Articles from May 2023

Scientists have been dreaming about nuclear fusion for decades. Microsoft thinks the technology is nearly ready to plug into the grid. The company just signed a jaw-dropping agreement to purchase electricity from a nuclear fusion generator. Nuclear fusion, often called the Holy Grail of energy, is a potentially limitless source of clean energy that scientists have been chasing for the better part of a century.

People who follow the Mediterranean diet—rich in fats from olive oil and nuts—tend to live longer, healthier lives than others who chow down primarily on fast food, meat and dairy. But it hasn’t been clear on a cellular level exactly why the diet is so beneficial. Now researchers led by the Stanford School of Medicine have found one of the first cellular connections between healthy fats—known as monounsaturated fatty acids—and lifespan in laboratory worms. The finding hints at a complex relationship between diet, fats and longevity.

“Fats are generally thought to be detrimental to health,” said professor of genetics Anne Brunet, Ph.D. “But some studies have shown that specific types of fats, or lipids, can be beneficial.” The researchers learned that one of the fats in the Mediterranean diet, oleic acid, increases the number of two key cellular structures, or organelles, and protects cellular membranes from damage by a chemical reaction called oxidation. This protective effect has a big payoff: Worms fed food rich in oleic acid lived about 35% longer than those consigned to standard worm rations, the researchers found. Surprisingly, one of the organelles, known as lipid droplets, served as a de facto crystal ball, predicting with increasing accuracy the number of days each animal would live.

“The number of lipid droplets in individual worms tells me that animal’s remaining lifespan,” said research scientist Katharina Papsdorf, Ph.D. “The worms with greater numbers of lipid droplets live longer than those with fewer droplets.” Brunet, who is the school’s Professor of Genetics, is the senior author of the study, which was published May 1 in Nature Cell Biology. Papsdorf is the lead author of the research. “For years, we’ve been very interested in learning how diet influences lifespan,” Brunet said. “It will be fascinating to see whether we see a similar association between lipid droplets and longevity in mammals and humans. These findings suggest there may be a fat-based strategy to improve human health and longevity.”

Anyone who has struggled to remember the difference between “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol” and how to cultivate one over the other will know that the language of fats can be confusing. In general, most monounsaturated fats, which are found in plant-based foods like avocados, olive oil and nuts, are considered relatively healthy. Saturated fats and trans fats—those that are solid at room temperature—can increase the risk of heart disease and other health complications. Fats and oils are made up of fatty acids; lipids include fats, oils, fatty acids and cholesterol.

Source: https://phys.org/

Using mRNA tailored to each patient’s tumor, the vaccine may have staved off the return of one of the deadliest forms of cancer in half of those who received it.

Five years ago, a small group of cancer scientists meeting at a restaurant in a deconsecrated church hospital in Mainz, Germany, drew up an audacious plan: They would test their novel cancer vaccine against one of the most virulent forms of the disease, a cancer notorious for roaring back even in patients whose tumors had been removed. The vaccine might not stop those relapses, some of the scientists figured. But patients were desperate. And the speed with which the disease, pancreatic cancer, often recurred could work to the scientists’ advantage: For better or worse, they would find out soon whether the vaccine helped.

On Wednesday, the scientists reported results that defied the long odds. The vaccine provoked an immune response in half of the patients treated, and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study, a finding that outside experts described as extremely promising.

The study, published in Nature, was a landmark in the yearslong movement to make cancer vaccines tailored to the tumors of individual patients. Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center  (MSK) in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients’ tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful Covid vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells. Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient’s immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech’s Covid shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients’ cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells. A larger, randomized clinical trial is set to open involving patients at multiple sites in various countries. MSK expects to begin enrolling patients in the trial this summer.

Source: https://www.mskcc.org/
AND
https://www.nytimes.com/

Quantum computing holds and processes information in a way that exploits the unique properties of fundamental particles: electrons, atoms, and small molecules can exist in multiple energy states at once, a phenomenon known as superposition, and the states of particles can become linked, or entangled, with one another. This means that information can be encoded and manipulated in novel ways, opening the door to a swath of classically impossible computing tasks.
As yet, quantum computers have not achieved anything useful that standard supercomputers cannot do. That is largely because they haven’t had enough qubits and because the systems are easily disrupted by tiny perturbations in their environment that physicists call noise.  Researchers have been exploring ways to make do with noisy systems, but many expect that quantum systems will have to scale up significantly to be truly useful, so that they can devote a large fraction of their qubits to correcting the errors induced by noise.

IBM is not the first to aim big. Google has said it is targeting a million qubits by the end of the decade, though error correction means only 10,000 will be available for computations. Maryland-based IonQ is aiming to have 1,024 “logical qubits,” each of which will be formed from an error-correcting circuit of 13 physical qubits, performing computations by 2028. Palo Alto–based PsiQuantum, like Google, is also aiming to build a million-qubit quantum computer, but it has not revealed its time scale or its error-correction requirements. Because of those requirements, citing the number of physical qubits is something of a red herring—the particulars of how they are built, which affect factors such as their resilience to noise and their ease of operation, are crucially important. The companies involved usually offer additional measures of performance, such as “quantum volume” and the number of “algorithmic qubits.” In the next decade advances in error correction, qubit performance, and software-led error “mitigation,” as well as the major distinctions between different types of qubits, will make this race especially tricky to follow.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/

We started with a plant-based burger from Impossible Foods. Founded in 2011, the company makes meat alternatives from plants. The special ingredient is heme protein, which is cranked out by genetically engineered microbes and sprinkled in for that meaty flavor. I took a small bite of the Impossible burger, and if you ask me, the taste was a pretty good approximation of the real thing, though the texture was a bit looser and softer than beef. (If you’re based in the US, you may have tried this one already yourself. In Europe, heme still hasn’t been approved by regulators, so Impossible’s products don’t include it there.)

Next on the docket was the beef burger. By the way, none of these sliders had any sort of sauces or toppings on them, and Krieger says they were seasoned identically, for a fair comparison. I truly have nothing to say about this one—it was just a plain burger. Even as I was chewing, I had my eyes on the final item on my tasting menu for the day: the lab-grown version. The burger on my plate was actually only about 20% lab-grown material, Krieger explained. The company’s plan is to blend its cells with a base of plant-based meat (she wouldn’t tell me much about this base, just that it’s not Ohayo’s recipe). Plants can help provide the structure for alternative meats, Krieger says. One other major benefit to this blending technique is financial: the lab-grown components are expensive, so mixing in plants can help keep costs down. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com

New technologies that can capture subtle changes in a patient’s voice may help physicians diagnose cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms begin to show, according to a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher who led a study published in the Alzheimer’s Association publication Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.

“Prior to the development of machine learning and NLP, the detailed study of speech patterns in patients was extremely labor intensive and often not successful, because the changes in the early stages [of Alzheimer’s] are frequently undetectable to the human ear,” said lead study author Ihab Hajjar, MD, a professor of neurology at UT Southwestern’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, in a news release. “This novel method of testing performed well in detecting those with mild cognitive impairment and more specifically in identifying patients with evidence of Alzheimer’s disease — even when it cannot be easily detected using standard cognitive assessments.”

Dr. Hajjar and his collaborators collected data on 206 people aged 50 and older, 114 who met the criteria for mild cognitive decline and 92 who were cognitively unimpaired. Each person’s cognitive status was determined through standard testing. Study subjects were also recorded as they gave a one- to two-minute description of a colorful circus procession. Using sophisticated computer analysis of these recordings, scientists could determine and evaluate specific types of speech features, including: how fast a person talks, pitch, voicing of vowel and consonant sounds, grammatical complexity, speech motor control and idea density.

The research team also examined cerebral spinal fluid samples for amyloid beta protein. One form called amyloid beta peptide 42, for example, is especially toxic, according to the National Institute on Aging, and plays a significant role in Alzheimer’s disease. A total of 40 cognitively unimpaired and 63 impaired individuals were found.

Source: https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/

The Polish company Nevomo  is a European deep-tech company and the developer of the next generation of high-speed rails. As a leading player in the area of innovation in the sustainable and intelligent mobility industry, the company has developed the globally unique MagRail technology, allowing significant improvements in the efficiency of existing rail transportation systems. Nevomo proposes a phased implementation of transportation systems, inspired by the hyperloop concept, by upgrading railway lines. By equipping existing infrastructure with magnetic levitation and linear motor, the company intends to take railway transport to a whole new dimension of travel with speeds of up to 550 kph (342 mph).

Nevomo introduces MagRail technology to existing rail infrastructure, allowing its cost-effective upgrade, thus enabling rail to become the preferred green, fast, efficient, and interoperable mode of transport of the 21st century. MagRail allows gradual improvements to existing networks and is a major technological breakthrough allowing railways to finally significantly increase their market share and reduce CO2 emissions in transport. MagRail provides the possibility to operate electric vehicles in non-electrified areas, such as terminals and ports.

Nevomo has just signed a major deal with The French giant SNCF to transform the large network of the railways operator.

Source: https://www.nevomo.tech/

Imagine using your cell phone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and diseases. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology. Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood. Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, like Newton’s laws of motion, break down at atomic scales. Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

For humans, who can only perceive the macroscopic world, or what’s visible to the naked eye, quantum mechanics can seem counterintuitive and somewhat magical. Things you might not expect happen in the quantum world, like electrons “tunneling” through tiny energy barriers and appearing on the other side unscathed or being in two different places at the same time in a phenomenon called superposition.

Research in quantum mechanics is usually geared toward technology. However, and somewhat surprisingly, there is increasing evidence that nature – an engineer with billions of years of practice — has learned how to use quantum mechanics to function optimally. If this is indeed true, it means that our understanding of biology is radically incomplete. It also means that we could possibly control physiological processes by using the quantum properties of biological matter.

Researchers can manipulate quantum phenomena to build better technology. In fact, you already live in a quantum-powered world: from laser pointers to GPS, magnetic resonance imaging, and the transistors in your computer – all these technologies rely on quantum effects.

In general, quantum effects only manifest at very small length and mass scales or when temperatures approach absolute zero. This is because quantum objects like atoms and molecules lose their “quantumness” when they uncontrollably interact with each other and their environment. In other words, a macroscopic collection of quantum objects is better described by the laws of classical mechanics. Everything that starts quantum dies classical. For example, an electron can be manipulated to be in two places at the same time, but it will end up in only one place after a short while – exactly what would be expected classically.
In a complicated, noisy biological system, it is thus expected that most quantum effects will rapidly disappear, washed out in what the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called the “warm, wet environment of the cell.” To most physicists, the fact that the living world operates at elevated temperatures and in complex environments implies that biology can be adequately and fully described by classical physics: no funky barrier crossing, no being in multiple locations simultaneously.

Chemists, however, have for a long time begged to differ. Research on basic chemical reactions at room temperature unambiguously shows that processes occurring within biomolecules like proteins and genetic material are the result of quantum effects. Importantly, such nanoscopic, short-lived quantum effects are consistent with driving some macroscopic physiological processes that biologists have measured in living cells and organisms. Research suggests that quantum effects influence biological functions, including regulating enzyme activity, sensing magnetic fields, cell metabolism, and electron transport in biomolecules.

Source: https://www.inverse.com/

Athletes are getting in shape for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, and so is the world’s first electric air taxi network.

“We are going to make it happen,” Solène Le Bris of Paris airports operator Groupe ADP told an industry audience at Amsterdam Drone Week. “We are trying to launch the first e-VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] pre-commercial service in the world: that’s our ambition.”

In a packed talk, the first outlines were revealed of what has been dubbed the “Tesla of the skies”. Senior civil engineer Le Bris explained that there will be five vertiports where passengers can board the vehicles, the first of which at Cergy-Pontoise opened in November and is functioning as a test centre.

Using the existing helicopter route network, the vehicles – known as VoloCity air taxis – will fly with one passenger and one pilot along two routes, taking short rides from Charles de Gaulle airport to Le Bourget then to a new landing pad at Austerlitz Paris, and another route from Paris to Sans-Cyr. Thierry Allain, head of innovation at the Direction General de l’Aviation Civile (DGAC) regulator, said a safety-first approach using existing networks was key. “For the regulation issues, the challenges we have are not that big,” he said.

Source: https://www.volocopter.com/
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https://www.theguardian.com/