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Feb 18, 2019

A Report from the Longevity Therapeutics Summit

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, information science, life extension, robotics/AI

The Longevity Therapeutics Summit was focused on therapeutics that target aging, rather than basic research or theory.


This was the first year for the Longevity Therapeutics Summit in San Francisco, California. Ably organized by Hanson Wade, with John Lewis, CEO of Oisín Biotechnologies, as program chair, the conference focused on senolytics for senescent cell clearance, big data and AI in finding new drugs (“in silico” testing), delivery systems for therapeutics like senolytics, TORC1 drugs, and biomarkers of aging, and the challenges of clinical trial development and FDA approval.

The conference featured a smorgasbord of cutting-edge longevity research, and, as the name implies, the general focus was on therapeutics that target aging, rather than basic research or theory.

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Feb 18, 2019

Water Taxis Can Hover On Water

Posted by in category: transportation

These hovering taxis are a cleaner, faster way to travel on water.

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Feb 18, 2019

Leading in the Future

Posted by in category: futurism

Ladies Monday with Nancy Giordano.

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Feb 18, 2019

Machine learning unlocks plants’ secrets

Posted by in categories: biological, food, robotics/AI

Plants are master chemists, and Michigan State University researchers have unlocked their secret of producing specialized metabolites.

The research, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combined plant biology and machine learning to sort through tens of thousands of genes to determine which genes make specialized metabolites.

Some metabolites attract pollinators while others repel pests. Ever wonder why deer eat tulips and not daffodils? It’s because daffodils have metabolites to fend off the critters who’d dine on them.

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Feb 18, 2019

New pill can deliver insulin

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

An MIT-led research team has developed a drug capsule that could be used to deliver oral doses of insulin, potentially replacing the injections that people with type 1 diabetes have to give themselves every day. About the size of a blueberry, the capsule contains a small needle made of compressed insulin, which is injected after the capsule reaches the stomach. In tests in animals, the researchers showed that they could deliver enough insulin to lower blood sugar to levels comparable to those produced by injections given through skin. They also demonstrated that the device can be adapted to deliver other protein drugs.


Capsule that releases insulin in the stomach could replace injections for patients with type 1 diabetes.

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Feb 18, 2019

Scientific Duo Gets Back To Basics To Make Childbirth Safer

Posted by in category: health

Understanding Pregnancy Basics Could Make Childbirth Safer : Shots — Health News Remarkably little is known about the fundamentals of how a woman carries a baby inside her. Two Columbia University researchers aim to change that, to reduce the number of kids born too soon.

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Feb 18, 2019

Fresh evidence overturns the identification of a factor involved in blood-vessel dilation

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

In the life-threatening condition known as sepsis, the body responds to infection by inducing widespread biochemical changes that make the situation worse, some of which can lead to a severe decline in blood pressure. Several molecular factors that alter the constriction of blood vessels are involved in this decline, including nitric oxide, prostaglandins and oxidants such as hydrogen peroxide. In 2010, kynurenine — a metabolic product of the amino acid tryptophan — was identified as another factor that causes blood vessels to widen during sepsis. Writing in Nature, Stanley et al. (who work in the same laboratory as the researchers who identified kynurenine) now say that they got the wrong culprit.


Nine years ago, the compound kynurenine was reported to be responsible for the dilation of blood vessels during a potentially fatal inflammatory condition. New evidence has now identified the true culprit. A re-evaluation of a factor involved in vasodilation.

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Feb 18, 2019

Small research teams ‘disrupt’ science more radically than large ones

Posted by in category: science

The current infatuation with large-scale scientific collaborations and the energy they can bring to a scientific domain owes much to the robust correlation that exists between citation impact and team size. This relationship has been well documented in the emerging ‘science of science’ field. Writing in Nature, Wu et al. use a new citation-based index to nuance this conventional wisdom. They find that small and large teams differ in a measurable and systematic way in the extent of the ‘disruption’ they cause to the scientific area to which they contribute.


The application of a new citation metric prompts a reassessment of the relationship between the size of scientific teams and research impact, and calls into question the trend to emphasize ‘big team’ science. The disruptive contributions of small teams to science.

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Feb 18, 2019

Optical cooling achieved by tuning thermal radiation

Posted by in category: electronics

When two bodies are at different temperatures and not in direct contact with each other, it is generally assumed that thermal radiation (heat) will be transferred from the hotter body to the colder one. If the distance between the bodies is larger than the dominant thermal wavelength (about 10 micrometres at room temperature), there is a maximum heat-transfer rate, known as the black-body limit. Writing in Nature, Zhu et al. report that an electronic device called a photodiode can cool a solid that is colder than the photodiode when the two objects are in each other’s near field — that is, when they are separated by a distance much smaller than the thermal wavelength. This demonstration could have a tremendous impact on the fields of cooling and heat management.


It is well established that solid objects can be cooled by harnessing the properties of laser light. A laser-free technique that attains such cooling by tuning thermal radiation could have many practical applications. A method for near-field optical cooling.


Feb 18, 2019

How broken sleep promotes cardiovascular disease

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Most people have at some point echoed Macbeth’s complaint about the loss of “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. Sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnoea (when breathing temporarily stops, causing both sleep disruption and lack of oxygen in blood) and sleep deprivation, have been associated with an increased risk of atherosclerosis and its harmful cardiovascular effects,. Atherosclerosis is characterized by the formation of ‘plaques’ in arteries, as white blood cells enter the artery wall, take up cholesterol and other substances from the blood and trigger an inflammatory response. However, the mechanisms linking sleep disruption and atherosclerosis have been largely unknown. Writing in Nature, McAlpine et al. show that persistent sleep disruption causes the brain to signal the bone marrow to increase the production of white blood cells.

McAlpine et al. studied mice that were prone to developing atherosclerosis. The authors induced sleep fragmentation by moving a bar intermittently across the bottom of the animals’ cages during their sleep period (Fig. 1), and compared these animals with animals that slept normally. They found that mice with sleep fragmentation had more-severe atherosclerosis, which was paralleled by increases in the production of white blood cells in the bone marrow and in the numbers of monocytes and neutrophils — two types of white blood cell — in the blood. These effects were absent if the bar was moved when the mice were fully awake. Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system (which is associated with the ‘fight-or-flight’ response), and such activation increases the production of white blood cells and atherosclerosis in other experimental settings. However, the authors did not find evidence for a role of sympathetic activation in their setting.

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