An increasing number of companies looking for technology workers want those new hires to have a basic understanding of quantum information science and are expecting schools to offer relevant basic courses in their curriculums. The discovery that more and more companies now want new employees to be “quantum aware” comes from a study carried out...
Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE
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EXPERIMENTAL DRUG “DE-AGES” THE BRAIN
As we age, our immune system tends to go haywire. It can become sluggish in responding to infections, fail to recognize intruders entirely, or, as is common, begin to attack our healthy cells, leading to the low-grade inflammation that has been identified as a cause of ailments from cancer to dementia. A key culprit is...
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U.S. INFANTS MAY BE UNABLE TO BENEFIT FROM BREAST MILK
Pediatricians have long known that human breast milk is key to babies’ development of everything from a strong immune system to proper brain and motor function. But the majority of human infants seem to lack a vital gut bacterium that turns breast milk into usable nutrients, according to a new study by researchers led by...
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MORE STUDIES LINK CELL PHONES TO CANCER
Incidences of breast and thyroid cancers have risen dramatically in recent years and two studies are adding to earlier evidence of the cause: cell phones. According to a study from Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, cell phones operate at radio frequencies that “significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, especially in women 50 and older...
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RESEARCHERS ELECTRONICALLY STORE COMPUTER FILES IN DNA
DNA has long been an attractive target as a medium for storing computer data: DNA can store 1,000 times as much information in the same space as a computer’s hard drive – about 10 full-length movies in a space the size of a grain of salt – and, unlike hard drives, DNA is a technology...
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TEACHING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO TEACH ITSELF
Technologists and ethicists have long pondered the consequences of the moment when technological development is wrested from human control and taken over by technology itself, with computers writing their own programs and designing their own descendants. Engineers at Cornell University have made it more interesting to think about that now. The researchers gave an artificial...
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NEW TREATMENT WEARS OUT CANCER
Cancer can outwit the human immune system and resist treatments – including chemotherapy, which can wreak damage of its own on organs and tissues. Now a team of German and Swedish bioscientists is testing a way to kill cancer cells by denying them energy. Until recently, cancer was thought to grow without needing mitochondria, the...
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“FATHER OF THE INTERNET” INVENTS NEW COMPETITOR
Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the computer codes 30 years ago that made the Internet possible, has become disenchanted with his creation… so, he’s designing an alternative. Unhappy about the hordes of personal data, as well as the power and control, amassed by giant corporations such as Amazon and Google, Berners-Lee has created Solid, which he...
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LAB-GROWN HEART CELLS IMPLANTED INTO HUMAN PATIENT
In the first such process on record, scientists at Kyoto University have surgically implanted lab-grown heart cells into a patient. First, the research team harvested cells from the patient and regressed them to become “induced pluripotent stem cells” (IPSCs) by exposing them to a virus that transferred 24 selected genes into the cells. The new...
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SCIENTISTS BUILD WORKING HUMAN THYMUS
Using human stem cells, researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London have, for the first time, grown a working human thymus. The thymus, sitting between the heart and the sternum, is essential in establishing the body’s immune system. Once that task is done, the thymus gradually wastes away until it virtually disappears...