Cute

Having A Longer Life

Eating only during your most active time of day, while following a reduced-calorie diet, may lead to a substantially longer life, according to new research conducted on mice.

One recipe for longevity is simple, if not easy to follow: eat less. Restricting calories can lead to a longer, healthier life, as studies have shown in a variety of animals.

Now, new research suggests that the body’s daily rhythms play a significant role in this longevity effect. 

Eating only during their most active time of day substantially extended the lifespan of mice on a reduced-calorie diet, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Joseph Takahashi and colleagues reported in the journal Science on May 5, 2022.

In his team’s study of hundreds of mice over four years, a reduced-calorie diet alone extended the animals’ lives by 10 percent. But feeding mice the diet only at nighttime, when mice are most active, extended life by 35 percent. 

That combo – a reduced-calorie diet plus a nighttime eating schedule – tacked on an extra nine months to the animals’ typical two-year median lifespan. For people, an equivalent plan would limit eating to daytime hours.  READ MORE...

Birds & Fish

 

Fusion Energy Unchained

Illustration of cloud-like ionized plasma in the ITER fusion reactor tokamak. Credit: ITER

Physicists at EPFL, within a large European collaboration, have revised one of the fundamental laws that has been foundational to plasma and fusion research for over three decades, even governing the design of megaprojects like ITER. The update demonstrates that we can actually safely utilize more hydrogen fuel in fusion reactors, and therefore obtain more energy than previously thought.

Fusion is one of the most promising future energy sources . It involves two atomic nuclei merging into one, thereby releasing enormous amounts of energy. In fact, we experience fusion every day: the Sun’s warmth comes from hydrogen nuclei fusing into heavier helium atoms.

There is currently an international fusion research megaproject called ITER that seeks to replicate the fusion processes of the Sun to create energy on the Earth. Its goal is to generate high-temperature plasma that provides the right environment for fusion to occur, producing energy.

Plasmas — an ionized state of matter similar to a gas – are made up of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons, and are almost a million times less dense than the air we breathe. Plasmas are created by subjecting “the fusion fuel” – hydrogen atoms – to extremely high temperatures (10 times that of the core of the Sun), forcing electrons to separate from their atomic nuclei. In a fusion reactor, the process takes place inside a donut-shaped (“toroidal”) structure called a “tokamak.”  READ MORE...

Water Caves

 

Einstein Was Right

According to Einstein's relativity, if you move relative to another observer and come back to their starting point, you'll age less than whatever remains stationary. Einstein also tells us that the curvature of space itself, depending on the strength of gravitation at your location, also affects how fast or slow your clock runs.

By flying planes both with and against Earth's rotation, and returning them all to the same starting point, we tested Einstein as never before. 

Here's what we learned.

In 1905, our conception of the Universe changed forever when Einstein put forth his special theory of relativity. Prior to Einstein, scientists were able to describe every “point” in the Universe with the use of just four coordinates: three spatial positions for each of the three dimensions, plus a time to indicate which moment any particular event occurred. 

All of this changed when Einstein had the fundamental realization that every single observer in the Universe, dependent on their motion and location, each had a unique perspective on where and when every event in the Universe would have occurred.

Whenever one observer moves through the Universe relative to another, the observer-in-motion will experience time dilation: where their clocks run slower relative to the observer-at-rest. 

Based on this, Einstein suggested that we could make use of two clocks to put this to the test: one at the equator, which speeds around the Earth at approximately 1670 km/hr (1038 mph), and one at the Earth’s poles, which is at rest as the Earth rotates about its axis.  READ MORE...

Waterfall

Night Sky

Adopting Healthy Habits

A new longevity study reveals that healthy lifestyle habits add up to six years to an individual's life—even if they're adopted in middle or older age. The study, published in Age and Ageing, followed 49,021 Japanese men and women ages 40 to 80 over two decades to analyze how modifiable health habits and behaviors affected their life expectancy.

What did the research find & why does it matter?
While other studies have been conducted on lifestyle habits, health status, and life expectancy in a number of countries with national life expectancies under 85 years, researchers wanted to see if adopting healthy habits in a country with a high life expectancy would also yield an increase in lifetime gains.

In 2020, Japan's national life expectancy was 84.7, with women living an average of 87.7 years and men an average of 81.6 years. These long life spans can be attributed to a number of factors—including a low prevalence of obesity, regular physical activity, lower intake of red meat, and diets high in fish, omega-3s, and polyphenol- and micronutrient-rich plant foods.

Interestingly, this study found that even though the average life expectancy in Japan is high, individuals could further extend their lives by implementing healthy lifestyle habits. In other words? Small, consistent actions that support our health make a big difference—especially when we build upon them.  READ MORE...

Sleeping Child

 

Blue-Green Algae Powers Computer

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have managed to run a computer for six months, using blue-green algae as a power source.  A type of cyanobacteria called Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 – commonly known as “blue-green algae,” which produces oxygen through photosynthesis when exposed to sunlight, was sealed in a small container, about the size of an AA battery, made of aluminum and clear plastic.

The research was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.  Christopher Howe from the University of Cambridge and colleagues claim that similar photosynthetic power generators could be the source of power for a range of small devices in the future, without the need for the rare and unsustainable materials used in batteries.

The computer was placed on a windowsill at one of the researchers' houses during the lockdown period due to COVID-19 in 2021, and stayed there for six months, from February to August.  The battery made of blue-green algae has provided a continuous current across its anode and cathode that ran a microprocessor.

The computer ran in cycles of 45 minutes. It was used to calculate sums of consecutive integers to simulate a computational workload, which required 0.3 microwatts of power, and 15 minutes of standby, which required 0.24 microwatts.  The microcontroller measured the device's current output and stored this data in the cloud for researchers to analyze.

Howe suggests that there are two potential theories for the power source. Either the bacteria itself produces electrons, which creates a current, or it creates conditions in which an aluminum anode in the container is corroded in a chemical reaction that produces electrons.  The experiment ran without any significant degrading of the anode and because of that, the researchers believe that the bacteria is producing the bulk of the current.

Further research is needed
Howe says that the approach could be scaled up, but further research is needed to figure out how far. He explains that putting one on your roof will not provide sufficient power for your house. But in rural areas of low and middle-income countries, in applications where a small amount of energy might be beneficial, such as environmental sensors or charging a mobile phone.  READ MORE...

Take a Break

 

Quantum Physics & Truth

I first learnt about Plato’s allegory of the cave when I was in senior high school. A mathematics and English nerd – a strange combination – I played cello and wrote short stories in my spare time. I knew a bit about philosophy and was taking a survey class in the humanities, but Plato’s theory of ideal forms arrived as a revelation: this notion that we could experience a shadow-play of a reality that was nonetheless eternal and immutable. 

Somewhere out there was a perfect circle; all the other circles we could see were pale copies of this single Circle, dust and ashes compared with its ethereal unity.  Chasing after this ideal as a young man, I studied mathematics. I could prove the number of primes to be infinite, and the square root of two to be irrational (a real number that cannot be made by dividing two whole numbers). 

These statements, I was told, were true at the beginning of time and would be true at its end, long after the last mathematician vanished from the cosmos. Yet, as I churned out proofs for my doctoral coursework, the human element of mathematics began to discomfit me. My proofs seemed more like arguments than irrefutable calculations. Each rested on self-evident axioms that, while apparently true, seemed to be based on little more than consensus among mathematicians.

These problems with mathematics turned out to be well known. The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell spent much of his career trying to shore up this house built on sand. His attempt was published, with his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, in the loftily titled Principia Mathematica (1910-13) – a dense three-volume tome, in which Russell introduces the extended proof of 1 + 1 = 2 with the witticism that ‘The above proposition is occasionally useful.’ Published at the authors’ considerable expense, their work set off a chain reaction that, by the 1930s, showed mathematics to be teetering on a precipice of inconsistency and incompleteness.  READ MORE...

Slip Sliding Duck

Ying Yang

Human Eyes After Death

Scientists have momentarily restored a faint twinkle of life to dying cells in the human eye.

In order to better understand the way nerve cells succumb to a lack of oxygen, a team of US researchers measured activity in mouse and human retinal cells soon after their death.

Amazingly, with a few tweaks to the tissue's environment, they were able to revive the cells' ability to communicate hours later.

When stimulated by light, the postmortem retinas were shown to emit specific electrical signals, known as b-waves.

These waves are also seen in living retinas, and they indicate communication between all the layers of macular cells that allow us to see.

It's the first time deceased human donor eyes have ever responded to light in this way, and it has some experts questioning the irreversible nature of death in the central nervous system.

"We were able to wake up photoreceptor cells in the human macula, which is the part of the retina responsible for our central vision and our ability to see fine detail and color," explains biomedical scientist Fatima Abbas from the University of Utah.

"In eyes obtained up to five hours after an organ donor's death, these cells responded to bright light, colored lights, and even very dim flashes of light."

After death, it's possible to save some organs in the human body for transplantation. But after circulation ceases, the central nervous system as a whole stops responding far too quickly for any form of long-term recovery.  READ MORE...

Every 172 Years

 

Reliance on Fossil Fuels

Modern societies would be impossible without mass-scale production of many man-made materials. We could have an affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to good education and health care without any microchips or personal computers: we had one until the 1970s, and we managed, until the 1990s, to expand economies, build requisite infrastructures and connect the world by jetliners without any smartphones and social media. 

But we could not enjoy our quality of life without the provision of many materials required to embody the myriad of our inventions.  Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. 

The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.

The dependence is even higher in the world’s most populous country: feeding three out of five Chinese depends on the synthesis of this compound. This dependence easily justifies calling ammonia synthesis the most momentous technical advance in history: other inventions provide our comforts, convenience or wealth or prolong our lives—but without the synthesis of ammonia, we could not ensure the very survival of billions of people alive today and yet to be born.  READ MORE...

Approaching Birds

 

Americans Avoid Going to Work

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said he expects China to produce "some very strong companies" because of the country's workforce.

"There's just a lot of super-talented, hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing," Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday.

"They won't just be burning the midnight oil. They will be burning the 3 a.m. oil," he continued. "They won't even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all."

Musk himself famously slept on the floor of Tesla's Fremont factory during the "production hell" for the Model 3.

"I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company," he told Bloomberg in 2018. "Whenever they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse."

Last month, workers at Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory were required to sleep at the facility as production resumed following a three-week shutdown, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A memo, which Bloomberg reported, indicated that each worker would be provided with a sleeping bag and an air mattress and expected to work 12-hour shifts with one day off per week.

But workplace tides may be shifting in China after tech workers there protested the "996" schedule that had many working 72 hours per week, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for six days.  READ MORE...