What if you could cheat death and live for ever? To people in the radical life extension movement, immortality is a real possibility. Leah Green spends a long weekend at RAADfest, a meeting of scientists, activists and ordinary people who want to extend the human lifespan. So is reversing your age a real possibility? And what’s behind the wish for immortality?
Adding energy to any material, such as by heating it, almost always makes its structure less orderly. Ice, for example, with its crystalline structure, melts to become liquid water, with no order at all.
But in new experiments by physicists at MIT and elsewhere, the opposite happens: When a pattern called a charge density wave in a certain material is hit with a fast laser pulse, a whole new charge density wave is created — a highly ordered state, instead of the expected disorder. The surprising finding could help to reveal unseen properties in materials of all kinds.
The discovery is being reported today (November 11, 2019) in the journal Nature Physics, in a paper by MIT professors Nuh Gedik and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, postdoc Anshul Kogar, graduate student Alfred Zong, and 17 others at MIT, Harvard University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and Argonne National Laboratory.
New gene-editing documentary showcases biology’s hottest tool — up to the point when things went awry. By Amy Maxmen.
Circa 2017
Today, lithium is the active ingredient in batteries that power smart phones, laptops, and cars. But because of the price of lithium, researchers have been looking for another, more abundant element that could replace it. Several start-ups and established companies have tackled the idea of developing rechargeable batteries in which the active ingredient is sodium, lithium’s neighbor on the periodic table.
Besides its availability, sodium has several other important properties—not the least of which is its resistance to catching on fire. What’s more, “It was a good candidate because it could store a similar amount of energy as compared to lithium,” remembers Minah Lee, who does research on sodium batteries at Stanford University.
Continue reading “How Long Before Sodium Batteries Are Worth Their Salt?” »
Albert Einstein’s famous expression “spooky action at a distance” refers to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon seen on the most micro of scales. But machine learning seems to grow more mysterious and powerful every day, and scientists don’t always understand how it works. The spookiest action yet is a new study of heart patients where a machine-learning algorithm decided who was most likely to die within a year based on echocardiogram (ECG) results, reported by New Scientist. The algorithm performed better than the traditional measures used by cardiologists. The study was done by researchers in Pennsylvania’s Geisinger regional healthcare group, a low-cost and not-for-profit provider.
Every now and again, scientists discover fossils that are so bizarre they defy classification, their body plans unlike any other living animals or plants. Tullimonstrum (also known as the Tully Monster), a 300m-year-old fossil discovered in the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois, US, is one such creature.
At first glance, Tully looks superficially slug-like. But where you would expect its mouth to be, the creature has a long thin appendage ending in what looks like a pair of grasping claws. Then there are its eyes, which protrude outward from its body on stalks.
Tully is so strange that scientists have even been unable to agree on whether it is a vertebrate (with a backbone, like mammals, birds, reptiles and fish) or an invertebrate (without a backbone, like insects, crustaceans, octopuses and all other animals). In 2016, a group of scientists claimed to have solved the mystery of Tully, providing the strongest evidence yet that it was a vertebrate. But my colleagues and I have conducted a new study that calls this conclusion into question, meaning this monster is as mysterious as ever.
A new study co-led by researchers in the U.S. and China has pushed back the first-known physical evidence of insect flower pollination to 99 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous period.
The revelation is based upon a tumbling flower beetle with pollen on its legs discovered preserved in amber deep inside a mine in northern Myanmar. The fossil comes from the same amber deposit as the first ammonite discovered in amber, which was reported by the same research group earlier this year.
The report of the new fossil will publish Nov. 11 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fossil, which contains both the beetle and pollen grains, pushes back the earliest documented instance of insect pollination to a time when pterodactyls still roamed the skies—or about 50 million years earlier than previously thought.
It can reportedly cover the 55 miles between San Jose and San Francisco in just 15 minutes.
