Thursday 13 June 2019

Aging delayed in older mice given blood component from young mice

New research has identified a novel approach to staving off the detrimental effects of aging, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

* This article was originally published here

Ford opens Israel tech lab in move toward driverless cars

Ford has opened a research center in Israel, joining a legion of major automakers racing to develop new technologies for the world of driverless cars.

* This article was originally published here

Empirical energy consumption model quantifies Bitcoin's carbon footprint

Researchers have conducted the first analysis of Bitcoin power consumption based on empirical data from IPO filings and localization of IP addresses. They found that the cryptocurrency's carbon emissions measure up to those of Kansas City—or a small nation. The study, published June 12 in the journal Joule, suggests that cryptocurrencies contribute to global carbon emissions, an issue that must be considered in climate change mitigation efforts.

* This article was originally published here

Mutant bacterial receptor could point to new therapies against opportunistic pathogen

Researchers have developed a new mutant version of a receptor used by a bacterial pathogen for a chemical communication process called quorum sensing, according to a study published June 13 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University, and colleagues. As the authors note, the mutant receptor could be used to identify therapeutic compounds that inhibit quorum sensing, fulfilling an urgent medical need.

* This article was originally published here

Common conditions keep many patients out of knee cartilage research studies

Some of the most common traits among patients with cartilage issues in the knee are excluding them from participating in clinical trials because the trial outcomes might not yield the optimum results for new methods of cartilage regeneration, according to a Penn Medicine study published in Regenerative Medicine. Researchers testing the new methods tend to only include the patients most likely to succeed with the fewest complications, but if some of these trials could be safely opened up to different kinds of patients—such as those older than 55 or younger than 18, or those who knee joints don't align perfectly—the results could be much more robust and reflective of the patient population being treated. In the team's paper, they also highlighted therapies that hold special promise for the excluded populations, such as the use of "scaffolding" to promote cartilage growth.

* This article was originally published here

South Australia's droughts are getting worse

Despite Adelaide experiencing its wettest day in more than two years this month, a new study by UniSA shows droughts are becoming longer and more severe in South Australia.

* This article was originally published here

Magnetism: An unexpected push for the hydrogen economy

Humankind has entered uncharted territory: atmospheric CO2 levels have soared to a record-breaking 415 ppm for the first time in human history. The need to find a sustainable alternative to CO2-producing fuels is urgent. One of the most promising and environmentally friendly energetic sources is hydrogen generated via water splitting, the reaction in which water is broken down into oxygen and hydrogen. Now, researchers from the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia are bringing this hydrogen economy one step closer in an unexpected way.

* This article was originally published here

PoseRBPF: A new particle filter for 6D object pose tracking

Researchers at NVIDIA, University of Washington, Stanford University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have recently developed a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter for 6-D pose tracking, called PoseRBPF. The approach can effectively estimate the 3-D translation of an object and its full distribution over the 3-D rotation. The paper describing this filter, pre-published on arXiv, will be presented at the upcoming Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Freiburg, Germany.

* This article was originally published here

A new approach for unsupervised paraphrasing without translation

In recent years, researchers have been trying to develop methods for automatic paraphrasing, which essentially entails the automated abstraction of semantic content from text. So far, approaches that rely on machine translation (MT) techniques have proved particularly popular due to the lack of available labeled datasets of paraphrased pairs.

* This article was originally published here

Flying-V plane concept marks spectacular new look in air travel

Seating airline passengers in the wings? Think about it. A V-shaped plane designed to carry passengers, cargo, and fuel tanks in its wings is being seeded as a good idea for the future.

* This article was originally published here