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Researchers working for industrial development company Carbios have created a mutant bacterial enzyme that can break down plastic bottles for recycling in only a couple of hours, according to The Guardian.

The enyzme can break down PET plastic bottles into their individual chemical composites, which could later be reused to make brand new bottles.

Conventional recycled plastic that goes through a “thermomechanical” process isn’t high enough quality and is mostly used for other products such as clothing and carpets.

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Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in restoring mobility and sensation of touch in stroke-afflicted rats by reprogramming human skin cells to become nerve cells, which were then transplanted into the rats’ brains. The study has now been published in the research journal PNAS.

“Six months after the transplantation, we could see how the new cells had repaired the damage that a stroke had caused in the rats’ brains,” says Professor Zaal Kokaia, who together with senior professor Olle Lindvall and researcher Sara Palma-Tortosa at the Division of Neurology is behind the study.

Several previous studies from the Lund team and others have shown that it is possible to transplant cells derived from human stem cells or from reprogrammed cells into brains of rats afflicted by stroke. However, it was not known whether the transplanted cells can form connections correctly in the rat in a way that restores normal movement and feeling.

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DAEGU, South Korea, April 6, 2020 — Luminescence technology developed at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), using an in-plane electric field generated in parallel to the light-emitting layer of an LED, could help improve the efficiency of light-emitting elements used in billboards and banners. According to the research team, the LEDs produced this way emit light in a more flexible, stable way than conventional LEDs.

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“Collisional cooling has been the workhorse for cooling atoms,” adds Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. Arthur professor of physics at MIT. “I wasn’t convinced that our scheme would work, but since we didn’t know for sure, we had to try it. We know now that it works for cooling sodium lithium molecules. Whether it will work for other classes of molecules remains to be seen.” MIT School of Science, Harvard — MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, RLE at MIT — Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, #research #supercooledatoms #nanokelvin #WolfgangKetterle

Technique may enable molecule-based quantum computing.

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If you’re curious about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to animals, I’d like to recommend an excellent interview with a bat virus expert who was in Wuhan, China at ground zero in mid-January. He has been involved in a series of investigations of viral epidemics since the mid-1990s.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Dr. Linfa Wang, director of the Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases at the collaborative Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School in Singapore.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Continue reading “Bat Man: Hunting Down COVID-19 and other Deadly Viruses” | >

Not only have all the patients survived, according to Pluristem, but four of them showed improvement in respiratory parameters and three of them are in the advanced stages of weaning from ventilators. Moreover, two of the patients with preexisting medical conditions are showing clinical recovery in addition to the respiratory improvement.

“We are pleased with this initial outcome of the compassionate use program and committed to harnessing PLX cells for the benefit of patients and healthcare systems,” said Pluristem CEO and president Yaky Yanay. “Pluristem is dedicated to using its competitive advantages in large-scale manufacturing to potentially deliver PLX cells to a large number of patients in significant need.”

Pluristem’s PLX cells are “allogeneic mesenchymal-like cells that have immunomodulatory properties,” meaning they induce the immune system’s natural regulatory T cells and M2 macrophages, the company explained in a previous release. The result could be the reversal of dangerous overactivation of the immune system. This would likely reduce the fatal symptoms of pneumonia and pneumonitis (general inflammation of lung tissue).

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Abstract: Quantum optics is the study of the intrinsically quantum properties of light. During the second part of the 20th century experimental and theoretical progress developed together; nowadays quantum optics provides a testbed of many fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics such as coherence and quantum entanglement. Quantum optics helped trigger, both directly and indirectly, the birth of quantum technologies, whose aim is to harness non-classical quantum effects in applications from quantum key distribution to quantum computing. Quantum light remains at the heart of many of the most promising and potentially transformative quantum technologies. In this review, we celebrate the work of Sir Peter Knight and present an overview of the development of quantum optics and its impact on quantum technologies research. We describe the core theoretical tools developed to express and study the quantum properties of light, the key experimental approaches used to control, manipulate and measure such properties and their application in quantum simulation, and quantum computing.

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