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May 28, 2022

Making stem cells with chemicals

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, education, life extension

Reprogramming without having to insert genes.


When people think of cellular reprogramming, converting a differentiated cell into a stem cell, they often refer to the overexpression of Yamanaka factors[Oct4, Klf4, Sox2 & c-Myc]. Rightly so. But what if i told you that stem cells could be induced with just chemicals. Well you would reply “show me the data”. So, let’s take a look at this recent Nature paper that showed how combinations of small molecules/chemicals converted human differentiated cells to stem cells.

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May 28, 2022

Toward customizable timber, grown in a lab

Posted by in category: materials

MIT researchers can now control the physical and mechanical properties of lab-grown plant materials. This could enable an environmentally friendly process to produce wood-like structures with specific properties, like stiffness or density, tailored to certain applications.

May 28, 2022

Real-time AI: Microsoft announces preview of Project Brainwave

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The speed of operations leaves manual inspectors with just seconds to decide if the product is really defective, or not.

That’s where Microsoft’s Project Brainwave could come in. Project Brainwave is a hardware architecture designed to accelerate real-time AI calculations. The Project Brainwave architecture is deployed on a type of computer chip from Intel called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, to make real-time AI calculations at competitive cost and with the industry’s lowest latency, or lag time. This is based on internal performance measurements and comparisons to other organizations’ publicly posted information.

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May 28, 2022

Intro to an Intellectual Property Revolution

Posted by in category: futurism

Understanding technological disruption & opportunity.

May 28, 2022

Cell cycle gene regulation dynamics revealed by RNA velocity and deep-learning

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Single-cell RNA-sequencing technology gives access to cell cycle dynamics without externally perturbing the cell. Here the authors present DeepCycle, a robust deep learning method to infer the cell cycle state in single cells from scRNA-seq data.

May 28, 2022

World’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot, measuring just half a millimetre wide, has been demonstrated by Northwestern University. Its potential applications include the clearing of blocked arteries.

May 28, 2022

New vaccine type overcomes cancerous tumor defenses

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. and one in Japan has developed a new type of vaccine that helps the immune system destroy cancerous tumors by overcoming their defense system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes the new vaccine and its effects in mouse and rhesus macaque models.

Until recently, the only tools available to doctors treating have been chemotherapy, radiation treatment and surgery. More recently, have been exploring vaccines in the fight against cancer—the development of a vaccine against HPV-related diseases, for example, has reduced the risks of cervical and other types of cancers. Other research efforts have involved targeting peptide antigens and have proven to be effective, but only in limited circumstances. In this new effort, the researchers developed a more generalized vaccine that they believe can be used against multiple types of cancers in many types of cancer patients.

The new vaccine works by taking away one of the major defense strategies used by tumors, which is the ability to cleave T cells and from their surfaces. Such cells are deployed when the body detects a growing tumor and alerts the . By shedding them after they affix themselves to MICA and MICB proteins on their surface, tumors are free to grow. The new vaccine works by interceding in the cleaving process, preventing the tumor from shedding the immune cells sent to kill it. The vaccine disrupts this cleaving process by increasing the density of proteins on the surface of tumor cells, which the researchers describe as “inciting protective immunity.”

May 28, 2022

Magic mushrooms evolved to scramble insect brains, send them on wild, scary trips

Posted by in category: neuroscience

How psilocybin evolved has more to do with sending insects on terrifying trips than it does making Phish sound good.

May 28, 2022

Researchers ‘magically’ mining metals from water

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics

Once the tiny, iron-based particles are added to the water, the lithium is drawn out of the water and binds to them. Then with the help of a magnet, the nanoparticles can be collected in just minutes with the lithium hitching a ride, no longer suspended in the liquid and ready for easy extraction. After the lithium is extracted, the recharged nanoparticles can be used again.


New approach uses magnetic nanoparticles to extract valuable rare earth elements from geothermal fluids.

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May 28, 2022

Neural network-based prediction of the secret-key rate of quantum key distribution

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI, security

For instance, continuous-variable (CV) QKD has its own distinct advantages at a metropolitan distance36,37 due to the use of common components of coherent optical communication technology. In addition, the homodyne38 or heterodyne39 measurements used by CV-QKD have inherent extraordinary spectral filtering capabilities, which allows the crosstalk in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channels to be effectively suppressed. Therefore, hundreds of QKD channels may be integrated into a single optical fiber and can be cotransmitted with classic data channels. This allows QKD channels to be more effectively integrated into existing communication networks. In CV-QKD, discrete modulation technology has attracted much attention31,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50 because of its ability to reduce the requirements for modulation devices. However, due to the lack of symmetry, the security proof of discrete modulation CV-QKD also mainly relies on numerical methods43,44,45,46,47,48,51.

Unfortunately, calculating a secure key rate by numerical methods requires minimizing a convex function over all eavesdropping attacks related with the experimental data52,53. The efficiency of this optimization depends on the number of parameters of the QKD protocol. For example, in discrete modulation CV-QKD, the number of parameters is generally \(1000–3000\) depending on the different choices of cutoff photon numbers44. This leads to the corresponding optimization possibly taking minutes or even hours51. Therefore, it is especially important to develop tools for calculating the key rate that are more efficient than numerical methods.

In this work, we take the homodyne detection discrete-modulated CV-QKD44 as an example to construct a neural network capable of predicting the secure key rate for the purpose of saving time and resource consumption. We apply our neural network to a test set obtained at different excess noises and distances. Excellent accuracy and time savings are observed after adjusting the hyperparameters. Importantly, the predicted key rates are highly likely to be secure. Note that our method is versatile and can be extended to quickly calculate the complex secure key rates of various other unstructured quantum key distribution protocols. Through some open source deep learning frameworks for on-device inference, such as TensorFlow Lite54, our model can also be easily deployed on devices at the edge of the network, such as mobile devices, embedded Linux or microcontrollers.