Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 9606

Accumulation of fat in the liver, known as fatty liver disease, is experienced by over 5.5 million Australians, including more than 40% of all adults over the age of 50.

Fatty liver develops from a combination of both genetic and environmental causes, which influence the age of onset and severity of the disease. Experts are now describing the condition as a hidden epidemic, which is driving up rates of liver transplant, contributing to a range of illnesses and ultimately death.

Fatty liver disease usually has no early symptoms and diagnoses with current technologies mostly comes when it’s too late to prevent major illness. But now, for the first time in a study published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, a team of researchers from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, University of California, and University of Sydney, have discovered biomarkers in the blood that can predict the accumulation of toxic fats in the liver, which are a sign of early fatty liver disease. These predictions can be made based on the lipid (fats) profile in the blood.

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In the fight against cancer, there is a surprising tool in the arsenal: the food we eat. That’s because some nutrients in food have been found to play a role in preventing cancer, and it’s relevant because the World Cancer Research Fund reports that 30 to 50 percent of cancer cases are preventable, putting a focus on stopping cancer from developing in the first place.

Xiang-Dong Wang, a senior scientist and associate director of the Jean Mayer USDA Human Research Center on Aging at Tufts, studies how food can help prevent development, particularly lung, liver, and colon cancer.

Although the rate of most cancers is dropping, there is increasing concern about the rise in both incidence and death rate of liver cancer in the United States, partially due to the parallel rise in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, obesity, and diabetes.

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The human eye is an exquisite photodetection system with the ability to detect single photons. The process of vision is initiated by single-photon absorption in the molecule retinal, triggering a cascade of complex chemical processes that eventually lead to the generation of an electrical impulse. Here, we analyze the single-photon detection prospects for an architecture inspired by the human eye: field-effect transistors employing carbon nanotubes functionalized with chromophores. We employ non-equilibrium quantum transport simulations of realistic devices to reveal device response upon absorption of a single photon. We establish the parameters that determine the strength of the response such as the magnitude and orientation of molecular dipole(s), as well as the arrangements of chromophores on carbon nanotubes. Moreover, we show that functionalization of a single nanotube with multiple chromophores allows for number resolution, whereby the number of photons in an incoming light packet can be determined. Finally, we assess the performance prospects by calculating the dark count rate, and we identify the most promising architectures and regimes of operation.

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Nuclear fission — the physical process by which very large atoms like uranium split into pairs of smaller atoms — is what makes nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants possible. But for many years, physicists believed it energetically impossible for atoms as large as uranium (atomic mass = 235 or 238) to be split into two.

That all changed on Feb. 11, 1939, with a letter to the editor of Nature — a premier international scientific journal — that described exactly how such a thing could occur and even named it fission. In that letter, physicist Lise Meitner, with the assistance of her young nephew Otto Frisch, provided a physical explanation of how nuclear fission could happen.

It was a massive leap forward in nuclear physics, but today Lise Meitner remains obscure and largely forgotten. She was excluded from the victory celebration because she was a Jewish woman. Her story is a sad one.

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