Lifespan: Why We Age-and Why We Don’t Have To — Kindle edition by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. LaPlante. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Lifespan: Why We Age-and Why We Don’t Have To.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the California NanoSystems Institute in Los Angeles have recently developed a soft swimming robot based on a self-sustained hydrogel oscillator. This robot, presented in a paper published in Science Robotics, operates under constant light input without the need for a battery.
“When I shone light on a soft, fast responsive hydrogel pillar, I observed the pillar started to oscillate around the optical beam,” Yusen Zhao, a Ph.D. student involved in the research, said. “It looked very intriguing to me, and I wondered: How can a constant input produce intermittent output? Under what conditions does the oscillation happen? Would it be powerful enough to propel and swim in water, and eventually lead to solar sails? With these questions, I continued systematic studies aiming to achieve these objectives.”
Zhao and his colleagues developed a soft oscillator made of a light-responsive soft gel, which is molded into the shape of a pillar or strip. When light hits a spot of this gel pillar, it is automatically absorbed and converted into heat. The locally heated spot on the robot causes it to eject some of its water and shrink in volume, resulting in its tail bending towards the light source.
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Revolutionary research is underway to create a cheap, fast, at-home early diagnostic test.
Researchers at Mayo Clinic have identified the enzyme, called CD38, that is responsible for the decrease in nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) during aging, a process that is associated with age-related metabolic decline. Results demonstrated an increase in the presence of CD38 with aging in both mice and humans. The results appear today in Cell Metabolism.
“As we age, we experience a decline in our metabolism and metabolic function. This increases the incidence of age-related metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes and others,” says Eduardo Chini, M.D., Ph.D., anesthesiologist and researcher for Mayo Clinic’s Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging and lead author of the study. “Previous studies have shown that levels of NAD decline during the aging process in several organisms. This decrease in NAD appears to be, at least in part, responsible for age-related metabolic decline.”
In this study, researchers at the Center on Aging have shown that CD38, an enzyme that is present in inflammatory cells, is directly involved in the process that mediates the age-related NAD decline. Comparing 3- to 32-month-old mice, researchers found that levels of CD38 increased at least two to three times during chronological aging in all tissues tested, including the liver, fat, spleen and skeletal muscle.
Researchers at the Universities of Abuja and Nigeria, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, have detected a potentially human-infective microbe in pet dogs in Nigeria.
Dogs in tropical Africa run the risk of contracting canine trypanosomosis if they are bitten by bloodsucking tsetse flies carrying trypanosomes – microscopic, single-celled organisms found in the bloodstream. In dogs, this disease runs a severe course and is often fatal; “white eyes” or corneal cloudiness is one of the characteristic and obvious signs of the disease.
Sick dogs suspected of trypanosomosis are frequently brought to the University of Nigeria Veterinary Teaching Hospital (UNVTH) in Nsukka, where diagnosis relies on examination of a blood smear under the microscope. While trypanosomes are easily detected by their rapid motion among the blood cells, it is hard to determine the exact species of trypanosome by microscopy alone.
Technology entrepreneurs delight in disrupting established industries, from textiles to healthcare to agriculture.
Changes in automotive manufacturing have been tougher to sell because no matter how many computers are put under the hood, the cars themselves “are still being built on 100-year-old concepts,” Daniel Barel, CEO of Israeli automotive startup REE, tells ISRAEL21c.
Continue reading “Israeli startup is totally reinventing how cars are built” »
Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa.
