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upstart writes:

Insulin in the Brain Influences Dopamine Levels:

Worldwide, more and more people are developing obesity and type 2 diabetes. Studies show that the brain plays an important role in causing these diseases. Dopamine is the most important neurotransmitter for the reward system. The hormone insulin is released after eating and regulates the metabolism in the human body (homeostatic system). It is not yet known how these two systems interact. However, changes in these systems have been linked to obesity and diabetes. In the current study, researchers from the Institute of Diabetes Research and Metabolic Diseases (IDM) of Helmholtz Zentrum München at the University of Tübingen, a partner of the DZD, and Tübingen University Hospital (Innere IV, Director: Prof. Andreas Birkenfeld) examined how the two systems interact specifically in the reward center of the brain, the striatum[*].

"Our eating behavior is regulated by the interaction between the reward system and homeostatic systems. Studies indicate that insulin also acts in dopamine-driven reward centers in the brain. It has also been shown that obesity leads to changes in the signaling of the brain that have a negative effect on the glucose metabolism in the whole body," said first author Stephanie Kullmann. "We now wanted to decipher the interaction between the two systems in humans and find out how insulin regulates the dopamine system."

looorg writes:

IKEA has furnished and is renting out a 10 m² apartment in central Tokyo for about a dollar per month. It's clearly a gimmick of sorts as the furniture in the apartment are worth a lot more then that. Still looking at the pictures it looks like living in a nicely furnished prison cell, that is also very high (floor to ceiling). Any takers for such compact living? I dont think climbing around on ladders to get around is for me.

It seems very futuristic though; it is a staple of sci-fi to pack people like sardines in a can (Ripley's apartment in aliens, 5th element etc., etc.)

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/25/business/ikea-japan-tokyo-tiny-apartment-scli-intl/index.html
https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/campaigns/ca00-tiny-homes-pub616dcf20

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takyon writes:

First RISC-V smartphones could launch in 2022

Sipeed recently tweeted a short video depicting its RISC-V RV64-powered smartphone prototype running Android 10. If all goes well, the Chinese company expects to release the first commercial models in 2022.

[...] The flexibility and ease of development brought on by the latest iterations of the RISC-V ISA have also been noticed by Intel and Apple recently, but this architecture seems more appealing to Chinese tech producers that intend to cut ties with the Western world and reduce reliance on US-owned patents as much as possible. To this effect, Alibaba already managed to port Android 10 on RISC-V about a year ago via the T-Head XuanTie board. More recently, Sipeed tweeted a video of what looks to be an Android 10 device with a 7-inch touchscreen powered by the XuanTie C901 board.

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weilawei writes:

Phys.org reports,

A team of physicists at the Universities of Bristol, Vienna, the Balearic Islands and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI-Vienna) has shown how quantum systems can simultaneously evolve along two opposite time arrows—both forward and backward in time.

The study, published in the latest issue of Communications Physics, necessitates a rethink of how the flow of time is understood and represented in contexts where quantum laws play a crucial role.

Dr. Gonzalo Manzano, co-author from the University of the Balearic Islands, said: "In our work, we quantified the entropy produced by a system evolving in quantum superposition of processes with opposite time arrows. We found this most often results in projecting the system onto a well-defined time's direction, corresponding to the most likely process of the two. And yet, when small amounts of entropy are involved (for instance, when there is so little toothpaste spilled that one could see it being reabsorbed into the tube), then one can physically observe the consequences of the system having evolved along the forward and backward temporal directions at the same time."

Quantum superposition of thermodynamic evolutions with opposing time's arrows, Communications Physics (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s42005-021-00759-1

A preprint of their paper is available.

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takyon writes:

An Alzheimer's Nasal Spray Vaccine Is About to Enter Human Trials For The First Time

Alzheimer's treatments seemed like an unlikely prospect mere months ago.

Drug trials tried and failed for 20 years to produce treatments that would stop the progression of the disease, and several large pharmaceutical companies abandoned the mission of developing Alzheimer's treatments altogether.

[...] Now, the field of Alzheimer's treatments may finally be opening up.

Last week, Brigham and Women's Hospital announced it would spearhead the first human trial of a nasal vaccine for Alzheimer's, designed to prevent or slow the disease's progression.

The trial is small – 16 people between ages 60 to 85 with Alzheimer's symptoms will receive two doses of the vaccine one week apart. But it builds on decades of research suggesting that stimulating the immune system can help clear out beta-amyloid plaques in the brain.

[...] The vaccine sprays a drug called Protollin directly into the nasal passage, with the goal of activating immune cells to remove the plaque.

FDA OKs Phase 1 Trial of Nasal Spray Immunotherapy Protollin

Protollin is a new intranasal immunotherapy made of proteins derived from the outer membrane of certain bacteria. It works by stimulating the innate immune system — the part of the immune system that serves as the body's first line of defense — to clear amyloid-beta plaques and tau tangles from the brain.

It worked in mice, so it must be good.

Also at Medical News Today.

Related: Novel Dementia Vaccine on Track for Human Trials Within Two Years

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upstart writes:

Giving social support to others may boost your health:

While researchers have long thought that receiving social support from others is a key to health, results from studies have shown mixed results. So researchers from The Ohio State University decided to see if giving support may also play an important role in health.

They found that on one important measure of health -- chronic inflammation -- indicators of positive social relationships were associated with lower inflammation only among people who said they were available to provide social support to family and friends.

In other words, having friends to lean on may not help your health unless you also say that you're available to help them when they need it.

“Positive relationships may be associated with lower inflammation only for those who believe they can give more support in those relationships,” said Tao Jiang, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State.

Preliminary evidence in the study suggested that the link between health and the willingness to help others may be especially important for women.

[...] The study used data from 1,054 participants in the National Survey of Midlife Development in the U.S. These were all healthy adults between 34 and 84 years old.

Journal Reference:
Tao Jiang, Syamil Yakin, Jennifer Crocker, Baldwin M. Way. Perceived social support-giving moderates the association between social relationships and interleukin-6 levels in blood. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2022; 100: 25 (DOI: 10.1016/j.bbi.2021.11.002)

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upstart writes:

Researchers reveal how to turn a global warming liability into a profitable food security solution:

“Industrial sources in the U.S. are emitting a truly staggering amount of methane, which is uneconomical to capture and use with current applications,” said study lead author Sahar El Abbadi, who conducted the research as a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.

"Our goal is to flip that paradigm, using biotechnology to create a high-value product," added El Abbadi, who is now a lecturer in the Civic, Liberal and Global Education program at Stanford.

[...] Although carbon dioxide is more abundant in the atmosphere, methane's global warming potential is about 85 times as great over a 20-year period and at least 25 times as great a century after its release. Methane also threatens air quality by increasing the concentration of tropospheric ozone, exposure to which causes an estimated 1 million premature deaths annually worldwide due to respiratory illnesses. Methane's relative concentration has grown more than twice as fast as that of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution due in great part to human-driven emissions.

A potential solution lies in methane-consuming bacteria called methanotrophs. These bacteria can be grown in a chilled, water-filled bioreactor fed pressurized methane, oxygen and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and trace metals. The protein-rich biomass that results can be used as fishmeal in aquaculture feed, offsetting demand for fishmeal made from small fish or plant-based feeds that require land, water and fertilizer.

NPC-131072 writes:

From Nature

Researchers in South Africa are racing to track the concerning rise of a new variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The variant harbours a large number of mutations found in other variants, including Delta, and it seems to be spreading quickly across South Africa.

A top priority is to track the variant more closely as it spreads: it was first identified in Botswana this month and has turned up in travellers to Hong Kong from South Africa. Scientists are also trying to understand the variant's properties, such as whether it can evade immune responses triggered by vaccines and whether it causes more or less severe disease than other variants do.

WHO calls special meeting to discuss new Covid variant found in South Africa with 'a large number of mutations':

The World Health Organization is monitoring a new variant with numerous mutations to the spike protein, scheduling a special meeting Friday to discuss what it may mean for vaccines and treatments, officials said Thursday.

Journal Reference:
Ewen Callaway. Heavily mutated coronavirus variant puts scientists on alert, (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-03552-w)

Editor's Note: The UK, France and some Asian countries have suspended flights from 6 African countries as from 26 Nov at the time of processing this story Other countries may choose to do the same.

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upstart writes:

SpaceX's Starlink Will Make Life Hell for Astronomers Like Me. Telescopes on the Moon Could Help Fix That.:

This "mega-constellation" of Starlink satellites is the brainchild of Elon Musk's company SpaceX. Their plan is something straight out of science fiction: put 42,000 satellites into orbit, and broadcast wireless internet to anyone and everyone, all of the time. Early reviews have been... less than stellar ("unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees", said The Verge). But the tech will no doubt improve. Like it or not, ubiquitous Starlink internet is coming.

There's also no reason to think that SpaceX is the only player in town. A number of other companies and countries are all planning their own satellite mega-constellations, from Amazon (3,236 satellites as part of Project Kuiper), OneWeb, and Boeing, to China's ambitious plan for a 13,000-strong swarm.

Astronomers like myself have been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a night sky full of artificial satellites. Our most sensitive telescopes are designed to pick up the unimaginably faint signals from planets orbiting distant stars, and galaxies billions of years in the past. How did the first galaxies form after the Big Bang? How fast is the universe expanding? Are there any dangerous asteroids that might crash into Earth? Having tens of thousands of satellites criss-crossing the sky and obscuring the view is going to make answering these questions more difficult.

This is going to be a serious problem for some future projects. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is an upcoming telescope, located under Chile's dark skies, that will have the unprecedented ability to photograph the entire sky every few nights.

takyon writes:

New Ultrahard Diamond Glass Synthesized

Carnegie's Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang were part of an international research team that synthesized a new ultrahard form of carbon glass with a wealth of potential practical applications for devices and electronics. It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials. Their findings are published in Nature.

[...] Because of its extremely high melting point, it's impossible to use diamond as the starting point to synthesize diamond-like glass. However, the research team, led by Jilin University's Bingbing Liu and Mingguang Yao—a former Carnegie visiting scholar—made their breakthrough by using a form of carbon composed of 60 molecules arranged to form a hollow ball. Informally called a buckyball, this Nobel Prize-winning material was heated just enough to collapse its soccer-ball-like structure to induce disorder before turning the carbon to crystalline diamond under pressure.

The team used a large-volume multi-anvil press to synthesize the diamond-like glass. The glass is sufficient large for characterization. Its properties were confirmed using a variety of advanced, high-resolution techniques for probing atomic structure.

Journal Reference:
Yuchen Shang, Zhaodong Liu, Jiajun Dong, et al. Ultrahard bulk amorphous carbon from collapsed fullerene, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03882-9)

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Freeman writes:

Ars Technica has a series-recap-thing going on for "The Wheel of Time" series on Amazon: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/two-book-readers-recap-the-first-three-episodes-of-amazons-the-wheel-of-time/

In the event that you dislike people ruining great books for stupid political agendas, perhaps you should steer clear of this review of Amazon's TV Series.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

upstart writes:

A Stunning 3D Map of Blood Vessels and Cells in a Mouse Skull Could Help Scientists Make New Bones:

"We need to see what's happening inside the skull, including the relative locations of blood vessels and cells and how their organization changes during injury and over time," says Warren Grayson, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Craniofacial and Orthopaedic Tissue Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His lab focuses on developing biomaterials and transplanting stem cells into the skull to re-create missing bone tissue.

Other scientists have provided maps of small portions of blood vessels and stem cells in the mouse skull. "However, a larger picture of the skull gives us a better understanding of the entire vasculature and distribution of different stem cell types," says Alexandra Rindone, graduate student at The Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine and first author of the paper.

The new map, published Oct. 28 in Nature Communications, is a 3D view of the top of a mouse skull -- its cranial bone, or calvaria -- which is made up of four connected skull bones.

To create the map, which includes hundreds of thousands of cells, the Johns Hopkins researchers used four key techniques to pinpoint vessels and cells.

upstart writes:

One year on this giant, blistering hot planet is just 16 hours long:

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has turned up more than 4,000 far-flung worlds, orbiting stars thousands of  light years from Earth. These extrasolar planets are a veritable menagerie, from rocky super-Earths and miniature Neptunes to colossal gas giants.

Among the more confounding planets discovered to date are "hot Jupiters" —  massive balls of gas that are about the size of our own Jovian planet but that zing around their stars in less than 10 days, in contrast to Jupiter's plodding, 12-year orbit. Scientists have discovered about 400 hot Jupiters to date. But exactly how these weighty whirlers came to be remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in planetary science.

Now, astronomers have discovered one of the most extreme ultrahot Jupiters  — a gas giant that is about five times Jupiter's mass and blitzes around its star in just 16 hours. The planet's orbit is the shortest of any known gas giant to date.

Due to its extremely tight orbit and proximity to its star, the planet's day side is estimated to be at around 3,500 Kelvin, or close to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit — about as hot as a small star. This makes the planet, designated TOI-2109b, the second hottest detected so far.

Judging from its properties, astronomers believe that TOI-2109b is in the process of "orbital decay," or spiraling into its star, like bathwater circling the drain. Its extremely short orbit is predicted to cause the planet to spiral toward its star faster than other hot Jupiters.

upstart writes:

Italy fines Amazon, Apple $230M over reseller collusion – TechCrunch:

Amazon and Apple have been hit with almost $230 million (€203M) in total fines by Italy’s antitrust authority — following an investigation into reselling of Apple and (Apple-owned) Beats kit on Amazon’s Italian ecommerce marketplace.

The authority says the alleged collusion decreased the level of discounts available to consumers buying Apple and Beats products on the Amazon Italy marketplace.

It has also ordered the tech giants to end the restrictions on resellers.

The AGCM announced the sanction today, saying its probe identified a restrictive agreement between the pair to block some “legitimate” resellers of Beats products on Amazon.it.

The fine breaks down into €134.5M (~$151M) for Amazon — and €68.7M (~$77.3M) for Apple.

The agreement in question was signed between the pair back in October 2018.

Per the AGCM’s press release, it found the agreement contained a number of contractual clauses which prohibited official and unofficial resellers of Apple and Beats products from using Amazon.it — with the restriction limiting the sale of Apple and Beats products on Amazon.it to Amazon itself and a number of resellers the authority says were “chosen individually and in a discriminatory way” — in violation of Art. 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

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takyon writes:

Samsung Officially Announces $17 Billion Advanced Semiconductor Site in Texas – Facility to Span More Than 5 Million Square Meters

After multiple reports and of course, surveying various locations in the U.S., Samsung has officially announced that Taylor, Texas[*], is the location of the Korean giant's $17 billion advanced chip manufacturing facility. The company states that the new hub will boost production of various semiconductor solutions that will be found in next-generation solutions, including smartphones.

[...] The Korean tech behemoth says that groundbreaking will begin in the first half of 2022, with operations expected to start in the second half of 2024. Unfortunately, this timeline means that this chip manufacturing hub will not be one of the locations where Samsung will mass produce its 3nm wafers, as a previous report states that mass production of this advanced process will commence in the first half of 2022.

[*] Taylor, Texas on Wikipedia.

Texas To Get Multiple New Fabs as Samsung and TI to Spend $47 Billion on New Facilities

After a year of searching for the right place of its new U.S. fab, Samsung this week announced that it would build a fab near Taylor, Texas. The company will invest $17 billion in the new semiconductor fabrication plant and will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives from local and state authorities. Separately, Texas authorities have announced that Texas Instruments intend to spend $30 billion on new fabs in the state, as well.

[...] The Governor of Texas recently announced the Texas Instruments was planning to build several new 300-mm fabs near Sherman[**]. In total, TI intends to build as many as four wafer fabrication facilities in the region over coming decades and the cumulative investments are expected to total $30 billion as fabs will be eventually upgraded.

Texas Instruments itself [has] yet have to formally announce its investments plans, but the announcement by the governor Greg Abbot indicates that the principal decisions have been made and now TI needs to finalize the details.

[**] Sherman, Texas on Wikipedia.

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