Articles from July 2021



Test Your Creativity

Calendar July 30, 2021 | Posted by admin

What makes one person more creative than another? Creativity is hard to define and perhaps even more difficult to measure, but scientists think they’ve come up with a remarkably simple way of assessing at least one aspect of it.

It’s a test that you can take yourself in a couple of minutes, and it works best when you don’t know much about how the analysis works. Head over to the project page to give it a go, and then come back to read all about it.

The new method, called the Divergent Association Task (DAT), asks people to name 10 nouns that are as far apart in meaning as possible. “Cat” and “book” would be more divergent than “cat” and “dog”, for example.

A computer algorithm then measures this semantic distance – how much the two words have to do with each other – between the nouns the person came up with. Based on an analysis of responses from 8,914 volunteers, DAT is at least as good as current methods for predicting creativity in a person.

“Several theories posit that creative people are able to generate more divergent ideas,” write the researchers in their published paper. “If this is correct, simply naming unrelated words and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective measure of divergent thinking.”

The Alternative Uses Task (where you think of as many uses as possible for an object) and the Bridge-the-Associative Gap Task (where you try and link two words with a third word) are the two existing measures of creativity that DAT went up against.

The creativity scores from DAT correlated as well with the other scores as they did with one another, implying it’s about as useful at assessing creativity as more complicated tools. What’s more, the data show that its effectiveness seems to apply across different demographics, making it suitable for large-scale surveys.

The key benefits of the new DAT test are that it’s simple and quick to complete, and doesn’t require any kind of human assessment, which might introduce bias. However, the researchers are keen to point out that it doesn’t measure every aspect of creativity.

“Our task measures only a sliver of one type of creativity,” says psychologist Jay Olson, from Harvard University. “But these findings enable creativity assessments across larger and more diverse samples with less bias, which will ultimately help us better understand this fundamental human ability.”

As Olson points out to CNN, the DAT test explores divergent thinking and verbal creativity – it won’t show how creative you might be when cooking in the kitchen for example, which uses a different set of skills, but it can predict aptitude at certain problem-solving tasks.

Psychologists think that more creative people are able to link remote elements together in their minds more easily, which is what’s being tested here. A more comprehensive measure would have to also take into account achievements in creative fields, such as music composition and inventions.

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

IBM has Unveiled a Brand-New Quantum Computer

Calendar July 29, 2021 | Posted by admin

Thousands of miles away from the company’s quantum computation center in Poughkeepsie, New York, IBM is bringing quantum technologies out of Big Blue’s labs and directly to partners around the world. A Quantum System One, IBM‘s flagship integrated superconducting quantum computer, is now available on-premises in the Kawasaki Business Incubation Center in Kawasaki City, for Japanese researchers to run their quantum experiments in fields ranging from chemistry to finance.

Most customers to date can only access IBM‘s System One over the cloud, by connecting to the company’s quantum computation center in Poughkeepsie. Recently, the company unveiled the very first quantum computer that was physically built outside of the computation center’s data centers, when the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany acquired a System One. The system that has now been deployed to Japan is therefore IBM‘s second quantum computer that is located outside of the US.

The announcement comes as part of a long-standing relationship with Japanese organizations. In 2019, IBM and the University of Tokyo inaugurated the Japan-IBM Quantum Partnership, a national agreement inviting universities and businesses across the country to engage in quantum research. It was agreed then that a Quantum System One would eventually be installed at an IBM facility in Japan.

Building on the partnership, Big Blue and the University of Tokyo launched the Quantum Innovation Initiative Consortium last year to further bring together organizations working in the field of quantum. With this, the Japanese government has made it clear that it is keen to be at the forefront of the promising developments that quantum technologies are expected to bring about.

Leveraging some physical properties that are specific to quantum mechanics, quantum computers could one day be capable of carrying out calculations that are impossible to run on the devices that are used today, known as a classical computers.

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Stronger than Steel, Tougher than Kevlar

Calendar July 28, 2021 | Posted by admin

Spider silk is said to be one of the strongest, toughest materials on the Earth. Now engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed amyloid silk hybrid proteins and produced them in engineered bacteria. The resulting fibers are stronger and tougher than some natural spider silks.

To be precise, the artificial silk — dubbed “polymeric amyloid” fiber — was not technically produced by researchers, but by bacteria that were genetically engineered in the lab of Fuzhong Zhang, a professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering.

Zhang has worked with spider silk before. In 2018, his lab engineered bacteria that produced a recombinant spider silk with performance on par with its natural counterparts in all of the important mechanical properties.

“After our previous work, I wondered if we could create something better than spider silk using our synthetic biology platform,” Zhang said.

The research team, which includes first author Jingyao Li, a PhD student in Zhang’s lab, modified the amino acid sequence of spider silk proteins to introduce new properties, while keeping some of the attractive features of spider silk.

A problem associated with recombinant spider silk fiber — without significant modification from natural spider silk sequence — is the need to create β-nanocrystals, a main component of natural spider silk, which contributes to its strength. “Spiders have figured out how to spin fibers with a desirable amount of nanocrystals,” Zhang said. “But when humans use artificial spinning processes, the amount of nanocrystals in a synthetic silk fiber is often lower than its natural counterpart.”

Their research was published in the journal ACS Nano.

Source: https://source.wustl.edu/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

French company Carmat sells first artificial heart to Italian patient

Calendar July 27, 2021 | Posted by admin

A French prosthetics company announced on July 19, that it sold its first artificial heart. Carmat, the French company, announced that its artificial heart was bought and transplanted into an Italian patient.


Carmat stated that the procedure “was performed by the team headed by heart surgeon Dr Ciro Maiello at the Azienda Ospedaliera dei Colli hospital in Naples, one of the centres with the greatest experience in the field of artificial hearts in Italy.”
The artificial heart, marketed as the Aeson prosthetic heart, got the certification to be sold in the European Union in December 2020. The certification for the French company, which was founded in 2008, came based on the PIVOTAL research that had started in 2016 and which is still ongoing.
Carmat said the sale of the Aeson heart signified “a major milestone that opens up a new chapter in the company’s development.” The company also added that it was looking to help more customers in France and Germany by the end of the year. The artificial heart helps patients who need immediate transplants but have to wait for the relevant organs. According to a study in 2019, 73 percent of the patients survived the transplant for six months or until a successful permanent transplant within the same period.
While the treatment may prove to be lifesaving, the costs may be prohibitive. The surgical operation cost over 150,000 euros, which was paid for by the regional health system. The national system in Italy will not cover the procedure until it has been proven to be safe over several years.
Source: https://www.carmatsa.com/
AND
https://www.cnbctv18.com/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , ,

3 Existing Drugs Fight Coronavirus with ‘almost 100%’ Success

Calendar July 26, 2021 | Posted by admin

Israeli scientists say they have identified three existing drugs that have good prospects as COVID-19 treatments, reporting that they illustrated high ability to fight the virus in lab tests.

They placed the substances with live SARS‑CoV‑2 and human cells in vitro. The results “showed that the drugs can protect cells from onslaught by the virus with close to 100 percent effectiveness, meaning that almost 100% of the cells lived despite being infected by the virus,” Prof. Isaiah Arkin, the Hebrew University biochemist behind the research, told The Times of Israel.

“By contrast, in normal circumstances, around half the cells would have died after two days following contact with the virus.” He added there are strong indications that the drugs will be robust against changing variants.

Arkin, part of a Hebrew University center that specializes in repurposing existing drugs, said that he screened more than 3,000 medicines for suitability, in what he describes as a needle-in-a-haystack search. This approach can provide a fast track to find treatments as the drugs have already been tried and tested, and he hopes to work with a pharmaceutical company to quickly get the medicines he identified clinically tested for COVID-19.

“We have the vaccine, but we shouldn’t rest on our laurels, and I would like to see these drugs become part of the arsenal that we use to fight the coronavirus,” he said. When confronting SARS‑CoV‑2, the drugs in question — darapladib, which currently treats atherosclerosis; the cancer drug Flumatinib; and an HIV medicine — don’t target the spike protein. Rather, they target one of two other proteins: the envelope protein and the 3a protein. These proteins — especially the envelope protein — hardly change between variants, and even between diseases from the coronavirus family. As such, drugs that target them are likely to remain effective in spite of mutations, Arkin said.

Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Bright Future of the Hydrogen Economy

Calendar July 23, 2021 | Posted by admin

The U.S. is counting on hydrogen to play a significant role in the low-carbon economy of the future, but fundamental questions about transportation, storage and cost need to be addressed in order to integrate hydrogen gas into the nation’s existing infrastructure, according to a preliminary study from a new research program at The University of Texas at Austin. That’s because although hydrogen gas burns carbon free, it only gives about a third of the energy of natural gas per unit volume. That means the U.S. will need to make and store much more of it for heating, transportation, power generation and industrial uses.

The research offers a framework for solving these issues, presenting an initial goal of replacing 10% of the nation’s natural gas supply with hydrogen as a reasonable first target. That move could reduce U.S. greenhouse gasses by 3.2%, based on 2019 emissions, and help meet the Department of Energy’s goal of enabling a low-carbon economy in the U.S. The analysis considers what it would take to scale up the use of hydrogen, including integrating hydrogen into the country’s natural gas system, which is probably the most robust in the world, said lead author Mark Shuster, associate director of energy at the Bureau of Economic Geology in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences.

“We know how to move gas. We’re very experienced in it, particularly in the U.S., so it makes sense,” he said. “You have a whole suite of potential uses for the hydrogen, but it’s going to take some work, some research, and I think it’s going to take probably some targeted incentives.”

The paper, authored by scientists and economists at the bureau, was published in the Oil & Gas Journal. It came out as Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm announced the goal of reducing the cost of clean hydrogen from $5 a kilogram to $1 a kilogram in a decade.

Bureau Chief Economist Ning Lin, a study co-author, said that hydrogen projects will have to quickly become reality for the Department of Energy’s goal to be met.

“There is a lot of research being done, but not enough demonstration,” she said. “In order to achieve the goal of having hydrogen as a meaningful sector in our current energy system with competitive cost, we need to see material progress in scaling up to pilot test capacity and strong cost reduction evidence in the next five years.”

Source: https://news.utexas.edu/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , ,

China Reports its First Human Death from Rare Monkey B Virus

Calendar July 22, 2021 | Posted by admin

China says it has recorded its first primate-to-human infection and death involving the monkey B virus, a rare and deadly pathogen that remains little-understood in some parts of the world.

The victim was a 53-year-old veterinarian from Beijing who contracted the infection while dissecting dead monkeys in early March, according to China’s CDC Weekly. *The patient started showing symptoms in April and died on May 27, officials said. Two close contacts have since tested negative for the virus. Symptoms include nausea, fever and vomiting about a month after the infection.

Neurological symptoms started to appear soon afterward, prompting health officials to run a battery of tests. They ultimately found the monkey B virus in the patient’s blood and saliva, China’s CDC said. They were unable to save him from the disease.

It was an unusual discovery for health officials in China, where doctors have never documented the virus in humans before.

Source: http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/
AND
https://msn.com

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , ,

FDA-approved Drugs Slow or Reverse Alzheimer’s

Calendar July 21, 2021 | Posted by admin

A research team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has identified potential new treatment targets for Alzheimer’s disease, as well as existing drugs that have therapeutic potential against these targets.

The potential targets are defective proteins that lead to the buildup of amyloid in the brain, contributing to the onset of problems with memory and thinking that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s. The 15 existing drugs identified by the researchers have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other purposes, providing the possibility of clinical trials that could begin sooner than is typical, according to the researchers.

In addition, the experiments yielded seven drugs that may be useful for treating faulty proteins linked to Parkinson’s disease, six for stroke and one for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Scientists have worked for decades to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s by targeting genes rooted in the disease process but have had little success. That approach has led to several dead ends because many of those genes don’t fundamentally alter proteins at work in the brain. The new study takes a different approach, by focusing on proteins in the brain, and other tissues, whose function has been altered.

“In this study, we used human samples and the latest technologies to better understand the biology of Alzheimer’s disease,” said principal investigator Carlos Cruchaga, the Reuben Morriss III Professor of Neurology and a professor of psychiatry. “Using Alzheimer’s disease samples, we’ve been able to identify new genes, druggable targets and FDA-approved compounds that interact with those targets to potentially slow or reverse the progress of Alzheimer’s.”

The scientists focused on protein levels in the brain, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood plasma of people with and without Alzheimer’s disease. Some of the proteins were made by genes previously linked to Alzheimer’s risk, while others were made by genes not previously connected to the disease. After identifying the proteins, the researchers compared their results to several databases of existing drugs that affect those proteins.

The new study, funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Source: https://source.wustl.edu/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Virus Trap

Calendar July 20, 2021 | Posted by admin

To date, there are no effective antidotes against most virus infections. An interdisciplinary research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now developed a new approach: they engulf and neutralize viruses with nano-capsules tailored from genetic material using the DNA origami method. The strategy has already been tested against hepatitis and adeno-associated viruses in cell cultures. It may also prove successful against corona viruses.

There are antibiotics against dangerous bacteria, but few antidotes to treat acute viral infections. Some infections can be prevented by vaccination but developing new vaccines is a long and laborious process.

Now an interdisciplinary research team from the Technical University of Munich, the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Brandeis University (USA) is proposing a novel strategy for the treatment of acute viral infections: The team has developed nanostructures made of DNA, the substance that makes up our genetic material, that can trap viruses and render them harmless.

Lined on the inside with virus-binding molecules, nano shells made of DNA material bind viruses tightly and thus render them harmless.

Even before the new variant of the corona virus put the world on hold, Hendrik Dietz, Professor of Biomolecular Nanotechnology at the Physics Department of the Technical University of Munich, and his team were working on the construction of virus-sized objects that assemble themselves.

In 1962, the biologist Donald Caspar and the biophysicist Aaron Klug discovered the geometrical principles according to which the protein envelopes of viruses are built. Based on these geometric specifications, the team around Hendrik Dietz at the Technical University of Munich, supported by Seth Fraden and Michael Hagan from Brandeis University in the USA, developed a concept that made it possible to produce artificial hollow bodies the size of a virus.

In the summer of 2019, the team asked whether such hollow bodies could also be used as a kind of “virus trap”. If they were to be lined with virus-binding molecules on the inside, they should be able to bind viruses tightly and thus be able to take them out of circulation. For this, however, the hollow bodies would also have to have sufficiently large openings through which viruses can get into the shells.

“None of the objects that we had built using DNA origami technology at that time would have been able to engulf a whole virus – they were simply too small,” says Hendrik Dietz in retrospect. “Building stable hollow bodies of this size was a huge challenge.”

Starting from the basic geometric shape of the icosahedron, an object made up of 20 triangular surfaces, the team decided to build the hollow bodies for the virus trap from three-dimensional, triangular plates. For the DNA plates to assemble into larger geometrical structures, the edges must be slightly beveled. The correct choice and positioning of binding points on the edges ensure that the panels self-assemble to the desired objects.

“In this way, we can now program the shape and size of the desired objects using the exact shape of the triangular plates,” says Hendrik Dietz. “We can now produce objects with up to 180 subunits and achieve yields of up to 95 percent. The route there was, however, quite rocky, with many iterations.”

By varying the binding points on the edges of the triangles, the team’s scientists can not only create closed hollow spheres, but also spheres with openings or half-shells. These can then be used as virus traps.

Source: https://www.tum.de/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

AI Recognises the Biological Activity of Natural Products

Calendar July 19, 2021 | Posted by admin

Nature has a vast store of medicinal substances. “Over 50 percent of all drugs today are inspired by nature,” says Gisbert Schneider, Professor of Computer-​Assisted Drug Design at ETH Zurich. Nevertheless, he is convinced that we have tapped only a fraction of the potential of natural products. Together with his team, he has successfully demonstrated how artificial intelligence (AI) methods can be used in a targeted manner to find new pharmaceutical applications for natural products. Furthermore, AI methods are capable of helping to find alternatives to these compounds that have the same effect but are much easier and therefore cheaper to manufacture.

And so the ETH researchers are paving the way for an important medical advance: we currently have only about 4,000 basically different medicines in total. In contrast, estimates of the number of human proteins reach up to 400,000, each of which could be a target for a drug. There are good reasons for Schneider’s focus on nature in the search for new pharmaceutical agents.

“Most natural products are by definition potential active ingredients that have been selected via evolutionary mechanisms,” he says.
Whereas scientists used to trawl collections of natural products on the search for new drugs, Schneider and his team have flipped the script: first, they look for possible target molecules, typically proteins, of natural products so as to identify the pharmacologically relevant compounds. “The chances of finding medically meaningful pairs of active ingredient and target protein are much greater using this method than with conventional screening,” Schneider says.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , ,