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Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging Ambassador and Founder of Bioquark interviews Camillo Ricordi, Director Diabetes Research Institute University of Miami and Editor in Chief CellR4. They talk of the science behind the claim “We will cure diabetes!”.

Note: A decision was made to publish this interview despite the quality of the audio as it is still possible to understand the content. For links to research papers contact [email protected].

Ira Pastor comments:

The global economic cost of diabetes was estimated in 2018 to be over US$750 billion.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D), is a form of diabetes in which very little or no insulin is produced by the pancreas. While the cause of type 1 diabetes is still unknown.

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) involves insulin resistance, a condition in which cells fail to respond to insulin properly.

Continue reading ““We will cure diabetes!”” | >

Auguste Rodin spent the best part of four decades working on his epic sculpture The Gates of Hell.

The Mona Lisa, by contrast, took Leonardo da Vinci a mere 15 years or so, although it should be noted the Renaissance master never considered the painting finished.

So we can only imagine what those luminaries would think of an up-and-coming Oxford-based contemporary artist who can knock out complex works in under two hours.

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In the “Automate the Freight” series, I’ve concentrated on stories that reflect my premise that the killer app for self-driving vehicles will not be private passenger cars, but will more likely be the mundane but necessary task of toting things from place to place. The economics of replacing thousands of salary-drawing and benefit-requiring humans in the logistics chain are greatly favored compared to the profits to be made by providing a convenient and safe commuting experience to individuals. Advances made in automating deliveries will eventually trickle down to the consumer market, but it’ll be the freight carriers that drive innovation.

While I’ve concentrated on self-driving freight vehicles, there are other aspects to automating the supply chain that I’ve touched on in this series, from UAV-delivered blood and medical supplies to the potential for automating the last hundred feet of home delivery with curb-to-door robots. But automation of the other end of the supply chain holds a lot of promise too, both for advancing technology and disrupting the entire logistics field. This time around: automated packaging lines, or how the stuff you buy online gets picked and wrapped for shipping without ever being touched by human hands.

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A spacecraft having a triangular hull with vertical electrostatic line charges on each corner that produce a horizontal electric field parallel to the sides of the hull. This field, interacting with a plane wave emitted by antennas on the side of the hull, generates a force per volume combining both lift and propulsion.

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Imagine a simple and effective treatment for restoring the sense of smell in people who have lost it or never had it in the first place – that could one day be possible as a result of early stage research on mice, in which olfactory nerves were replenished using stem cells.

Using droplets of globose basal cells – the same cells that naturally replace damaged and ageing neurons related to smell – scientists were able to get them to develop into full nerve cells, stretching right into the brain.

Ultimately a few squirts of stem cells were able to reconnect the axons leading to the olfactory signalling in the brains of the mice. Scientists are still a long way from repeating the trick with human beings, but it’s a very promising start.

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A laser-driven technique for creating fusion that dispenses with the need for radioactive fuel elements and leaves no toxic radioactive waste is now within reach, say researchers.

Dramatic advances in powerful, high-intensity lasers are making it viable for scientists to pursue what was once thought impossible: creating energy based on hydrogen-boron reactions. And an Australian physicist is in the lead, armed with a patented design and working with international collaborators on the remaining scientific challenges.

In a paper in the scientific journal Laser and Particle Beams today, lead author Heinrich Hora from the University of New South Wales in Sydney and international colleagues argue that the path to hydrogen-boron fusion is now viable, and may be closer to realization than other approaches, such as the deuterium-tritium fusion approach being pursued by U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in France.

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