT.

Quantum computers capable of conducting real computing work have still not been realized, but work continues as scientists are confident that the goal will be reached. And as Li notes, most of the early-stage demo quantum computers are based on superconducting qubits or trapped ion platforms, though other systems are being studied, as well. One such system is based on neutral atoms in which the charges of the protons and electrons balance. In this new effort, the researchers looked at a type of neutral atom system based on Rydberg atoms (excited atoms with one or more electrons that also have a high quantum number). To use such atoms in a quantum computer, they must, of course, be entangled—and there needs to be a lot of them, generally arranged in an array.

In their work, the team at CIT developed a way to demonstrate entanglement of Rydberg atoms in arrays—and as part of the system, they were able to detect and control Rydberg qubits with unprecedented fidelities. To achieve this feat, they began with realizing photon coupling between different levels of Rydberg ground-state qubits, thus avoiding scattering. Doing so also allowed for efficient detection of Rydberg states, greatly improving detection fidelity. The researchers also demonstrated two-qubit entanglement using tweezer potentials, also with high fidelity.

A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19.

Last year, Stanley Qi, an assistant professor in the departments of bioengineering, and chemical and systems biology at Stanford University and his team had begun working on a technique called PAC-MAN—or Prophylactic Antiviral CRISPR in human cells —that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to fight influenza.

But that all changed in January, when news of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Qi and his team were suddenly confronted with a mysterious new virus for which no one had a clear solution. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we try using our PAC-MAN technology to fight it?’” said Qi.

Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, ETH in Zurich and the University of Cambridge have synthesized and analysed active microparticles self-propelling in a fluid and reversing their propulsion direction depending on the wavelength of illuminating light. A research article summarising their work has recently been published in Nature Communications.

Active matter encompasses systems with self-propelling elements that draw energy from the environment and convert it into kinetic energy. This is currently a lively discipline in physics, spanning across many time and length scales, concerning, e.g., the behaviour of birds in flocks (such as murmurations of starlings), schools of fish (as a form of protection against predators), and also bacteria in biofilms and other aquatic microswimmers. It focuses both on the behaviour of individual elements and understanding their mechanisms of energy conversion, interaction and coupling with the environment so important for the survival, and on the collective effects and emergence of new phenomena in large populations. Both can be successfully described on different levels of precision, starting from simplistic minimal coarse-grained models, and up to refined numerical simulations.

Bacteria, algae, spermatozoa, ciliates and other unicellular organisms are an important group of active swimmers. Exploring the physical basis of their dynamics is often complicated by their immense diversity, biological complexity, and high sensitivity to external conditions. The aquatic microworld is, however, governed by the universal laws of fluid dynamics, which put limitations on all organisms.

The pharmaceutical company aims to distribute 1 billion shots to people in low and middle income countries, with 400 million doses ready this year.

Taking inspiration from nature’s nanotech that creates the stunning color of butterfly wings, a University of Central Florida researcher is creating technology to make extremely low-power, ultra-high-definition displays and screens that are easier on the eyes.

The new technology creates digital displays that are lit by surrounding light and are more natural looking than current display technologies that rely on energy-intensive bright lights hidden behind screens. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This display is more of a natural look than your current computer or smartphone screens,” said Debashis Chanda, an associate professor in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and principal investigator of the research. “It is like seeing a portrait on the wall at your house. It doesn’t have that glare or extra light. It is more like looking at the natural world.”

Optics-based technologies such as optical fibers have strongly influenced the age of wired communication. Now they look set to revolutionize wireless communications as well and solve key issues with traditional radio-based approaches by using steerable, narrow infrared beams to send large amounts of data to user devices individually in an energy efficient and secure manner. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology are developing new methods for infrared wireless communications that could change how we access data forever.

The modern world is fast becoming a wireless, infrared world! Until now, the majority of wireless communications, both indoor and outdoor, have been radio-based. Although signal modulation techniques can squeeze more data into the limited radio-frequency spectrum and spatial multiplexing can combine multiple data signals into one signal without requiring more spectrum, we are struggling to meet our exponentially growing data demands.

The solution could be optical wireless communications, which use optical wavelengths over a wide spectral range from a few hundred nanometers to a few micrometers that includes visible and infrared radiation. Ton Koonen and researchers at the Institute for Photonic Integration are designing prototype systems with a capacity of more than two thousand times that of current shared WiFi systems. They have presented their work in an invited paper for the themed issue, “Optical Wireless Communication,” of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A, the oldest ongoing scientific journal in the world. Isaac Newton’s first paper, “New Theory about Light and Colours,” was published in the same journal in 1672.

Panelists: andy gelme, jon oxer, greg adamson, jeremy negal at humanity+ melbourne.

Panelists and audience members weigh in on a variety of topics: technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact, and social implications of technology in general.

Continue reading “At Home with Technology — H+ Panelists: Andy Gelme, Jon Oxer, Greg Adamson, Jeremy Nagel” »