Editorâs note: raised a $100m Series A in September and is rumored to have reached a unicorn valuation. They have all-star advisors from Geoff Hinton to Yann Lecun and team of deep domain experts to tackle this next frontier in AI applications.
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Major battery breakthrough paving way for EV upgrade
Chinese scientists have developed a lithium metal battery that boasts an energy density of more than 700 watt-hours per kilogram and stable performance at extremely low temperatures, marking a significant advancement in the production of high-energy batteries for electric vehicles. The research paper was published on Thursday in the science journal Nature.
Chen Jun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and vice-president of Nankai University in Tianjin, was among the researchers who led the breakthrough. Chen said the team has replaced oxygen atoms with fluorine ones. It designed and synthesized novel fluorinated hydrocarbon solvent molecules, creating a new electrolyte system based on lithium-fluorine coordination.
Dr. Ted Brown: O.G. Cryonicist
Ted Brown has been involved in cryonics since the 1960s.
The 5 Foods Every 100-Year-Old Ate Daily (Blue Zones Diet Breakdown)
The controversial diet truth backed by 155 dietary surveys across 90 years that food scientists donât want you to know.
Dan Buettner exposes why meta-analyses prove most nutritional debates wrong and reveals what centenarians actually ate as children to live past 100.
The peasant food formula thatâs cheaper than a hamburger, 50 times more nutrient dense, and leaves you completely satisfied.
Plus why the 15 countries with the highest life expectancy all eat white rice daily.
Dan Buettner is a New York Times bestselling author, National Geographic Fellow, and co-producer of the Emmy Award winning Netflix series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.
Beam me to the stars: Scientists propose wild new interstellar travel tech
If we are ever going to be go beyond the solar system, to share the miracle of Earth Life, itâs clear that we will need radical new ways of getting there.
One such solution that was recently proposed uses electron beams accelerated to near the speed of light to propel spacecraft, something that could overcome the vast distances between Earth and the next closest star. âFor interstellar flight, the primary challenge is that the distances are so great,â Greason explained. âAlpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years away; about 2,000 times further away from the sun than the Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached â the furthest spacecraft weâve ever sent into deep space so far. No one is likely to fund a scientific mission that takes much longer than 30 years to return the data â that means we need to fly fast.â
A study by Greason and Gerrit Bruhaug, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, published in the journal Acta Astronautica, highlights that reaching practical interstellar speeds hinges on the ability to deliver sufficient amounts of kinetic energy to the spacecraft in an economic way.
âInterstellar flight requires us to collect and control vast amounts of energy to achieve speeds fast enough to be useful,â said Greason. âChemical rockets that we use today, even with the extra speed boost from flying by planets, or from [âŠ] swinging by the sun for a boost, just donât have the ability to scale to useful interstellar speeds.â
Where Biology Meets Resonance: Light, Vibration, and Living Order
When we think about biology, we usually picture chemistry: molecules bumping into each other, enzymes reacting, and signals spreading by diffusion. That picture is realâbut it may be incomplete. In my recent paper in Harmonic Science Perspectives (Vol 1, Issue 1), I propose a complementary layer of cellular organization: a fast, coordination-capable âresonance networkâ that uses three interchangeable carriers of energy and information.
IntroductionA simple picture: three messengers that can translate into one anotherWhere this shows up in the body: mitochondria and microtubules as a coupled networkWhy interconversion matters: translation is the key featureResonant synchronization: a possible mechanism for cellular timingTherapeutic implications: why light and sound therapies might work better togetherA note on whatâs established vs whatâs proposedConclusion: a new lens on living organization
Those three carriers are light (photons), vibration/sound-like mechanical waves (phonons), and mobile electronic excitations in biomolecules (excitons). The central idea is simple to state even if the details are deep: living systems may continuously convert energy back and forth between these three modes to synchronize activity across space and time inside the cellâand potentially across tissues.
Mechanisms and Regulation of Cellular Senescence
Cellular senescence is generally an irreversible proliferative arrest in damaged normal cells that have exited the cell cycle. These cells display high metabolic activities [1], remain viable, and actively suppress apoptosis [2, 3]. Senescent cells present unique morphological and molecular characteristics and functions that distinguish them from other nondividing cell populations, such as quiescent cells and terminally differentiated cells [4, 5, 6]. The hallmarks of cellular senescence include: prolonged cell cycle arrest, transcriptional changes, acquisition of a bioactive secretome, known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), macromolecular damage, and deregulated metabolism [7].
Replicative senescence was the first cellular senescence subtype to be described [8]. It is induced after serial propagation of normal human cells in culture and is caused by telomere erosion and the consequent increase in DNA lesions [9, 10,11,12]. The limited lifespan of most (perhaps all) cultured primary cells is influenced by the species and tissue type from which they were derived. Senescence can also be triggered by many other intrinsic and extrinsic factors, particularly, replicative stress, oxidative damage, metabolism dysfunctions, cytokines, oncogene activation, and chemotherapy agents. All these factors can induce DNA damage and senescence in normal and cancer cells (in some contexts) [6]. Cellular senescence occurs not only in vitro (i.e., cell culture models), but also in various tissues in vivo [13,14,15,16].
Senescence is an important contributor to cancer and aging, two processes characterized by a time-dependent accumulation of cell damage and dysfunction. Senescence markers are detected in premalignant tumor lesions but not at later stages of tumor development [17,18,19]. The proliferative arrest imposed by cellular senescence represents an early barrier against cancer initiation by preventing the propagation of damaged DNA to the next generation of cells [18,20]. Therefore, it has been proposed that senescence escape is required for tumor progression to overt malignancy [18,21]. On the other hand, senescent fibroblasts can influence their local environment by turning into proinflammatory cells that can promote the growth of transformed or preneoplastic neighboring epithelial cells in culture and in vivo [22,23,24].
The Color of Wonder and the Chemical Code of Creation
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
We look at a thing â a bird, a ball, a planet â and perceive it to be a certain color. But what we are really seeing is the color that does not inhere in itâthe portion of the spectrum it shirks, the wavelength of light it reflects back unabsorbed. Our world appears a swirling miracle of blue, but its blueness is only a perceptual phenomenon arising from how our particular atmosphere, with its particular chemistry and its insentient stubbornness toward a particular portion of the spectrum, absorbs and reflects light.
In the living world beneath this atmosphere that scatters the shorter wavelengths as they pass, blue is the rarest color: There is no naturally occurring true blue pigment among living creatures. In consequence, only a slender portion of plants bloom in blue, and an even more negligible number of animals are bedecked with it, all having to perform various tricks with chemistry and the physics of light, some having evolved astonishing triumphs of structural geometry and optics to render themselves blue. Each feather of the blue jay is tessellated with tiny light-reflecting beads arranged to cancel out every wavelength of light except the blue.