In Unexpected Futurist, we profile the lesser known futurist side of influential individuals. This episode’s unexpected time-traveler: Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin was an inventor, observer, electricity pioneer, and serial experimenter, so it’s not entirely surprising he looked to the future. But it turns out he was looking to the far, far future. In 1780 he wrote a letter to a friend in which he lamented that he was born during the dawn of science.
Why is it that a cut on your finger seems to last for days, but a cut in your mouth is usually healed by morning? There are a lot of factors at play, but 2017 research found one intriguing answer that could benefit more than just your mouth: there’s a molecule in your saliva that can help grow new cells.
Scientists already knew that saliva contains a peptide called histatin-1 that fights off bacteria and aids in wound healing. For a 2017 study published in the FASEB Journal, Chilean researchers set out to discover exactly how the little molecule helped heal wounds. In a series of experiments, they added histatin-1 to chicken embryo cells and several types of human blood-vessel cells, and watched what happened.
There are many steps that have to happen for a wound to heal. New skin cells have to form and migrate from the wound’s edges little by little to cover the whole thing like a Band-Aid. Active cells called fibroblasts move in, too, helping to produce collagen, elastin, and other proteins that the new skin will need. The body also starts regrowing blood vessels, which boosts blood flow to the wound and makes it heal even faster.
For the first time, researchers have sent a quantum-secured message containing more than one bit of information per photon through the air above a city. The demonstration showed that it could one day be practical to use high-capacity, free-space quantum communication to create a highly secure link between ground-based networks and satellites, a requirement for creating a global quantum encryption network.
Quantum encryption uses photons to encode information in the form of quantum bits. In its simplest form, known as 2D encryption, each photon encodes one bit: either a one or a zero. Scientists have shown that a single photon can encode even more information—a concept known as high-dimensional quantum encryption—but until now this has never been demonstrated with free-space optical communication in real-world conditions. With eight bits necessary to encode just one letter, for example, packing more information into each photon would significantly speed up data transmission.
“Our work is the first to send messages in a secure manner using high-dimensional quantum encryption in realistic city conditions, including turbulence,” said research team lead, Ebrahim Karimi, University of Ottawa, Canada. “The secure, free-space communication scheme we demonstrated could potentially link Earth with satellites, securely connect places where it is too expensive to install fiber, or be used for encrypted communication with a moving object, such as an airplane.”
