Scientists from MIPT, Moscow Pedagogical State University and the University of Manchester have created a highly sensitive terahertz detector based on the effect of quantum-mechanical tunneling in graphene. The sensitivity of the device is already superior to commercially available analogs based on semiconductors and superconductors, which opens up prospects for applications of the graphene detector in wireless communications, security systems, radio astronomy, and medical diagnostics. The research results are published in Nature Communications.
Fair to say that we all assume that aging is inevitable. In reality however, there is no biological law that says we must age. Over the years we’ve seen a variety of theories proposed to explain why we age including the accumulation of damage to our DNA, the damaging effects of chemicals called “free radicals, changes in the function of our mitochondria, and so many others.
Our guest today, Dr. David Sinclair, believes that aging is related to a breakdown of information. Specifically, he describes how, with time, our epigenome accumulates changes that have powerful downstream effects on the way our DNA functions. Reducing these changes to the epigenome is achievable and in fact, even taking it further, his research now reveals that the epigenome can be reprogrammed back to a youthful state.
David A. Sinclair, PhD, AO is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and is the author of Lifespan — Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To. He is the Founding Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard. One of the leading innovators of his generation, he is listed by TIME magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in the world” (2014) and top 50 most important people in healthcare (2018). He is a board member of the American Federation for Aging Research, a Founding Editor of the journal Aging, and has received more than 35 awards for his research on resveratrol, NAD, and reprogramming to reverse aging, which have been widely hailed as major scientific breakthroughs and are topics we discuss in our time together.
In 2018, Dr. Sinclair became an Officer of the Order of Australia, the equivalent of a knighthood, for his work on national security matters and human longevity. Dr. Sinclair and his work have been featured on 60 Minutes, Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, and Newsweek, among others.
In closing, I really need to say that Lifespan (https://amzn.to/3sSoCNS) ranks as one of the most influential books I have ever read. Please enjoy today’s interview.
To stay current on Dr. Sinclair, follow him on Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidasinclair) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/davidsinclairphd/)
The Man Said That His Country Has Been In Existence For 1000 Years And Was A Little Puzzled Why His Country Was Called Andorra On The Map.
It was July 1954 when a smartly dressed man arrives at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan. Much like other passengers, he makes his way to customs. But whatever happened from this point onwards have left all puzzled and concerned. When questioned by the customs officers, the mysterious passenger said he was from Taured, also referred to as Taured Mystery. The mystery man claimed that it was the third time he was visiting Japan from his country. But, to the surprise of officers, they couldn’t find any country named Taured. The primary language of the man, described as Caucasian looking with a beard, was French. However, she was purportedly speaking Japanese and many other languages as well.
Officers were perplexed because they had never heard about any such country. The passport of the man was issued by of course the Taured. The passport looked authentic but the place was not recognized.
Location of Taured. The man was then given a map and asked to point out his country. He immediately man pointed to the area occupied by the Principality of Andorra is at the border of France and Spain. The man said that his country has been in existence for 1000 years and was a little puzzled why his country was called Andorra on the map. The man argued with the customs officers for long and refused to give in.
What Is The Mystery All About? He was also carrying currencies of different countries, probably because he had made several business trips. The mystery man shared other details like the company for which he was working and the hotel where he stayed. Officials find out that the company which he mentioned existed in Tokyo but not in Taured. Similarly, the hotel he mentioned did exist but hotel employees informed them that no such booking was made. This prompted officers to take the man in custody for further interrogation. Officers were suspicious that he might be some criminal and confiscated his documents and personal belongings. The officers put the mystery man in a nearby hotel whilst they conducted their investigation.
Mystery Man Vanishes Amid Tight Security. To ensure that the mystery man didn’t escape, two guards were placed on the door. It must be mentioned that the hotel room in which he was staying only had one entry and exit point. But to everyone’s surprise, the man vanished the next morning. Not only that, but all his personal documents had also disappeared. A search was launched to find the man but in vain. The thing that was troubling investigating officers was that he was put up in a room high up in the multi-storey hotel building with no balcony.
Unexplained Phenomena. Some people argued that the mystery man was indeed from Taured but the country happens to be in another universe and somehow passed through a parallel dimension and ended up at Haneda Airport. Another theory is that the mystery man was a time traveller and had mistakenly landed at the airport. Above all this, there are people who claim that it’s just an elaborate internet hoax.
The arrival of government-operated autonomous police robots does not look like predictions in science fiction movies. An army of robots with gun arms is not kicking down your door to arrest you. Instead, a robot snitch that looks like a rolling trash can is programmed to decide whether a person looks suspicious —and then call the human police on them. Police robots may not be able to hurt people like armed predator drones used in combat— yet —but as history shows, calling the police on someone can prove equally deadly.
Long before the 1987 movie Robocop, even before Karel Čapek invented the word robot in 1920, police have been trying to find ways to be everywhere at once. Widespread security cameras are one solution—but even a blanket of CCTV cameras couldn’t follow a suspect into every nook of public space. Thus, the vision of a police robot continued as a dream, until now. Whether they look like Boston Dynamics’ robodogs or Knightscope’s rolling pickles, robots are coming to a street, shopping mall, or grocery store near you.
The Orwellian menace of snitch robots might not be immediately apparent. Robots are fun. They dance. You can take selfies with them. This is by design. Both police departments and the companies that sell these robots know that their greatest contributions aren’t just surveillance, but also goodwill. In one brochure Knightscope sent to University of California-Hastings, a law school in the center of San Francisco, the company advertises their robot’s activity in a Los Angeles shopping district called The Bloc. It’s unclear if the robot stopped any robberies, but it did garner over 100000 social media impressions and Knightscope claims the robot’s 193 million overall media impressions was worth over $5.8 million. The Bloc held a naming contest for the robot, and said it has a “cool factor” missing from traditional beat cops and security guards.
In a study published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by academician Guo Guangcan from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has made progress in high dimensional quantum teleportation. The researchers demonstrated the teleportation of high-dimensional states in a three-dimensional six-photon system.
To transmit unknown quantum states from one location to another, quantum teleportation is one of the key technologies to realize long-distance transmission.
Compared with two-dimensional systems, high-dimensional system quantum networks have the advantages of higher channel capacity and better security. In recent years more and more researchers of the quantum information field have been working on generating efficient generation of high-dimensional quantum teleportation to achieve efficient high-dimensional quantum networks.
They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner—so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite. The special feature of such materials is that they possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies. Researchers at the University of Bonn (Germany) have now used ultracold atoms to gain new insights into previously unknown quantum phenomena. They found out that the magnetic orders between two coupled thin films of atoms compete with each other. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Quantum systems realize very unique states of matter originating from the world of nanostructures. They facilitate a wide variety of new technological applications, e.g. contributing to secure data encryption, introducing ever smaller and faster technical devices and even enabling the development of a quantum computer. In the future, such a computer could solve problems which conventional computers cannot solve at all or only over a long period of time.
How unusual quantum phenomena arise is still far from being fully understood. To shed light on this, a team of physicists led by Prof. Michael Köhl at the Matter and Light for Quantum Computing Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn are using so-called quantum simulators, which mimic the interaction of several quantum particles—something that cannot be done with conventional methods. Even state-of-the-art computer models cannot calculate complex processes such as magnetism and electricity down to the last detail.
As the number of devices connected to the internet continues to increase, so does the amount of redundant data transfer between different sensory terminals and computing units. Computing approaches that intervene in the vicinity of or inside sensory networks could help to process this growing amount of data more efficiently, decreasing power consumption and potentially reducing the transfer of redundant data between sensing and processing units.
Researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have recently carried out a study outlining the concept of near-sensor and in-sensor computing. These are two computing approaches that enable the partial transfer of computation tasks to sensory terminals, which could reduce power consumption and increase the performance of algorithms.
“The number of sensory nodes on the Internet of Things continues to increase rapidly,” Yang Chai, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “By 2032, the number of sensors will be up to 45 trillion, and the generated information from sensory nodes is equivalent to 1020 bit/second. It is thus becoming necessary to shift part of the computation tasks from cloud computing centers to edge devices in order to reduce energy consumption and time delay, saving communication bandwidth and enhancing data security and privacy.”
Over the past 25 years, suicide attacks have emerged as a method used on a large scale by terrorist organizations to inflict lethal damage and create fear and chaos. Data collected by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats shows that worldwide there were 5, 021 suicide attacks utilizing bombs, which resulted in 47, 253 deaths and 113, 413 wounded from 2000 to 2016.
And recent news reports have highlighted the attempted use of suicide bombs in U.S. subways and city streets as well as on major airlines. An individual willing to sacrifice their own life in an attack is a significant force-multiplier, who too often escapes conventional threat detection methods. However, new technologies may yet close the security gap.
To detect suicide bombers preparing to attack public places and other high-value targets, a research team led by a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School invented a method to detect persons wearing wires or a significant amount of metal that might be part of an explosive device.
