Menu

Blog

Page 8865

Feb 2, 2018

A successful SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch gives NASA new options

Posted by in category: space travel

The impact next week’s flight could have.

Read more

Feb 2, 2018

Generalized Hardy’s paradox shows an even stronger conflict between quantum and classical physics

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

By building the most general framework for the n-particle Hardy’s paradox and Hardy’s inequality, the results of the new paper provide a stronger Hardy’s paradox, and can also detect more quantum entangled states. As the success probability for the three-qubit generalized Hardy’s paradox reaches 0.25, the researchers are very hopeful that it will be observed in future experiments. Credit: Jiang, et al. © 2018 American Physical Society In 1993, physicist Lucien Hardy proposed an experiment showing that there is a small probability (around 6–9%) of observing a particle and its antiparticle in…

Read more

Feb 2, 2018

Airbus’ drone taxi takes to the skies for the first time

Posted by in category: drones

Airbus’ self-piloted taxi flies for the first time.

Read more

Feb 2, 2018

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs has a plan to bring order to the mobility chaos in our cities

Posted by in category: transportation

Coord is a new cloud-based platform for on-demand transportation companies.

Read more

Feb 2, 2018

Amazon’s idea for employee-tracking wearables raises concerns

Posted by in category: wearables

The company has patents for wristbands that track warehouse employees’ movements.

Read more

Feb 2, 2018

Could Klotho Treat Dementia

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience

Researcher Dr. Dena Dubal, from the University of California San Francisco, is considering a new approach to combat neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, using a protein known as klotho.

Aging is the foundation of age-related diseases

Instead of trying to understand each of these diseases and the complex mechanisms unique to both, she considered what all these conditions have in common; the answer, of course, is aging.

Continue reading “Could Klotho Treat Dementia” »

Feb 2, 2018

Altered Carbon Premiere Viewing Party SF w Aubrey/Life Extension

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Viewing party of one of the most highly-anticipated science fiction stories onto the screen. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon on Netflix. Introduction speech by Dr. Aubrey de Grey, famous proponent of innovative biotechnologies.

Watch the premiere alongside other fans and talk about what you would do if you could live another 100 years.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80097140

Read more

Feb 2, 2018

Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico

Posted by in categories: cryptocurrencies, transportation

SAN JUAN, P.R. — They call what they are building Puertopia. But then someone told them, apparently in all seriousness, that it translates to “eternal boy playground” in Latin. So they are changing the name: They will call it Sol.

Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They are selling their homes and cars in California and establishing residency on the Caribbean island in hopes of avoiding what they see as onerous state and federal taxes on their growing fortunes, some of which now reach into the billions of dollars.

And these men — because they are almost exclusively men — have a plan for what to do with the wealth: They want to build a crypto utopia, a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public, to show the rest of the world what a crypto future could look like. Blockchain, a digital ledger that forms the basis of virtual currencies, has the potential to reinvent society — and the Puertopians want to prove it.

Continue reading “Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico” »

Feb 2, 2018

A chip implanted under the skin allows for precise, real-time medical monitoring

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing

Under-the-skin chip (credit: EPFL)

A tiny (one-centimeter-square) biosensor chip developed at EPFL is designed to be implanted under your skin to continuously monitor concentrations of pH, temperature, and metabolism-related molecules like glucose, lactate and cholesterol, as well as some drugs.

The chip would replace blood work, which may take hours — or even days — for analysis and is a limited snapshot of conditions at the moment the blood is drawn.

Continue reading “A chip implanted under the skin allows for precise, real-time medical monitoring” »

Feb 2, 2018

How a hungry, hardy bacteria eats toxic metals and excretes gold nuggets

Posted by in categories: energy, food

If the goose that laid the golden egg had a real-life counterpart, it would be C. metallidurans. This hardy little bacterium consumes toxic metals and excretes tiny gold nuggets, but how and why it does so has never been fully understood. Now, German and Australian researchers have peered inside the microorganism and figured out that mechanism.

C. metallidurans has carved out a nice little niche for itself, usually living in soils full of heavy metals, which are toxic to most other microorganisms. But this bacteria has evolved a defense mechanism to help it not only survive but thrive under those conditions, and its ability to turn toxic compounds into gold is well known enough to once earn it a place in an alchemy art installation.

“Apart from the toxic heavy metals, living conditions in these soils are not bad,” says Dietrich H. Nies, an author on the new study. “There is enough hydrogen to conserve energy and nearly no competition. If an organism chooses to survive here, it has to find a way to protect itself from these toxic substances.”

Read more