The Ebola-like virus is endemic in parts of West Africa and can be spread by rats.
Lassa fever: Patient dies at Bedfordshire hospital
Reply
Category Archives: Mind Building
Covid: Wales’ mask and isolation laws could end in March
Self-isolation rules could become guidance rather than a legal requirement next month.
Lifetime of knowledge can clutter memories of older adults
When a person tries to access a memory, their brain quickly sifts through everything stored in it to find the relevant information. But as we age, many of us have difficulty retrieving memories. In a review publishing in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences on February 11, researchers propose an explanation for why this might be happening: the brains of older adults allocate more space to accumulated knowledge and have more material to navigate when attempting to access memories. While this wealth of prior knowledge can make memory retrieval challenging, the researchers say it has its upsides — this life experience can aid with creativity and decision-making.
Researchers Tarek Amer (@tarekamerphd) of Columbia University and Harvard University, Jordana Wynn (@jordwynn) of Harvard University, and Lynn Hasher of the University of Toronto looked at several behavioral and neuroimaging studies, which show that older adults have difficulty suppressing information that is no longer relevant and that when searching for a specific memory, they often retrieve other, irrelevant memories along with it. The studies also showed that when given a cognitive task, older adults rely more heavily on previous knowledge than younger adults do.
While the researchers focus primarily on the difficulties that these cluttered memories may pose, they also highlight a few situations in which these crowded memoryscapes may be useful. “Evidence suggests that older adults show preserved, and at times enhanced, creativity as a function of enriched memories,” the researchers write. They further hypothesize that older adults may be well served by their prior knowledge when it comes to decision-making, where they can pull on their accumulated wisdom.
With continued study and increased understanding of how memory works in older adults, researchers are hopeful that they may be able to find new ways to help them. They write, “It is possible that the increased binding and richer encodings of older adults can even be leveraged to improve older adults’ learning and memory.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Researchers make non-alcoholic beer taste like regular beer
Some people find the taste to be flat and watery and this has a natural explanation, according to Sotirios Kampranis, a Professor at the University of Copenhagen.
“What non-alcoholic beer lacks is the aroma from hops. When you remove the alcohol from the beer, for example by heating it up, you also kill the aroma that comes from hops. Other methods for making alcohol-free beer by minimizing fermentation also lead to poor aroma because alcohol is needed for hops to pass their unique flavor to the beer,” he says.
But now, Kampranis and his colleague Simon Dusséaux – both founders of the biotech company EvodiaBio – have cracked the code of how to make non-alcoholic beer that is full of hop aroma.
“After years of research, we have found a way to produce a group of small molecules called monoterpenoids, which provide the hoppy-flavor, and then add them to the beer at the end of the brewing process to give it back its lost flavor. No one has been able to do this before, so it’s a game changer for non-alcoholic beer,” says Sotirios Kampranis.
Instead of adding expensive aroma hops in the brewing tank, just to “throw away” their flavor at the end of the process, the researchers have turned baker’s yeast cells into micro-factories that can be grown in fermenters and release the aroma of hops, they state in a newly published study.
“When the hop aroma molecules are released from yeast, we collect them and put them into the beer, giving back the taste of regular beer that so many of us know and love. It actually makes the use of aroma hops in brewing redundant, because we only need the molecules passing on the scent and flavor and not the actual hops,” explains Sotirios Kampranis.
A lot more sustainable
On top of improving the taste of non-alcoholic beer, the method is also far more sustainable than the existing techniques, according to the researchers.
First of all, aroma hops are mainly farmed in the west coast of the U.S., which causes the need for extensive transportation and cooling down the crops in refrigerators.
Secondly, hops demand lots of water – more accurately you need 2,7 tons of water to grow one kilogram of hops. This combined makes it a not very climate-friendly production.
“With our method, we skip aroma hops altogether and thereby also the water and the transportation. This means that one kilogram of hops aroma can be produced with more than 10.000 times less water and more than 100 times less CO2,” says Sotirios Kampranis.
Good news for society
The researchers are pleased to be able to contribute to a much healthier lifestyle and hope that their new invention will help more people cut down on alcohol because now they will have equally delicious alternatives.
“Long term, we hope to change the brewing industry with our method – also the production of regular beer, where the use of aroma hops is also very wasteful,” concludes Sotirios Kampranis.
The method is already being tested in breweries in Denmark and the plan is to have the technique ready for the entire brewing industry in October 2022.
This bizarre looking helmet can create better brain scans
It may look like a bizarre bike helmet, or a piece of equipment found in Doc Brown’s lab in Back to the Future, yet this gadget made of plastic and copper wire is a technological breakthrough with the potential to revolutionize medical imaging. Despite its playful look, the device is actually a metamaterial, packing in a ton of physics, engineering, and mathematical know-how.
It was developed by Xin Zhang, a College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering, and her team of scientists at BU’s Photonics Center. They’re experts in metamaterials, a type of engineered structure created from small unit cells that might be unspectacular alone, but when grouped together in a precise way, get new superpowers not found in nature. Metamaterials, for instance, can bend, absorb, or manipulate waves — such as electromagnetic waves, sound waves, or radio waves. Each unit cell, also called a resonator, is typically arranged in a repeating pattern in rows and columns; they can be designed in different sizes and shapes, and placed at different orientations, depending on which waves they’re designed to influence.
Metamaterials can have many novel functions. Zhang, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, and materials science and engineering, has designed an acoustic metamaterial that blocks sound without stopping airflow (imagine quieter jet engines and air conditioners) and a magnetic metamaterial that can improve the quality of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines used for medical diagnosis.
Now, Zhang and her team have taken their work a step further with the wearable metamaterial. The dome-shaped device, which fits over a person’s head and can be worn during a brain scan, boosts MRI performance, creating crisper images that can be captured at twice the normal speed.
The helmet is fashioned from a series of magnetic metamaterial resonators, which are made from 3D-printed plastic tubes wrapped in copper wiring, grouped on an array, and precisely arranged to channel the magnetic field of the MRI machine. Placing the magnetic metamaterial — in helmet form or as the originally designed flat array — near the part of the body to be scanned, says Zhang, could make MRIs less costly and more time efficient for doctors, radiologists, and patients — all while improving image quality.
Eventually, the magnetic metamaterial has the potential to be used in conjunction with cheaper low-field MRI machines to make the technology more widely available, particularly in the developing world.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Boston University. Original written by Jessica Colarossi. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
End of Covid regulations: What if I’m still worried?
What would ending isolation rules in England mean for people who are worried about getting Covid?
My toddler died after swallowing a button battery
The family of Hugh McMahon say the battery burned a hole the size of a 5p coin in his heart.
Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of HIV, dies aged 89
The French virologist jointly won the Nobel Prize but later drew criticism for unscientific claims.
‘Dental deserts’ with no NHS provision on the rise in England, MPs warn
Campaign group Toothless in England say the government is ignoring “acute needs” of the public.
A ‘fairly simple’ breakthrough makes accessing stored hydrogen more efficient
A new catalyst from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and collaborators extracts hydrogen from hydrogen storage materials easily and efficiently. The process occurs at mild temperatures and under normal atmospheric conditions, without using metals or additives. The breakthrough offers a promising new solution that addresses a long-standing challenge to adopting hydrogen fuel for transportation and other applications.
Hydrogen fuel is one potential solution in the nationwide effort to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. According to the DOE, improving hydrogen storage is key to advancing hydrogen fuel cell technologies. At Ames Laboratory, scientists Long Qi and Wenyu Huang research the extraction of hydrogen from a class of materials called liquid organic hydrogen carriers, or LOHCs.
One of the ways to store hydrogen is chemically. Chemical storage relies on materials that react with hydrogen molecules and store them as hydrogen atoms, such as in LOHCs. This type of storage allows large amounts of hydrogen to be stored in small volumes at ambient temperatures. However, for the hydrogen to be useful, catalysts are needed to activate LOHCs and release the hydrogen. This process is called dehydrogenation.
Qi explained that currently there are other dehydrogenation methods, but they raise some challenges. Some methods rely on metal-based catalysts, which involve critical platinum group metals. Supplies of these metals are limited and expensive. Other methods require additives to release the hydrogen. The additives are not reusable and result in a higher overall cost because they need to be added in each cycle.
The catalyst Qi and Huang developed does not require metals or additives. “It’s fairly simple,” Qi said. “Basically, just add the metal-free catalyst into the LOHC, and then the hydrogen gas is just popping out, even at room temperature.”
The catalyst is composed of nitrogen and carbon. The key to its efficiency is the structure of the nitrogen. Catalytic activity can take place at room temperature because of the unique closely spaced graphitic nitrogens as nitrogen assembly which were formed during the carbonization process. The nitrogen assembly catalyzes the cleavage of carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds in LOHCs and facilitates the desorption of hydrogen molecules. This process is what makes the catalyst more efficient than other catalysts in use.
Qi and Huang explained that based on DOE goals for vehicle technologies, the hydrogen storage capacity needs to be close to 6.5% by weight. They are optimistic about the future of their research to meet the goal with molecules that have a larger capacity.
“This research will positively impact the target of reducing carbon dioxide emission,” Huang said, “and we will need to develop more efficient catalytic systems.”
In 2019, the transportation industry accounted for 29% of the overall carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. Qi said that the ease and efficiency of this process could benefit the transportation industry in the future. The benefits come from a combination of using LOHCs and a catalyst like this one. The combination can extract usable hydrogen from storage at a lower cost and under milder conditions than current technologies. A greater hydrogen density can provide a greater charge for hydrogen fuel cells which could provide power to vehicles over greater distances.
Both Qi and Huang emphasized that this research is an important step to support the national mission to become carbon-neutral by 2050 by providing an easy and efficient way to dehydrogenate LOHCs.
Story Source:
Materials provided by DOE/Ames Laboratory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
