Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE

The only truly reliable test for Alzheimer’s is to put slices of your brain under a microscope. By then, you’re dead. Now researchers at Johns Hopkins University have identified 38 proteins that signal dementia years in advance of any symptoms if their levels are elevated in the blood. Before this study, these proteins had not...

As carmakers opt increasingly for batteries, hopes for hydrogen as an inexhaustible clean fuel are looking up – literally: the gas could be the perfect fuel for emissions-free airplanes. NASA, Airbus, and startups such as Pipistrel and Eviation have lofted concept planes running on electrons in hopes of creating electric aircraft to meet the industry’s...

There’s your genome and then there’s your epigenome – external factors that can control which of your genes are turned on or off. Epigenetic influences, from the food you eat to the pollution you inhale, bring alien molecules into your body that stick to your DNA, not changing its structure but changing how it works...

Pyrowave, a Canadian firm started by chemical engineers, is making a business out of recycling plastic by bombarding it with high-intensity microwaves.  The company’s name derives from the word “pyrolysis,” which means heating substances in the absence of oxygen so that they break down into their chemical components. Typically, plastics being recycled are sorted, often...

At the center of the aging process are senescent cells – cells that are old, decrepit, and have lost their ability to reproduce sprightly young versions of themselves.  These elderly cells often are at the root of diseases and general decline associated with aging, from wrinkled skin to systemic inflammation. So-called “senolytic” drugs, approved by...

Colon cancer – the third most common cancer and the second deadliest – is normally treated with a drug called Capecitabine (CAP), but it’s a shotgun treatment: the drug swarms not only tumors but also healthy tissue, leaving patients with side effects ranging from severe pain in hands and feet to dermatitis to nausea. Researchers...

The more than one trillion transistors or semiconductors produced each year, the things that populate computer chips and make them work, are indispensable and also a biblical-scale trash problem: relatively few chips are recycled because breaking them down and extracting the metals used to make them is neither easy nor reliably profitable and also consumes...

General Motors, which has promised to make only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035, has taken a key step to making its promise practical. The company has partnered with seven companies that make electric-vehicle charging stations – Blink, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo, FLO, Greenlots, and SemaConnect – to set up 60,000 charging locations “no matter where” GM’s...

In the past 60 years, earthlings have shot more than 56,000 objects into space, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), with more than half still in orbit but only about 4,000 still working. That means more than 50,000 satellites, rockets, and other remnants have died or broken apart, creating a field of swirling debris...

The new generation of farmhands is armed with lasers and thinks with artificial intelligence. Instead of a hoe, Carbon Robotics’ four-wheeled weeder patrols crop rows using high-resolution cameras and an on-board computer to identify weeds, then blasts them to a crisp with its eight 150-watt lasers. The 9,500-pound can work around the clock, zap 100,000...