It’s been known for a decade that when infant mice’s hearts are damaged, they can regenerate new heart tissue in the first seven days of life. Now researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have found their secret. It could be used to turn sick old human hearts young and healthy again. The...
Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE
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A NEW PATH TO CLEAN NUCLEAR ENERGY
Those hoping to revive nuclear power production have been concentrating on redesigning nuclear reactors. But a new coalition is showing a more promising way: redesigning nuclear fuel. The U.S. Department of Energy, the Idaho National Laboratory, Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Engineering and Science Center, and private research company Clean Core Thorium Energy have partnered to...
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EUROPE BUILDS DIGITAL PARALLEL WORLD
The European Union is about to begin building what it calls a “digital twin” of planet Earth that will simulate “with unrivaled precision” our physical planet’s land, seas, atmosphere, and ice caps. The “Destination Earth” project is capable of modeling the planet in squares one kilometer across, about a sixth of a mile, a far...
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SURVEY: AI WILL TAKE CONTROL OF JOBS, CORPORATIONS BY 2035
Digital automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, will reshape and dominate work within 15 years, according to “Work 2035,” a survey just released by Citrix, a Florida-based software company. The survey of 1,500 executives and other employees of large and mid-size companies found that 72 percent believe AI will be their companies’ main revenue...
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HUMAN-MADE “SUPER-ENZYME” SPEEDS PLASTIC DECOMPOSITION
The bacterium I. sakaiensis has been eating away at the 300 million tons of plastic humanity tosses in the trash each year, but it takes the bug weeks to finish a meal. Bioscientists at the Kyoto Institute of Technology engineered a better bug, one that breaks down plastic six times faster than its ancestors. The...
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FINGER VEINS, NOT FINGERPRINTS, FOR I.D.
Fingerprints, the century-old standard for making positive identifications, isn’t so positive in the days of computer graphics and artificial intelligence. In the near future, we’ll rely on finger vein patterns instead. Researchers at the University of Buffalo have developed a 3D scanner that reads the patterns of blood vessels in a finger pad. Instead of...
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TRANSPLANT FAT TO LOSE WEIGHT
The human body holds two kinds of fat: brown fat, which burns energy, and white fat, which not only increases our pants size but also can cause obesity, and its attendant ailments range from joint damage to diabetes. People with obesity often have a genetic profile that renders the body unable to make enough brown...
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VACCINE AGAINST DEMENTIA
A research team, led by scientists at the Institute for Molecular Medicine and University of California at Irvine, has reported success with a vaccine against Alzheimer’s dementia tested in mice. The vaccine spurs the body to create antibodies that remove, and then prevent, the agglomeration of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain. These two...
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THE $1 HEARING AID
Around the world, more than 500 million people are partially or completely deaf, and that number is rising with the population of seniors. Severe hearing loss also is thought to be a contributing factor in dementia. Solution: hearing aids. However, only 3 percent of people globally who need hearing aids, and no more than 20...
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NEW TECH CHARGES EV POWER PACKS IN 15 SECONDS
Electric vehicles’ power packs can need eight hours or even longer to charge. But now Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Skeleton Technologies, an Estonian firm, claim to be able to put a usable charge into an EV in as little as 15 seconds. The key: pairing a standard lithium-ion battery pack with a set...