An innovative study has confirmed that quantum mechanics plays a role in biological processes and causes mutations in DNA.
Quantum biology is an emerging field of science, established in the 1920s, which looks at whether the subatomic world of quantum mechanics plays a role in living cells. Quantum mechanics is an interdisciplinary field by nature, bringing together nuclear physicists, biochemists and molecular biologists.
In a research paper published by the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a team from Surrey’s Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.
From the English Premier League to the NFL, sport is a multibillion-dollar industry, and top teams are increasingly turning to technology to give them the edge.
Until recently, gathering athletes’ performance data was a laborious process. Coaches and sports scientists would spend hours compiling information from games and training sessions, pulling out the information relevant to their players’ development. But technology-based performance analytics has changed all that.
These days, athletes can wear devices or vests with GPS-tracking capabilities that record the speed and distance they run, as well as the impacts on their body. The information helps coaches develop training plans to avoid athlete fatigue and maximize performance for match days.
Researchers in the UK have developed a way to coax microscopic particles and droplets into precise patterns by harnessing the power of sound in air. The implications for printing, especially in the fields of medicine and electronics, are far-reaching.
The scientists from the Universities of Bath and Bristol have shown that it’s possible to create precise, pre-determined patterns on surfaces from aerosol droplets or particles, using computer-controlled ultrasound. A paper describing the entirely new technique, called ‘sonolithography’, is published in Advanced Materials Technologies.
Professor Mike Fraser from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath, explained: “The power of ultrasound has already been shown to levitate small particles. We are excited to have hugely expanded the range of applications by patterning dense clouds of material in air at scale and being able to algorithmically control how the material settles into shapes.”
This is correct https://www.frontiersin.org/…/10…/fnhum.2010.00224/
Sesame seed-size brains created from a mix of human and Neanderthal genes lived briefly in petri dishes in a University of California, San Diego laboratory, offering tantalizing clues as to how the organs have evolved over millennia.
Scientists have long wondered how human beings evolved to have such big, complex brains. One way to figure that out is by comparing modern genes involved in brain development with those found in our ancient cousins. Though scientists have found plenty of fossilized remains from Neanderthals — cousins of modern humans that died out about 37000 years ago — they have yet to find a preserved Neanderthal brain. To bridge that gap in knowledge, a research team grew tiny, unconscious “minibrains” in petri dishes. Some of the brains were grown using standard human genes, and others were altered using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to have a brain development gene taken from Neanderthal remains.
Recently published neuroimaging research provides evidence that the directional connectivity between several brain regions plays an important role in emotional processing abilities.
Although interest in emotional intelligence has been steadily growing since the 1990s, the underlying neural mechanisms behind it have yet to be clearly established. The new study, which appears in NeuroImage, is part of a process to begin to fill in this gap in scientific knowledge.
“Emotional intelligence is one of the least studied topics, especially in conjunction with cutting-edge computational neuroimaging techniques,” explained lead researcher Sahil Bajaj, the director of the Multimodal Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Boys Town National Research Hospital.
The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, left his home on Saturday to receive his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and promote vaccination against the coronavirus, in what was his first public appearance in over a year.
The 85-year-old scrapped plans to receive the injection at home, opting instead to travel to a clinic in Dharamsala, India, where he’s lived since fleeing China after a failed uprising in 1959.
Mr. — Chairman, Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises — Our discussion starts out on U.S. food insecurity, but journeys into the topics of aging, as well as regeneration research at University of Chicago’s MBL.
A “food desert” is an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food, and the designation considers both the type and quality of food available, as well as the accessibility of the food through the size and proximity of the food stores.
In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that 23.5 million people in the U.S. lived in food deserts, meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
Food deserts tend to be inhabited by lower-income residents with reduced mobility, making them a less attractive market for large supermarket chains and available foods are often of the highly processed type, high in sugars and fats, which are known contributors to the proliferation of obesity and other chronic diseases. It’s estimated that the contribution of food deserts to healthcare costs in the U.S. is over $70 billion annually.
Top Box Foods is a non-profit, community-based, social business, with an innovative model of getting healthy and affordable grocery boxes to food-insecure neighborhoods, creating year round access to fresh fruits, vegetables, and proteins, in communities in Chicago, and Lake County, IL, as well as in New Orleans, LA.
Mr. Christopher Kennedy, along with his wife Sheila Kennedy, is a co-founder of Top Box Foods.
In addition to Top Box Foods, Mr. Kennedy is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, Inc., treasurer of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, serves on the public boards of Interface, Inc., and Knoll Inc., and is a trustee for the Marine Biological Laboratory at University of Chicago.
Mr. Kennedy earned his BA from Boston College and his MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where he serves on their Global Advisory Board.
Summary: The protein Arginase-2 works through mitochondria to reduce inflammation. The findings could lead to new treatments for diseases associated with neuroinflammation, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Source: RCSI
RCSI researchers have discovered a new way to ‘put the brakes’ on excessive inflammation by regulating a type of white blood cell that is critical for our immune system.
“An exciting outcome of this research is that it definitively shows the critical protective element at chromosome ends is the telomere DNA loop,” said Associate Professor Cesare.
“This likely explains why telomere length regulates ageing; cells must need long enough telomeres to make the DNA loops and this becomes difficult as cells age.”
Telomeres are the protective caps at chromosome ends. In adult cells, telomeres shorten each time a cell divides and this contributes to ageing and cancer. Pluripotent stem cells, however, are specialised cells that exist in the earliest days of development. These pluripotent cells do not age and have the ability to turn into any type of adult cell.
The surprise finding, published today in Nature, shows that telomeres in pluripotent stem cells are protected very differently than telomeres in adult tissues.
