Articles from January 2022

China is now home to the world’s first small modular nuclear reactor. The Huaneng Group Co.’s 200-megawatt unit 1 reactor at Shidao Bay provides power to the grid in Shandong province. The reactor can use nuclear energy for various functions including power generation. It can also be used in the mining sector, industrial parks and for high-end consumption industries. The plant uses helium instead of water to produce power. Its fourth-generation reactor shuts down passively in case of any problem. The small module reactors or SMRs, at 200 megawatts are nearly one-fifth the size of Hualong One, which happens to be China’s first homegrown reactor design.

“SMRs should be less costly to build and operate, faster to implement and have shorter shutdown times during refuelling than traditional nuclear plants,” Jefferies analyst Bolor Enkhbaatar said.

The application of SMRs has the ability to drastically cut down the consumption of fossil fuel energy in China. This can further help in promoting energy conservation and carbon emission reduction.

A report by Bloomberg reveals that no country in the world is spending on a nuclear plant as much as China. The country is expected to invest $440 billion into new plants in the coming 10 years. China has reportedly built 51 nuclear power units with 19 under construction. It currently has the world’s third-largest park of nuclear reactors after the US and France and has invested in developing the nuclear energy sector.

Source: https://www.wionews.com/

For years, the world of medicine has been steadily advancing the art of robot-assisted procedures, enabling doctors to enhance their technique inside the operating theatre. Now US researchers say a robot has successfully performed keyhole surgery on pigs all on its own – without the guiding hand of a human. Furthermore, they add, the robot surgeon produced “significantly better” results than humans.

Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (Star) carried out laparoscopic surgery to connect two ends of an intestine in four pigs. The robot excelled at the procedure, which requires a high level of precision and repetitive movements

Axel Krieger, of Johns Hopkins University, said it marked the first time a robot had performed laparoscopic surgery without human help. “Our findings show that we can automate one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in surgery: the reconnection of two ends of an intestine,” he said. “The Star performed the procedure in four animals and it produced significantly better results than humans performing the same procedure.”

Connecting two ends of an intestine is a challenging procedure in gastrointestinal surgery, requiring a surgeon to apply stitches – or sutures – with high accuracy and consistency. Even a slight hand tremor or misplaced stitch can result in a leak that could result in a patient suffering fatal complications. Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins, helped create the robot, a vision-guided system designed specifically to suture soft tissue. It improves a 2016 model that repaired a pig’s intestines, but required a large incision to access the intestine and more guidance from humans.
Experts say new features allow for improved surgical precision, including specialised suturing tools and imaging systems that provide more accurate visualisations of the surgical field.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

Artificial intelligence is largely a numbers game. When deep neural networks, a form of AI that learns to discern patterns in data, began surpassing traditional algorithms 10 years ago, it was because we finally had enough data and processing power to make full use of them.

Today’s neural networks are even hungrier for data and power. Training them requires carefully tuning the values of millions or even billions of parameters that characterize these networks, representing the strengths of the connections between artificial neurons. The goal is to find nearly ideal values for them, a process known as optimization, but training the networks to reach this point isn’t easy.

“Training could take days, weeks or even months,” said Petar Veličković, a staff research scientist at DeepMind in London.

That may soon change. Boris Knyazev of the University of Guelph in Ontario and his colleagues have designed and trained a “hypernetwork” — a kind of overlord of other neural networks — that could speed up the training process. Given a new, untrained deep neural network designed for some task, the hypernetwork predicts the parameters for the new network in fractions of a second, and in theory could make training unnecessary. Because the hypernetwork learns the extremely complex patterns in the designs of deep neural networks, the work may also have deeper theoretical implications.

For now, the hypernetwork performs surprisingly well in certain settings, but there’s still room for it to grow — which is only natural given the magnitude of the problem. If they can solve it, “this will be pretty impactful across the board for machine learning,” said Veličković.

Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org

Pfizer and BioNTech have begun enrollment for a clinical trial to test the safety and immune response of their Omicron-specific Covid-19 vaccine in adults aged up to 55, the companies announced in a statement. The pharmaceutical giant could be ready to file for regulatory approval of the shot by March.

The company’s head of vaccine research Kathrin Jansen underscored that current data showed that boosters against the original Covid strain continued to protect against severe outcomes with Omicron. Still she recognizes the need to be prepared in the event this protection wanes over time and to potentially help address Omicron and new variants in the future.”

“This study is part of our science-based approach to develop a variant-based vaccine that achieves a similar level of protection against Omicron as it did with earlier variants but longer duration of protection.”

The trial will involve 1,420 people aged 18-55. It did not include people older than 55 because the goal of the study was to examine the immune response of participants dosed, rather than estimate vaccine efficacy. The trial is taking place across the United States and South Africa, and the first participant was dosed in North Carolina. The volunteers are split into three groups. The first involves people who previously received two doses of the current Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine 90-180 days prior to enrollment, and will receive one or two doses of the Omicron vaccine. The second will be people who got three doses of the current vaccine 90-180 days prior to the study and will receive either another dose of the original shot or an Omicron-specific vaccine. The third and final group are people who have never previously received a Covid vaccine, and will receive three doses of the Omicron-specific vaccine.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was the first Covid shot to be authorized in the West, in December 2020.

Source: https://www.france24.com/

A novel study led by researchers from the University of Oxford has investigated the lingering cognitive effects of mild COVID-19 in the months following infection. The research revealed minor deficits in attention and memory can be seen for up to six months following a mild infection. It is becoming increasingly clear that a severe case of COVID-19 can result in lasting impacts to the brain. Alongside these acute impacts on the brain, there are persistent cognitive deficits being reported by long COVID patients that last months past an initial infection.

This new study, published in the journal Brain Communications, set out to investigate the other end of the disease spectrum. Here, the focus was on cognitive impacts in asymptomatic to moderate COVID-19 patients who do not report symptoms of long COVID.

More than 150 subjects were recruited for the study, with around 60 reporting a PCR-confirmed case of mild COVID-19 up to nine months prior. The cohort completed 12 different online tests designed to measure a range of cognitive functions, from sustained attention and semantic reasoning to mental rotation and spatial–visual attention.

An international team led by uOttawa Faculty of Medicine researchers have published findings that could contribute to future therapeutics for muscle degeneration due to old age, and diseases such as cancer and muscular dystrophy. In a study appearing in the Journal of Cell Biology, which publishes peer-reviewed research on cellular structure and function, the authors said their work demonstrates the importance of the enzyme GCN5 in maintaining the expression of key structural proteins in skeletal muscle. Those are the muscles attached to bone that breathing, posture and locomotion all rely on.

“We found that if you delete GCN5 expression from muscle it will no longer be able to handle extreme physical stress,” says Dr. Keir Menzies, a molecular biologist at the Faculty of Medicine’s Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology department and cross-appointed as an associate professor at the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences.

Over the span of roughly five years, the uOttawa-led international collaboration painstakingly experimented with a muscle-specific mouse “knockout” of GCN5, a well-studied enzyme which regulates multiple cellular processes such as metabolism and inflammation. Through a series of manipulations, scientists produce lab mice in which specific genes are disrupted, or knocked out, to unveil animal models of human disease and better understand how genes work.

In this case, multiple experiments were done to examine the role the GCN5 enzyme plays in muscle fiber. What they found with this line of muscle-specific mouse knockouts was a notable decline in muscle health during physical stress, such as downhill treadmill running, a type of exercise known by athletes to cause micro-tears in muscle fibres to stimulate muscle growth. The lab animals’ muscle fibers became dramatically weaker as they scurried downhill, like those of old mice, while wild-type mice were not similarly impacted. 

Dr. Menzies, the senior author of the study, says the findings are akin to what is observed in advanced aging, or myopathies and muscular dystrophy, a group of genetic diseases that result in progressive weakness and loss of muscle mass. It was supported by human data, including an observed negative correlation between muscle fiber diameter and Yin Yang 1, a highly multifunctional protein that is pivotal to a slew of cellular processes and found by the Menzies lab to be a target of GCN5. Ultimately, the team’s research found that GCN5 boosts the expression of key structural muscle proteins, notably dystrophin, and a lack of it will reduce them.

Source: https://rupress.org/
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https://www.thebrighterside.news

On 19 January 2022, co-founders Rick Klausner and Hans Bishop publicly launched an aging research initiative called Altos Labs, with $3 billion in initial investment from backers including tech investor Yuri Milner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. This is the latest in a recent surge of investment in ventures seeking to build anti-aging interventions on the back of basic research programs looking at epigenetic reprogramming. In December, cryptocurrency company Coinbase’s cofounder Brian Armstrong and venture capitalist Blake Byers founded NewLimit, an aging-focused biotech backed by an initial $105 million investment, with the University of California, San Francisco’s Alex Marson and Stanford’s Mark Davis as advisors.

The discovery of the ‘Yamanaka factors’ — four transcription factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4) that can reprogram a differentiated somatic cell into a pluripotent embryonic-like state — earned Kyoto University researcher Shinya Yamanaka a share of the Nobel prize in 2012. The finding, described in 2006, transformed stem cell research by providing a new source of embryonic stem cell (ESC)-like cells, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSCs), that do not require human embryos for their derivation. But in recent years, Yamanaka factors have also become the focus for another burgeoning area: aging research.

So-called partial reprogramming consists in applying Yamanaka factors to cells for long enough to roll back cellular aging and repair tissues but without returning to pluripotency. Several groups, including those headed by Stanford University’s Vittorio Sebastiano, the Salk Institute’s Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte and Harvard Medical School’s David Sinclair, have shown that partial reprogramming can dramatically reverse age-related phenotypes in the eye, muscle and other tissues in cultured mammalian cells and even rodent models by countering epigenetic changes associated with aging. These results have spurred interest in translating insights from animal models into anti-aging interventions. “This is a pursuit that has now become a race,” says Daniel Ives, CEO and founder of Cambridge, UK-based Shift Bioscience.

The Yamanaka factors that can reprogram cells into their embryonic-like state are at the heart of longevity research

“We’re investing in this area [because] it is one of the few interventions we know of that can restore youthful function in a diverse set of cell types,” explains Jacob Kimmel, a principal investigator at Alphabet subsidiary Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, California. The zeal is shared by Joan Mannick, head of R&D at Life Biosciences, who says partial reprogramming could be potentially “transformative” when it comes to treating or even preventing age-related diseases. Life Biosciences, a startup co-founded by David Sinclair, is exploring the regenerative capacity of three Yamanaka factors (Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4).

Source: https://www.nature.com/

Using deep learning to predict “retinal age” from images of the internal surface of the back of the eye, an international team of scientists has found that the difference between the biological age of an individual’s retina and that person’s real, chronological age, is linked to their risk of death. This ‘retinal age gap’ could be used as a screening tool, the investigators suggest.

Reporting on development of their deep learning model and research results in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, first author Zhuoting Zhu, PhD, at Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences, together with colleagues at the Centre for Eye Research Australia, Sun Yat-Sen University, and colleagues in China, Australia, and Germany, concluded that in combination with previous research, their study results add weight to the hypothesis that “… the retina plays an important role in the aging process and is sensitive to the cumulative damages of aging which increase the mortality risk.”

Estimates suggest that the global population aged 60 years and over will reach 2.1 billion in 2050, the authors noted.

“Aging populations place tremendous pressure on healthcare systems.”

But while the risks of illness and death increase with age, these risks vary considerably between different people of the same age, implying that ‘biological aging’ is unique to the individual and may be a better indicator of current and future health. As the authors pointed out, “Chronological age is a major risk factor for frailty, age-related morbidity and mortality. However, there is great variability in health outcomes among individuals with the same chronological age, implying that the rate of aging at an individual level is heterogeneous. Biological age rather than chronological age can better represent health status and the aging process.”

Several tissue, cell, chemical, and imaging-based indicators have been developed to pick up biological aging that is out of step with chronological aging. But these techniques are fraught with ethical/privacy issues as well as often being invasive, expensive, and time consuming, the researchers noted.

Source: https://www.genengnews.com/

Inspired by the growth of bones in the skeleton, researchers at the universities of Linköping in Sweden and Okayama in Japan have developed a combination of materials that can morph into various shapes before hardening. The material is initially soft, but later hardens through a bone development process that uses the same materials found in the skeleton…

When we are born, we have gaps in our skulls that are covered by pieces of soft connective tissue called fontanelles. It is thanks to fontanelles that our skulls can be deformed during birth and pass successfully through the birth canal. Post-birth, the fontanelle tissue gradually changes to hard bone. Now, researchers have combined materials which together resemble this natural process.

“We want to use this for applications where materials need to have different properties at different points in time. Firstly, the material is soft and flexible, and it is then locked into place when it hardens. This material could be used in, for example, complicated bone fractures. It could also be used in microrobots – these soft microrobots could be injected into the body through a thin syringe, and then they would unfold and develop their own rigid bones”, says Edwin Jager, associate professor at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University.

The idea was hatched during a research visit in Japan when materials scientist Edwin Jager met Hiroshi Kamioka and Emilio Hara, who conduct research into bones. The Japanese researchers had discovered a kind of biomolecule that could stimulate bone growth under a short period of time. Would it be possible to combine this biomolecule with Jager’s materials research, to develop new materials with variable stiffness?

In the study published in Advanced Materials, the researchers constructed a kind of simple “microrobot”, one which can assume different shapes and change stiffness. The researchers began with a gel material called alginate. On one side of the gel, a polymer material is grown. This material is electroactive, and it changes its volume when a low voltage is applied, causing the microrobot to bend in a specified direction. On the other side of the gel, the researchers attached biomolecules that allow the soft gel material to harden. These biomolecules are extracted from the cell membrane of a kind of cell that is important for bone development. When the material is immersed in a cell culture medium – an environment that resembles the body and contains calcium and phosphor – the biomolecules make the gel mineralise and harden like bone.

One potential application of interest to the researchers is bone healing. The idea is that the soft material, powered by the electroactive polymer, will be able to manoeuvre itself into spaces in complicated bone fractures and expand. When the material has then hardened, it can form the foundation for the construction of new bone. In their study, the researchers demonstrate that the material can wrap itself around chicken bones, and the artificial bone that subsequently develops grows together with the chicken bone.

Source: https://liu.se/

If you’re going to go to Mars, you’re probably going to get some cuts and scrapes along the way. Traveling into space is a dangerous endeavor. Humans have evolved to live on the surface of our planet and venturing outside of our atmosphere brings all manner of complications. There are the obvious things, like the lack of food, water, and oxygen. Not to mention the deadly vacuum of space or the potentially toxic environments of other worlds. Then there are less obvious problems, things which might not be immediately deadly but could become a problem in an emergency. Here on Earth, if you become injured you have access to a world’s worth of infrastructure including over the counter medications and healthcare systems. In space, if you get a flesh wound, your crewmates might hear you scream but they’ll have limited ways to help. An experiment by German Space Agency (DLR) is hoping to solve this problem with bioprinted bandages made from an astronaut’s own cells.

SpaceX’s 24^th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, which launched in late 2021, carried with it a handheld device known as the Bioprint FirstAid Handheld Bioprinter, or Bioprint FirstAid for short.

The device is designed to hold cells from astronauts or Earth-bound patients, infused inside a bio-ink. In the event of an injury, the Bioprint FirstAid would be used to apply a bandage to the injury site in near real-time. The bio-ink mixes with two fast setting gels and will create a covering similar to plaster.

Previously existing technologies for creating similar structures involved bulky machinery and required additional time for the patches to mature. The Bioprint FirstAid has the benefit of being small enough to hold in the hand and it is totally manual, requiring no batteries or other outside power source to use.

For the tests on the ISS, the device won’t have any live cells inside. Instead, it’s carrying fluorescent microparticles which take the place of cells for later observation. The primary objective of these experiments is to test the print capability of the device in microgravity and compare it to performance in Earth gravity.

Taking this technology into space allows researchers to understand the way tissue layers work together in microgravity, which might be fundamentally different to the way they operate here at home.

The findings will not only inform the future of this technology in space but will also provide insight which might be useful on the ground. While the allure of bioprinting technology for space-based missions is immense, this technology will likely do most of its work here on Earth.

Source: https://www.syfy.com/