Day's Headlines: Warping Science with Print; Younger DNA; Spinach Heart; Muscle Metal; Printing Human Cartilage; Artificial Sun; Absolutely Not Zero; CC'd Singing; and Real (Scary) Chatbot

Friday, March 24, 2017

Warping Science with Print; Younger DNA; Spinach Heart; Muscle Metal; Printing Human Cartilage; Artificial Sun; Absolutely Not Zero; CC'd Singing; and Real (Scary) Chatbot

Today is an unusual day where almost every article I found of interest was basically just research of something interesting!

Also - I can't believe I forgot to mention it a couple days ago, but this week I've officially been putting up this crazy, text-only blog for a year :) Here's that first post: March 22, 2016


Research

How the media warp science: the case of the sensationalised satnav theguardian

There’s a famous cliché which says “If you like sausage, you should never see one being made”. Well, earlier this week I saw how a science news story occurred, from experiment to media coverage, and I think the same applies here.

Note: the author's almost too casual with some of his language...

Scientists Can Reverse DNA Aging In Mice time

In the latest paper, the scientists revealed new details on how NAD+ works to keep cells young. Sinclair put drops of NAD+ into the water of a group of mice, and within a couple of hours, their NAD+ levels started to rise. Within the first week, the scientists saw obvious age reversal in muscle and improvements in DNA repair. “We can’t tell the difference between the tissues from an old mouse that is two years old versus a young mouse that is three to four months old," Sinclair says.

Spinach Wears a Heart on Its Leaves genengnews

Researchers often face a fundamental challenge as they seek to scale up human tissue regeneration: how to establish a vascular system that delivers blood deep into the developing tissue. Findings from the new study—published in an article entitled “Crossing Kingdoms: Using Decellularized Plants as Perfusable Tissue Engineering Scaffolds”—address the problems that current bioengineering techniques, including 3D printing, can't fabricate, which is creating the branching network of blood vessels down to the capillary scale required to deliver the oxygen, nutrients, and essential molecules required for proper tissue growth.

Dartmouth scientists create 3D printed rotaxane smart material that can lift 15x its own weight 3ders.org

Rotaxanes, dumbbell-shaped molecules that can convert energy into movement, are sometimes referred to as “nanomachines” thanks to their ability to perform tasks in response to stimuli. Making them work like real machines, however, has proved tricky. Since groups of these rotaxanes can consist of billions of randomly oriented individuals, the “motion” actually occurs in every direction at once, generally resulting in no useful function whatsoever.

Researchers in Sweden induce 3D bioprinted human cartilage cells to live and grow inside mice 3ders.org

In a research project that could massively advance the development of 3D printable human organs, scientists at Sahlgrenska Academy sahlgrenska.gu.se and Chalmers University of Technology chalmers.se have induced human-derived cartilage cells to live and grow in an animal host—in this case, mice. “This is the first time anyone has printed human-derived cartilage cells, implanted them in an animal model, and induced them to grow,” said Paul Gatenholm, a professor of biopolymer technology at Chalmers University of Technology.

Warning: The first image may be a little disturbing.

Let there be light: Germans switch on 'largest artificial sun' theguardian

German scientists are switching on “the world’s largest artificial sun” in the hope that intense light sources can be used to generate climate-friendly fuel.

A question not answered in the article: where does this thing get ITS power :)

Physicists prove that it's impossible to cool an object to absolute zero phys.org

In 1912, chemist Walther Nernst nobelprize.org proposed that cooling an object to absolute zero is impossible with a finite amount of time and resources. Today this idea, called the unattainability principle, is the most widely accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics—yet so far it has not been proved from first principles.

AI

Machine Learning Opens Up New Ways to Help Disabled People technologyreview

YouTube has used speech-to-text software to automatically caption speech in videos since 2009 (they are used 15 million times a day). Today it rolled out algorithms that indicate applause, laughter, and music in captions. More sounds could follow, since the underlying software can also identify noises like sighs, barks, and knocks.

See this old post from last June linking to an article where MIT was working on to tell what the sound should be in a silent video, and then adding it: June 13, 2016

Customer Service Chatbots Are About to Become Frighteningly Realistic technologyreview v

Sagar won two Academy Awards for novel digital animation techniques for faces used on movies including Avatar and King Kong. He’s now an associate professor at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, and CEO of a startup called Soul Machines soulmachines, which is developing expressive digital faces for customer service chatbots.

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