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Archive for the ‘chemistry’ category: Page 73

Feb 26, 2023

Nuclear Propulsion — How close are we to the Expanse?

Posted by in categories: chemistry, space travel

The future of space travel with my new YouTube video on nuclear propulsion! Learn how this technology can improve the propellant efficiency of chemical rockets, making it a viable option for crewed missions to Mars, and perhaps get us to the stars.

Plus, compare nuclear propulsion to conventional chemical rockets such as the Saturn V and to the Epstein Drive from the Expanse.

Continue reading “Nuclear Propulsion — How close are we to the Expanse?” »

Feb 26, 2023

The Unexpected Winners Of The ChatGPT Generative AI Revolution

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, robotics/AI

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the world like wildfire and continues to make headlines. However, the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has been around for a very long time. The technology was first pioneered in academia with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio publishing their first seminal work on Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014 and then Google picked up the torch and published seminal papers and patents in both GANs and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). In fact, my first paper on generative chemistry, was published in 2016, first granted patent in 2018, and the first AI-generated drug went through the first phase of clinical trials.


Forbes is one of the most reputable content providers on the planet and probably the most reputable when it comes to anything dealing with money. If Forbes does not classify you as a billionaire, you are not a billionaire. It has decades of high-quality expert-generated longitudinal text, and multimedia content in multiple languages. In addition to elite human reporters and editors, it also has a small army of content creators specializing in specific areas contributing to Forbes.com. For example, it is my 5th year as a contributor and I contribute regularly to keep the pencil sharp. This massive human intelligence may be partly repurposed to help develop internal generative resources within the Forbes empire, help curate the datasets and help train or benchmark third-party generative resources. I would gladly volunteer a small amount of time to such a task.

Nature and several other journals in the Nature Publishing Group portfolio are considered to be the Olympus in academic publishing. To publish in one of the elite Nature journals academics spend months and sometimes years going through the rounds of editorial and then peer-review. The quality of the data is questioned, all experimental data is disclosed, and the thousands or millions of dollars that went into the experiments are presented in the form of a paper and supplementary materials.

Continue reading “The Unexpected Winners Of The ChatGPT Generative AI Revolution” »

Feb 25, 2023

Chemically defined cytokine-free expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

A culture system allows the long-term expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in vivo without the use of recombinant cytokines or albumin, with potential applications for clinical therapies involving HSCs.

Feb 25, 2023

How Your Thoughts Change Your Brain, Cells, and Genes

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, neuroscience

Every minute of every day, your body is physically reacting, literally changing, in response to the thoughts that run through your mind.

It’s been proven over and over again that just thinking about something causes your brain to release neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that allow it to communicate with parts of itself and your nervous system. Neurotransmitters control virtually all of your body’s functions, from hormones to digestion to feeling happy, sad, or stressed.

Studies have shown that thoughts alone can improve vision, fitness, and strength. The placebo effect, as observed with fake operations and sham drugs, for example, works because of the power of thought. Expectancies and learned associations have been shown to change brain chemistry and circuitry which results in real physiological and cognitive outcomes, such as less fatigue, lower immune system reaction, elevated hormone levels, and reduced anxiety.

Feb 25, 2023

Cancer evolution is mathematical

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, evolution, genetics, health, mathematics

Cancer is not a uniform disease. Rather, cancer is a disease of phenotypic plasticity, meaning tumor cells can change from one form or function to another. This includes reverting to less mature states and losing their normal function, which can result in treatment resistance, or changing their cell type altogether, which facilitates metastasis.

In addition to direct changes in your DNA in cancer, a key driver of cancer progression is where and when your DNA is activated. If your DNA contains the “words” that spell out individual genes, then epigenetics is the “grammar” of your genome, telling those genes whether they should be turned on or off in a given tissue. Even though all tissues in the body have almost exactly the same DNA sequence, they can all carry out different functions because of chemical and structural modifications that change which genes are activated and how. This “epigenome” can be influenced by environmental exposures such as diet, adding a dimension to how researchers understand drivers of health beyond the DNA code inherited from your parents.

I’m a cancer researcher, and my laboratory at Johns Hopkins University studies how the differences among normal tissues are controlled by an epigenetic code, and how this code is disrupted in cancer. In our recently published review, colleague Andre Levchenko at Yale University and I describe a new approach to understanding cancer plasticity by combining epigenetics with mathematics. Specifically, we propose how the concept of stochasticity can shed light on why cancers metastasize and become resistant to treatments.

Feb 25, 2023

Electrodes build themselves inside the bodies of live fish

Posted by in categories: chemistry, electronics

Substance that transforms into a conductive polymer using the body’s own chemistry could improve implantable electronics.

Feb 23, 2023

‘Electronic nose’ built with sustainably sourced microbial nanowires could revolutionize health monitoring

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, health, nanotechnology, wearables

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced the invention of a nanowire, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, which can be cheaply grown by common bacteria and can be tuned to “smell” a vast array of chemical tracers—including those given off by people afflicted with different medical conditions, such as asthma and kidney disease.

Thousands of these specially tuned wires, each sniffing out a different chemical, can be layered onto tiny, , allowing health-care providers an unprecedented tool for monitoring potential health complications. Since these wires are grown by bacteria, they are organic, biodegradable and far greener than any inorganic nanowire.

To make these breakthroughs, which were detailed in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectrics, senior authors Derek Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, and Jun Yao, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, needed to look no farther than their own noses.

Feb 23, 2023

AI conjures proteins that speed up chemical reactions

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, information science, robotics/AI

For the first time, scientists have used machine learning to create brand-new enzymes, which are proteins that accelerate chemical reactions. This is an important step in the field of protein design, as new enzymes could have many uses across medicine and industrial manufacturing.

“Living organisms are remarkable chemists. Rather than relying on toxic compounds or extreme heat, they use enzymes to break down or build up whatever they need under gentle conditions. New enzymes could put renewable chemicals and biofuels within reach,” said senior author David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine and recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

As reported Feb, 22 in the journal Nature, a team based at the Institute for Protein Design at UW Medicine devised algorithms that can create light-emitting enzymes called luciferases. Laboratory testing confirmed that the new enzymes can recognize specific chemicals and emit light very efficiently. This project was led by two postdoctoral scholars in the Baker Lab, Andy Hsien-Wei Yeh and Christoffer Norn.

Feb 22, 2023

Researchers uncover how photosynthetic organisms regulate and synthesize ATP

Posted by in categories: chemistry, genetics

ATP, the compound essential for the functioning of photosynthetic organisms such as plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, is produced by an enzyme called “chloroplast ATP synthase” (CFoCF1). To control ATP production under varying light conditions, the enzyme uses a redox regulatory mechanism that modifies the ATP synthesis activity in response to changes in the redox state of cysteine (Cys) residues, which exist as dithiols under reducing (light) conditions, but forms a disulfide bond under oxidizing (dark) conditions. However, this mechanism has not yet been fully understood.

Now, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers from Japan led by Prof. Toru Hisabori from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has uncovered the role of the amino acid sequences present in CFoCF1, revealing how the regulates ATP production in photosynthetic organisms.

To understand how the conformation of the present in CFoCF1 contributes to the regulation mechanism, the researchers used the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, to produce the enzyme. “By leveraging the powerful genetics of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as a for photosynthesis, we conducted a comprehensive biochemical analysis of the CFoCF1 molecule,” explains Prof. Hisabori.

Feb 22, 2023

Researchers use light to convert abundant lignin into plastic that can be continually recycled

Posted by in categories: chemistry, sustainability

Lignin is arguably the most abundant component of biomass that most people have never heard of. That may be about to change.

Many people are familiar with its biochemical cousin cellulose, a byproduct of paper and wood milling. But the same processes produce 50 million tons of lignin annually, industry experts estimate. Once distilled, 98 percent of the inky liquid is burned to produce electricity.

Scientists have been working to find more efficient and sustainable approaches to transform this naturally occurring polymer for use as a cleaner and greener building block to develop next generation materials.

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