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Mitochondria are often called the power generators of human cells. They convert nutrients such as glucose and fatty acids that we obtain from food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the primary energy source in our cells during metabolism.

At the same time, mitochondria are the core of human immunity, too. Healthy mitochondria effectively regulate immune responses, while mitochondrial dysfunction can damage immune cells, resulting in many chronic diseases and impaired cellular differentiation.

Chen argues that seemingly diverse conditions—including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, allergies, autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, and even various mental illnesses—can be understood through a “unified theory” of mitochondrial imbalance. This means that almost every disease can be traced to mitochondrial imbalance. In other words, in mitochondrial imbalance, there is invariably something wrong with the body’s basic metabolism. This perspective suggests that approximately 90 percent of chronic diseases stem from problems with mitochondrial metabolism.

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In perhaps the least surprising outcome of this election cycle, incumbent Democrat George Gascon got a shellacking Tuesday from his opponent, independent Nathan Hochman, in the race for Los Angeles County district attorney, losing by 62% to 38%.

The writing was on the wall for Gascon, as LA voters not only twice unsuccessfully tried to recall him but 74% of primary voters also voted for candidates other than Gascon in April.

It turns out that voters do indeed want a safe county, unburdened by violent crime. Voters correctly blamed Gascon for the tsunami of crime he unleashed through his pro-criminal policies.

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Several left-wing district attorneys could find themselves out of a job after Tuesday’s election as voters voice their frustration with an explosion in crime ripping through their communities, including three California jurisdictions.

With many progressive prosecutors on the ballot this election, polling and fundraising data shows that voters are rejecting soft-on-crime policies across the nation with their ballots and wallets, according to multiple reports.

Crime remains one of the most important issues, with 75% of voters saying crime is very or somewhat important to their decision in the 2024 election, according to a Gallup poll released Oct. 9.

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Stanford researchers hope new technique will flip lymphoma protein’s normal action — from preventing cell death to triggering it.

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I guess the science really isn’t settled after all.

UCLA chemists have discovered a major flaw in a fundamental rule of organic chemistry that has held for 100 years. They say it’s time to rewrite the textbooks.

Organic molecules, which are primarily made of carbon, have specific shapes and arrangements of atoms. Molecules called olefins contain double bonds, or alkenes, between two carbon atoms. Typically, these atoms and their attached groups lie in the same 3D plane, and deviations from this structure are rare.

The rule being questioned, known as Bredt’s rule, was established in 1924. It asserts that molecules cannot have a double bond at the “bridgehead” position—the junction of a bridged bicyclic molecule—because this position would distort the geometry of the double bond. Bredt’s rule has constrained the design of synthetic molecules by preventing chemists from creating certain structures. Since olefins play a critical role in pharmaceutical research, Bredt’s rule has limited the types of molecules that scientists could envision, potentially holding back innovations in drug discovery.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

If you’re eagerly following discoveries from genetics, this year might have seemed a bit more sedated than last year. After all, 2022 saw a Nobel Prize awarded for innovation in ancient DNA, researchers uncovered a Neandertal family from mere bone fragments, and a team carried out a major study of ancient genomes from eastern Africa.

This year saw a lot of research consolidation, with continued progress along well-established lines. This year saw many research studies that are in this category of “filling in the map” of ancient DNA, especially within the last 3000 years. These included ancient DNA genotyping from Scandinavia, Tibet, the east coast of Africa, northwest Africa, the Aegean, and many more. In a preprint released this year, Swapan Mallick and collaborators have described the Allen Ancient DNA Resource, a database that now includes more than 10,000 individuals.

Building out the database of ancient DNA is undeniably valuable. But even more fascinating are the discoveries that allow us to look at biology, social dynamics, and evolution in new ways.

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If swing-state Nevada goes for Donald Trump in 2024, a decisive role may be played by a critical but widely under-examined constituency: ex-Californians who fled spiraling West Coast leftism and are now nudging Nevada rightward, Politico reports.

Early voting data from Nevada has already sent Republican hopes of securing the state’s six electoral votes soaring. Through Thursday — the penultimate day of early voting — the number of registered Republicans who’ve cast a ballot exceeds the Democrats’ tally by 47,300, or 5.1 percent. That’s a complete turning of the tables, as it’s usually Democrats who’ve banked a majority of the votes before Election Day. The GOP has built that lead not through the mail, but by a level of Republican in-person turnout that veteran Nevada political reporter and full-on leftist Jon Ralston has called “startling.”

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Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe.

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FOR A MACHINE THAT’S designed to replicate a star, the world’s newest stellarator is a surprisingly humble-looking apparatus. The kitchen-table-size contraption sits atop stacks of bricks in a cinder-block room at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J., its parts hand-labeled in marker.

The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.

The arrangement of magnets forms the defining feature of a stellarator: an entirely external magnetic field that directs charged particles along a spiral path to confine a superheated plasma. Within this enigmatic fourth state of matter, atoms that have been stripped of their electrons collide, their nuclei fusing and releasing energy in the same process that powers the sun and other stars. Researchers hope to capture this energy and use it to produce clean, zero-carbon electricity.

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Iran is likely still tallying the costs of the Israeli airstrikes launched on Saturday in retaliation for Tehran’s massive October 1 missile barrage on Israel. Among the targets that Israel appears to have gone after are Iran’s prized Russian-made S-300 air defense systems, according to U.S. and Israeli officials. Putting the Iranian S-300s out of action leaves the door open to follow-up strikes by Israel, including larger-scale direct attacks. As we noted on Saturday, this serves as both a contingent opportunity for the Israel Defense Forces and a deterrent against a response from Iran.

Among the critical Iranian military infrastructure destroyed on Saturday were its three surviving S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile systems. This is the assessment of unnamed U.S. and Israeli officials speaking to the Wall Street Journal. Iran’s only other S-300 system was already hit by Israel earlier this year.

Told ya so.

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And read the comments — people are getting sick & tired of YouTube hiding and throttling content that doesn’t agree with their Woke agenda.

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Few areas of research have captivated scientists more than the search for room-temperature superconductivity. Finding a way to reduce energy loss as electricity travels over transmission lines and across wires would profoundly change society. It would deliver nearly unlimited energy, turbocharge compute speeds, and introduce new and better ways to use computers and other electronics.

Yet assembling the right mix of materials to achieve room temperature superconductivity has eluded researchers for more than a century. Time and time again, physicists have announced breakthroughs that were later found to be irreproducible, in error, or even fraudulent. Consequently, the challenge—getting to superconductivity at temperatures above 0 degrees Kelvin (-273.15 degrees Celsius) at ambient pressure—remains a holy grail of physics and materials science.

The Register.

A group of researchers in the UK affiliated with the BSS published a paper this week calling for the permanent abolition of Daylight Saving Time (DST) and adherence to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), in large part because modern evidence suggests having that extra hour of sunlight in the evenings is worse for our health than we thought back in the 1970s when the concept was all the rage in Europe.

Not only does GMT more closely align with the natural day/light cycle in the UK, the boffins assert, but decades of research into sleep and circadian rhythms have been produced since DST was enacted that have yet to be considered.

The human circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle our bodies go through, drives a lot about our health beyond sleep. It regulates hormone release, gene expression, metabolism, mood (who isn’t grumpier when waking up in January?), and the like. In short, it’s important. Messing with that rhythm by forcing ourselves out of bed earlier for several months out of the year can have lasting effects, the researchers said.

Speed the day.

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The demand for food production is intensifying with a rapidly growing population, yet farmers around the world face unprecedented challenges owing to shifting climatic conditions. Controlled environment and vertical farming have emerged as a potential solution to boost resource use efficiency and food output per unit of land while allowing for cultivation in urban and arid regions, but widespread adoption has been hindered by substantial energy requirements. Recent developments in CO2/CO electrolysis as well as advances in genetic engineering and selective breeding have laid the groundwork for the emergence of electro-ag to substantially reduce the energy needs of vertical farming. Fueled by acetate derived from CO2 using renewable electricity, electro-ag enables the heterotrophic growth of food crops. Unlike traditional controlled environments or conventional farming, electro-ag is not constrained by the same efficiency limitations of photosynthesis. Instead, the efficient metabolic pathways of acetate utilization are harnessed to allow for at least a 4-fold improvement in solar-to-food efficiency, with future efforts potentially leading to an order of magnitude improvement in energy solar-to-food efficiency. If the United States food supply was produced via electro-ag, land usage could be decreased by 88% while substantially streamlining food supply chains by decentralizing food production.

There are many advantages of an electro-ag-based global food system. By improving efficiency and decreasing land usage, a large portion of Earth’s land could be rewilded to restore ecosystems supporting natural carbon sequestration. Additionally, electro-ag systems can be deployed in extreme environments such as deserts, cities, or even on Mars where it is otherwise difficult to grow food. Electro-ag can also help avoid devastating food price spikes by reducing the impact of extreme weather and localizing food production. Electro-ag is poised to revolutionize the realm of food production by offering a sustainable pathway toward a more resilient and equitable food system. Future efforts should seek to further improve the energy efficiency of electro-ag while working toward the production of calorie-dense staple crops to help combat global hunger.

The Economist.

Every day seems to bring more exciting news. First the drugs tackled diabetes. Then, with just an injection a week, they took on obesity. Now they are being found to treat cardiovascular and kidney disease, and are being tested for Alzheimer’s and addiction. It is early days yet, but glp-1 receptor agonists have all the makings of one of the most successful classes of drugs in history. As they become cheaper and easier to use, they promise to dramatically improve the lives of more than a billion people—with profound consequences for industry, the economy and society.

If, of course, they can make their way through the government gatekeepers on behalf of Big Pharma.

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The long-anticipated Israeli retaliation strike on Iran appears to be underway. U.S. and Iranian media is reporting that Tehran is under attack as videos emerging on social media show explosions in the Iranian capital. The attack is in retaliation for Iran’s massive Oct. 1 missile barrage on Israel.

Nature.

DNA has been humanity’s go-to data repository for millennia. Tough and compact, it is so information-dense that just one gram of it can hold enough data for 10 million hours of high-definition video.

But there is always room for improvement.

An innovative method now allows DNA to store information as a binary code — the same strings of 0s and 1s used by standard computers. That could one day be cheaper and faster than encoding information in the sequence of the building blocks that make up DNA, which is the method used by cells and by most efforts to harness DNA for storing artificially generated data.

The method is so straightforward that 60 volunteers from a variety of backgrounds were able to use it to store the text of their choice. Many of them initially didn’t think the technique would work, says Long Qian, a computational synthetic biologist at Peking University in Beijing and an author of the study1 describing the technique.

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Sideshows, the stunt-driving parties that rankle Bay Area residents and throttle early-morning commutes on the Bay Bridge, could become harder to pull off due to a new policing tool from tech company Flock Safety.

Officially launching Thursday, and with beta testing already complete, the technology listens for the sound of tire screeches and engine revs and then automatically sends a five-second audio clip to nearby police. The surveillance product is akin to Alexa- or Siri-enabled devices, digesting all nearby audio and waiting for trigger sounds.

Tom Pethtel, an engineering vice president at Flock, told SFGATE that his company has heard a dramatic uptick in complaints about sideshows from law enforcement customers over the past two years. The tech tool is meant to complement Flock’s license plate reader cameras and Raven gunshot microphones, part of the company’s mission to “eliminate crime.”

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A team of pathophysiologists at the University of Milan has found that climbing stairs or walking for short bursts allows people to consume 20% to 60% more energy than if they do the same activity nonstop for the same distance. In their study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group asked volunteers to walk on a treadmill or climb stairs while also monitoring their oxygen intake.

The research team noted that available reported energy expenditures tend to reflect activities that are done at a metabolically steady state, which only becomes established after performing such an activity for a while. They wondered if there might be differences in expenditures if people engaged in start-and-stop-type exercise multiple times. To find out, they recruited 10 volunteers.

The volunteers walked on a treadmill or climbed a short flight of stairs for different lengths of time, ranging from 10 seconds to four minutes. As they did so, they wore a mask to measure their oxygen intake, a means of measuring energy consumption.

I always wanted to be a pathophysiologist. It sounds as if it pays well and doesn’t involve any heavy lifting.

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We have gotten what appears to be our first view of a Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS) for the Aegis Ashore air defense system that has been installed on the highly strategic American island of Guam in the Pacific. The land-based Mk 41 launchers are one step toward addressing the vulnerabilities of the U.S. military bases on the island to attack — something that China, in particular, has directly referenced in the context of a full-scale conflict in the region. Ultimately, Aegis Ashore on Guam will be just one element in plans to make the island’s airspace the most heavily defended anywhere on Earth.

…

Aegis Ashore is primarily designed to engage ballistic threats during the midcourse portion of their flight outside the Earth’s atmophere using SM-3 interceptors. However, the Mk 41 is a modular launcher, meaning that additional anti-missile interceptors, such as the terminal-stage intercept and anti-air SM-6 and the forthcoming Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI), which could also be added. With its ability to take down certain incoming hypersonic threats, as well as other weapons, the GPI could be especially relevant for the defense of Guam. With additional launchers, even dispersed around the island, shorter-ranged missiles, such as the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) Block II and even the latest SM-2s, could feasibly provide protection against air breathing threats, such as cruise missiles and drones. Patriot interceptors are now also now a possibility.

 

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One of the more interesting twists in these last few weeks of the presidential election campaign has been the increasing support of black men for Donald Trump. The trend obviously has the Democrats worried, as evidenced by the blatant pandering of the “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” announced last week by the Kamala Harris campaign. I’m not sure that the target demographic is as stupid as Ms. Harris thinks they are, however — young black men usually have a good sense of when they’re being played.

The movement of black men towards Donald Trump really got going after he was arrested, and the famous mug shot was publicized. That’s when the #Niggas4Trump hashtag started trending, and young black vloggers began enthusing over Mr. Trump using boisterous ghetto argot.

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Modern high-speed internet uses light to quickly and reliably transmit large amounts of data through fiber-optic cables, but currently, light signals hit a bottleneck when data processing is necessary. For that, they must convert into electrical signals for processing before further transmission.

A device called an all-optical switch could instead use light to control other light signals without the need for electrical conversion, saving both time and energy in fiber-optic communication.

A University of Michigan-led research team demonstrated an ultrafast all-optical switch by pulsing circularly polarized light, which twists like a helix, through an optical cavity lined with an ultrathin semiconductor. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

This ‘influencer’ has a PhD from Oxford and an MD from Harvard Medical School, if you’re keeping track.

It’s always best to swap actual knowledge of causation for previous dependency on correlation studies.

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A new treatment combining ReCET and semaglutide could eliminate the need for insulin in type 2 diabetes, with 86% of participants in a study no longer requiring insulin therapy. The treatment was safe and well-tolerated, and further trials are planned to confirm these results.

Groundbreaking research presented at UEG Week 2024 introduces a promising new treatment approach for type 2 diabetes (T2D) that has the potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for insulin therapy.

This innovative approach, which combines a novel procedure known as ReCET (Re-Cellularization via Electroporation Therapy) with semaglutide, resulted in the elimination of insulin therapy for 86% of patients.

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Pretty cool. Let’s see if it has any impact.

UPDATE: Chinese scientists bring record-breaking Stirling generator to life while NASA’s patent stays on paper

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According to research, walking backwards can have surprising benefits for both your physical health and your brain, as Michael Mosley recently explored in a recent episode of the BBC podcast and Radio 4 show Just One Thing.

Retro-walking, as walking backwards is known in academic circles, has a rich history. There are reports dating back to the early 19th Century of people walking hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles, in reverse. Many were the result of impulsive bets and others were simply attempts to claim the bragging rights to a bizarre new record.

But due to the difference in biomechanics, backwards walking can actually bring some physical benefits. It is often used in physiotherapy to relieve back pain, knee problems and arthritis. Some studies even suggest that backwards walking can positively affect cognitive abilities such as memory, reaction time and problem-solving skills.

The Register.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced plans to support the development of three new nuclear energy projects, which it says will see the construction of several new small modular reactors (SMRs).

Just as their name suggests, SMRs are miniaturized nuclear power plants designed to be mass produced in a modular fashion. Amazon touts “faster build times” and the ability to deploy them “closer to the grid” as major benefits.

While there are several startups developing SMRs, including NuScale and Sam Altman-backed Oklo, Amazon is betting big on X-energy’s SMR tech for the Washington development. The e-tailer is one of the major investors in a $500 million Series-C funding intended to accelerate the development of X-energy’s tech and will reportedly support its goal of bringing more than 5 gigawatts of SMRs online in the US by 2039.

Ars Technica.

Has your dentist ever told you that it’s recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist’s office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association.

It’s a common refrain from dentists, but it’s false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it’s been that way for well over a decade.

The association’s guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don’t have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: “Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed,” the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.

Which my dentist always does.

Wall Street Journal.

Startup Kairos Power plans to build small reactors to help supply electricity to the tech company’s data centers, in a first-of-its-kind deal in the U.S.

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Cutting calorie intake can lead to a leaner body — and a longer life, an effect often chalked up to the weight loss and metabolic changes caused by consuming less food. Now, one of the biggest studies1 of dietary restrictions ever conducted in laboratory animals challenges the conventional wisdom about how dietary restriction boosts longevity.

The study, involving nearly 1,000 mice fed low-calorie diets or subjected to regular bouts of fasting, found that such regimens do indeed cause weight loss and related metabolic changes. But other factors — including immune health, genetics and physiological indicators of resiliency — seem to better explain the link between cutting calories and increased lifespan.

“The metabolic changes are important,” says Gary Churchill, a mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who co-led the study. “But they don’t lead to lifespan extension.”

CNN.

Probably not the grave of Christopher Columbus. But you never know.

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A team of National Geographic mountaineers has uncovered what is believed to be the partial remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a British climber who disappeared during a 1924 expedition to summit Mount Everest.

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Six unusual earthquakes shook Mount Adams in September, but it’s too soon to speculate about a potential eruption.

I suspect that this is God telling you to stay away from the Left Coast.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

UPDATE: Columbus Was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe, Study Finds

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Most developments over the last year have come from one company, Fervo, the enhanced geothermal startup. There have been improvements and derisking in reservoir creation and drilling. The latest project in Utah, Cape Station, could grow to produce hundreds of megawatts of electricity. The company is reducing costs and solving most issues, though questions about fluid loss remain.

Last year, I wrote about closed loop systems and Eavor several times due to the start of their Germany project and signing several sales contracts. The company has been quiet about progress, so no updates there.

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In contrast to biological cell membranes, it is still a major challenge for synthetic membranes to efficiently separate ions and small molecules due to their similar sizes in the sub-nanometer range. Inspired by biological ion channels with their unique channel wall chemistry that facilitates ion sieving by ion-channel interactions, the first free-standing, ultrathin (10–17 nm) nanomembranes composed entirely of polydopamine (PDA) are reported here as ion and molecular sieves.

You may not realize it but this is huge. Eventually we want such membranes to be able to filter useful stuff from unuseful stuff, and the better we automate it the better off life will be for all of us.

Ars Technica.

A few years ago, Egyptian archaeologists discovered what they thought were the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple dating back to the sixth century BCE. Subsequent finds at the site indicate that the structure was actually an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The L-shaped structure was found within a larger complex called the Temple of Buto (a later Greek name), known to the ancient Egyptians as Per-Wadjet and located east of Alexandria in the Nile Delta. It’s now called Tell El Fara’in (“Hill of the Pharaohs”). Buto was once a sacred site dedicated to the goddess Wadjet, believed to be the matron and protector of lower Egypt, who took on a cobra form. Buto was well-known for its temple and the oracle of Wadjet, with an annual festival held there in her honor.

There were archaeological excavations of the site in the 1960s and 1980s, revealing a palace dating back to the Second Dynasty, as well as six Greek bathhouses. An Egyptian team began fresh excavations a few years ago. In 2022, they uncovered a hall at the southwestern end of the temple, with the remains of three papyrus-shaped columns aligned on a north-south axis. They also found engraved stone fragments and a limestone painting of a bird’s head wearing a white crown within two feathers.

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If Apple can make a watch that reliably monitors blood pressure, I may have to get one.

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It can also type, so the robo-doctor can heal you and write legibly

Robot hands are commonplace, but their sense of touch is crude compared to that of a human. A design proposed by a group of scientists in the Middle Kingdom may change that.

Attention, PornHub….

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On September 28, California became the first state to ban “sell-by” dates, as Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation aimed at combating food waste. The law prohibits the use of consumer-facing sell-by dates, and also requires standardized language for date labels.

Far too many dimwitted hand-wringers were treating the dates like a Edict from God.

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Aurora Flight Sciences has released new renderings of an uncrewed fan-in-wing vertical take-off-and-landing capable demonstrator aircraft it is currently working on, as well as of a revised vision for a scaled-up cargo aircraft based on the same technology. The demonstrator is being developed under a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program centered on interest in a new high-speed, runway-independent special operations transport plane. Aurora’s unveiling of the new renders also comes amid growing interest from the U.S. Air Force in similar capabilities to support more general distributed logistics missions, especially in contested environments during future high-end conflicts.

Aurora, a subsidiary of Boeing, shared the new renders and provided more information about the work it is doing as part of DARPA’s Speed and Runway Independent Technologies (SPRINT) program earlier today. DARPA awarded new SPRINT contracts to Aurora, as well as Bell, earlier this year. SPRINT, which kicked off last year, is directly tied U.S. Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) High-Speed Vertical Takeoff and Landing (HSVTOL) project.

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The first of China’s new class of big-deck amphibious assault ships is rapidly taking shape and we can now get a much better look at the vessel’s twin-island configuration. The design choice is typically made to simplify air operations and is very likely another indicator of this class of vessels being tailored, at least in part, for going to sea with enhanced air wings that include larger types of drones.

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I may eventually have to get one of these.

SciTechDaily.

Within each cell, inside every nucleus, your survival relies on an intricate and highly complex process. Proteins are continuously wrapping and unwrapping DNA, and even the smallest error in this delicate dance can result in cancer.

A new study from the University of Chicago reveals a previously unknown part of this dance—one with significant implications for human health.

In the study, published Oct. 2 in Nature, a team of scientists led by UChicago Prof. Chuan He, in collaboration with University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio Prof. Mingjiang Xu, found that RNA plays a significant role in how DNA is packaged and stored in your cells, via a gene known as TET2. This pathway also appears to explain a long-standing puzzle about why so many cancers and other disorders involve TET2-related mutations—and suggests a set of new targets for treatments.

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Abstract
Starch is a natural polymer which is commonly used as a cooking ingredient. The renewability and bio-degradability of starch has made it an interesting material for industrial applications, such as production of bioplastic. This paper introduces the application of corn starch in the production of a novel construction material, named CoRncrete. CoRncrete is formed by mixing corn starch with sand and water. The mixture appears to be self-compacting when wet. The mixture is poured in a mould and then heated in a microwave or an oven. This heating causes a gelatinisation process which results in a hardened material having compressive strength up to 26 MPa. The factors affecting the strength of hardened CoRncrete such as water content, sand aggregate size and heating procedure have been studied. The degradation and sustainability aspects of CoRncrete are elucidated and limitations in the potential application of this material are discussed.

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A new study details how a nasal spray formulated by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital may work to protect against viral and bacterial respiratory infections. Based on their preclinical studies, the researchers say the broad-spectrum nasal spray is long-lasting, safe, and, if validated in humans, could play a key role in reducing respiratory diseases and safeguarding public health against new threats.

Nature.

One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells1. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. This advance is the first step towards mass production of such therapies.

One of the recipients, Mr Gong, a 57-year-old man from Shanghai, has systemic sclerosis, which affects connective tissue and can result in skin stiffening and organ damage. He says that three days after receiving the therapy, he felt his skin loosen and he could start moving his fingers and opening his mouth again. Two weeks later, he returned to his office job. “I feel very good,” he says, more than a year after receiving the treatment.

Engineered immune cells, called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, have shown great promise in treating blood cancers — half a dozen products are approved in the United States — and potential for treating autoimmune conditions such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, in which rogue immune cells release autoantibodies that attack the body’s own tissue. But the therapy typically relies on a person’s own immune cells, and this personalization makes it expensive and time consuming.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

CNN.

Botanists have grown a long-lost tree species from a 1,000-year-old seed found in a cave in the Judean Desert in the 1980s.

The researchers involved in the project say they believe the tree species, which is thought to be extinct today, could have been the source of a healing balm mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts.

Unearthed during an archaeological dig in the lower Wadi el-Makkuk region north of Jerusalem, the ancient seed was determined to be in pristine condition. But the scientists conducting the new research weren’t able to identify the type of tree from the seed alone. The team, led by Dr. Sarah Sallon, a physician who founded the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, planted the seed to further investigate more than a dozen years ago.