Speaker:
James L. Burk.
Commander, MDRS Crew 261.
Executive Officer, MDRS Crew 197.
Director of IT & MarsVR, The Mars Society.
Former Senior Technical Project Manager, Microsoft.
Track Code: AM-2
A team of physicists has discovered how DNA molecules self-organize into adhesive patches between particles in response to assembly instructions. Its findings offer a “proof of concept” for an innovative way to produce materials with a well-defined connectivity between the particles.
The work is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We show that one can program particles to make tailored structures with customized properties,” explains Jasna Brujic, a professor in New York University’s Department of Physics and one of the researchers. “While cranes, drills, and hammers must be controlled by humans in constructing buildings, this work reveals how one can use physics to make smart materials that ‘know’ how to assemble themselves.”
The device you are currently reading this article on was born from the silicon revolution. To build modern electrical circuits, researchers control silicon’s current-conducting capabilities via doping, which is a process that introduces either negatively charged electrons or positively charged “holes” where electrons used to be. This allows the flow of electricity to be controlled and for silicon involves injecting other atomic elements that can adjust electrons—known as dopants—into its three-dimensional (3D) atomic lattice.
Silicon’s 3D lattice, however, is too big for next-generation electronics, which include ultra-thin transistors, new devices for optical communication, and flexible bio-sensors that can be worn or implanted in the human body. To slim things down, researchers are experimenting with materials no thicker than a single sheet of atoms, such as graphene. But the tried-and-true method for doping 3D silicon doesn’t work with 2D graphene, which consists of a single layer of carbon atoms that doesn’t normally conduct a current.
Rather than injecting dopants, researchers have tried layering on a “charge-transfer layer” intended to add or pull away electrons from the graphene. However, previous methods used “dirty” materials in their charge-transfer layers; impurities in these would leave the graphene unevenly doped and impede its ability to conduct electricity.
Two drugs approved decades ago not only counteract brain damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease in animal models, the same therapeutic combination may also improve cognition.
Sounds like a slam dunk in terms of a cure—but not yet. Researchers currently are concentrating on animal studies amid implications that remain explosive: If a surprising drug combination continues to destroy a key feature of the disease, then an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s may have been hiding for decades in plain sight.
A promising series of early studies is highlighting two well known medicine cabinet standbys—gemfibrosil, an old-school cholesterol-lowering drug, and retinoic acid, a vitamin A derivative. Gemfibrosil, is sold as Lopid and while it’s still used, it is not widely prescribed. Doctors now prefer to prescribe statins to lower cholesterol. Retinoic acid has been used in various formulations to treat everything from acne to psoriasis to cancer.
Researchers from the Technion and the Houston Methodist Research Institute have developed microscopic machines that can deliver drugs to parts of the brain in order to treat injuries and diseases.
Researchers have identified a potential new treatment that suppresses the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
In order to multiply, all viruses, including coronaviruses, infect cells and reprogramme them to produce novel viruses.
The research revealed that cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 can only produce novel coronaviruses when their metabolic pentose phosphate pathway is activated.
The first artificial Lab-Grown Meats have recently gotten into stores and markets for everyone to buy and eat. But until now, those meats were largely just chicken nuggets or similar types of meat. But with Future Meat Technologies’ latest crazy invention, this has changed. They managed to create a system that actually involves Artificial Intelligence, which grows almost 5,000 fully-fledged hamburgers a day without the environmental impact or regular food and meat.
Cultured meat is meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells (as opposed to meat obtained from animals). It is a form of cellular agriculture.
Cultured meat is produced using many of the same tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicines. It’s also occasionally called lab grown meat.
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It’s the dog days of summer. You bite down on a plump, chilled orange. Citrus juice explodes in your mouth in a refreshing, tingling burst. Ahh.
And congratulations—you’ve just been vaccinated for the latest virus.
That’s one of the goals of molecular farming, a vision to have plants synthesize medications and vaccines. Using genetic engineering and synthetic biology, scientists can introduce brand new biochemical pathways into plant cells—or even whole plants—essentially turning them into single-use bioreactors.
