Posted: 6/4/2016
- "Sleeping" Birch Trees Rest Their Branches at Night Using laser scans of trees in Finland and Austria, researchers tracked interesting arboreal behavior (“In recent years, researchers have discovered that trees can communicate and share nutrients via an underground fungal net. Now, scientists in Europe have found that trees also “sleep,” or at least relax a little at night ... Using a terrestrial laser scanner on windless nights close to the equinox, researchers scanned two birch trees over the course of the night, one in Finland and one in Austria. ... The results, published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science, show that the trees drooped up to nearly four inches during the night.”)
- IBM scientists achieve storage memory breakthrough (“For the first time, scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated reliably storing 3 bits of data per cell using a relatively new memory technology known as phase-change memory (PCM). … For example, PCM doesn't lose data when powered off, unlike DRAM, and the technology can endure at least 10 million write cycles, compared to an average flash USB stick, which tops out at 3,000 write cycles.”)
- What Ever Happened to… Breaking the Speed of Light? (Nice synopsis article. “One case that does keep physicists busy these days is that of nonlocal quantum entanglement, the ability of two subatomic particles to stay synchronized, even if they are separated by great distances. If one particle is acted on, the other responds instantly. ”)
- Tau protein—not amyloid—may be key driver of Alzheimer’s symptoms (“When the team measured tau in the study participants’ CSF [cerebrospinal fluid], it found that higher levels were specifically correlated with increased tau in the temporal lobe, a region involved in memory processing, Ances says. That’s important, he suggests, because it means that one could potentially use tau in CSF as a diagnostic tool. ”)
- Did Scientists Stumble on a Battery that Lasts Forever? Researchers studying nanowires have found a battery material that can be recharged for years, even decades (“While they’re still not certain why using a gel electrolyte seems to keep the nanowires from breaking down, they have a hypothesis. The gel, Penner explains, is about as thick as peanut butter. The nanowires, which are hundreds of times thinner than human hair and made of manganese oxide, are 80 percent porous. Over time, the thick gel slowly seeps into the pores in the nanowires and makes them softer. This softness reduces their fragility.”)
- Gene therapy halts rare brain disease in young boys (“all but one of 17 boys with adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) remained relatively healthy for up to 2 years after having an engineered virus deliver into their cells a gene to replenish a missing protein needed by the brain. … As an alternative, in the late 2000s, French researchers treated the bone cells of two boys with a modified virus carrying the ALD gene. They reported in Science in 2009 that this halted progression of the disease. ... The scientists removed blood cells from 17 boys with cerebral ALD ranging from age 4 to 13 and treated the cells with a modified HIV virus carrying the gene for the ALD protein. They then reinfused the cells back into patients. Within 6 months, 16 patients stabilized, … In brain scans taken up to 2 years later, most had no further signs of inflammation or loss of myelin. And 16 of the 17 had no signs of neurological decline such as vision loss or trouble walking.”)
- Why quantum cryptography could be a one-way street (A new form of quantum nonlocality: one-way quantum steering)
- Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (The largest and oldest known battle north of the Alps. This could rewrite history!)
- Simple test might predict who gets world’s deadliest infectious disease (Who knew that tuberculosis is still a major killer worldwide? “After all, only one in 10 people who are infected with the TB-causing bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis ever develops the disease. So what distinguishes those who get sick from those who don’t?
Now, scientists may have found one answer: a set of 16 genes that is more active in people who will develop TB in the next 1 or 2 years than in those who are infected but stay healthy. … More than 2 billion people—almost a third of the world's population—carry M. tuberculosis, and an estimated 1.5 million died from it in 2014, making TB the deadliest infectious disease in the world. But predicting who'll be unlucky enough to fall ill has so far been impossible.”
No comments:
Post a Comment