Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE

BODYBUILDERS’ SUPPLEMENT STALLS AGING Alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG), a supplement bodybuilders use to bulk up, has delayed the symptoms of aging and extended healthspans in mice, researchers at California’s Buck Institute for Research on Aging have found. AKG occurs naturally in mammals, including humans, and is a compound needed to convert food into energy. Physicians sometimes prescribe...

IBM has announced a “road map” that will lead it to build a 1,000-qubit quantum computer by 2023. The state of the art now: a year ago, Google claimed its 53-qubit quantum computer solved in 200 seconds a calculation that would have taken a conventional supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. IBM’s plan is to build...

Schools, corporate headquarters, and other institutions are stocking up on bleach and microsprayers and are hiring extra staff to constantly clean surfaces where the COVID virus may lurk. Now Corvus Robotics has found a way to eliminate all that extra work and gear. The Boston-based drone maker has devised a robot that stops coronaviruses with...

As the Oil Age slowly fades into history, Saudi Arabia is betting its new energy future on becoming a leading producer of “green” hydrogen. The Saudi government already is a leading producer of hydrogen for use in fertilizers and chemicals. But now it has signed an agreement with ACWA Power, a Saudi public-private partnership, and...

Children’s and teens’ mental health varies according to the amount of time they spend outdoors versus in front of screens, according to new research from the University of Adelaide. The researchers reviewed 186 studies and found the more time young people spend in nature, the better their psychological health, while the more time spent staring...

Children born with type 1 diabetes can’t produce insulin from their pancreases to process sugar. Fewer than one in five of these children can manage their condition effectively.  They’re subject to a lifetime of insulin injections, detailed dietary management, and a range of future health risks. But now clinical trials at four U.S. pediatric diabetes...

Cracking open a CO2 molecule to harvest the carbon to make plastics and other necessary items is routine chemistry. But it takes so much energy, as well as costly rare-earth catalysts, that often it isn’t worth the trouble. Now engineers at the University of California in Los Angeles have found a way to enlist sunlight...

In the U.S. alone, about 112,000 people are waiting for organ transplants. More organs would be available if they could be taken from elderly people but those organs are, well, elderly; they’re full of failing or “senescent” cells that cause inflammation, a basic source of aging and illness, and spread the damage to nearby healthy...

After peaking in 2064 at some 9.7 billion people, the world’s population will decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100, according to a new study from the University of Washington School of Medicine. That century-ending figure is about two billion lower than many other analyses have predicted. The key factors that will shrink population are...