Betaine — a nutrient found in shellfish and beets — boosts athletic performance by nearly six percent when added to a sports drink, according to a study supervised by Ithaca College’s Exercise and Sport Sciences Chair Thomas Swensen.
“Betaine may contribute to creatine synthesis, which improves, strength, power and short-term performance,” Swensen said. “Future research should elucidate the mechanism of how betaine supplementation improves performance.”… read more
Researchers at Karolinska Institute have developed the first method for directly measuring the extent to which drugs reach their targets in the cell.
Called CETSA (Cellular Thermal Shift Assay), the method could improve the development of new improved drug substances.
Most drugs operate by binding to one or more proteins and affecting their function, which creates two common bottlenecks in the development of drugs:… read more
Researchers at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics together with colleagues at Harvard University and the Vienna University of Technology have developed an experimental optical switch that’s controlled by a single photon — the optical analog of a transistor, the fundamental component of a computing circuit.
Optical computing — using light rather than electricity to perform calculations — could could point toward new designs for… read more
Quantum software has finally left the dark ages with the creation of the first practical, high-level programming language for quantum computers. Called Quipper, it could guide the design of quantum computers and make them easier to program, New Scientist reports.
Quipper is based on a classical programming language called Haskell, which is particularly suited to programming for physics applications. Selinger’s team has customized… read more
Yo Tanaka from the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center has developed a reliable and durable system for incorporating glass microfluidics into lab-on-a-chip devices.
Lab-on-a-chip devices are microfluidic cells that incorporate pipes, reaction vessels, valves and a host of other implements typically found in laboratories. These components are typically carved into an inexpensive flat plastic plate, made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), to enable efficient… read more
On July 4th, documentary filmmaker named Chris Barrett captured the first fight and subsequent arrest using the Google Glass extended video recording option on the Jersey Shore boardwalk, Barrett told Venture Beat.
“This video is proof that Google Glass will change citizen journalism forever,” Barrett claims.
“That’s nothing we haven’t seen before caught on ‘tape’ by a videocamera or a mobile phone camera, but the fact… read more
The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do, by Dr. Daniel Berleant (388 pages), the first book published by the Lifeboat Foundation, is available free (Kindle version) to KurzweilAI readers on July 8 as a one-day promo.
A non-fiction book verging on science fiction, its imaginative future scenarios include colonizing the planet Mercury (it has water at the poles), GPS-enabled clocks… read more
University of New South Wales (UNSW) physicists are studying a distant star where gravity is more than 30,000 times greater than on Earth to test their controversial theory that α (alpha) — also known as the fine-structure constant — is not a constant.
“If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter… read more
Yung Chang and her colleagues at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute have launched an ambitious new project designed to attack nicotine dependence in a radically new way.
The research effort, pursued under a new $3.3 million grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, will attempt to design a vaccine conferring immunity to nicotine, using nanoscale structures assembled from DNA.… read more
Engineers at Oregon State University have determined that ethylene glycol, commonly used in antifreeze products, may be the key to making solar cells that cost less and avoid toxic compounds.
Ethylene glycol functions well in a “continuous flow” reactor — an approach to making thin-film solar cells that is easily scaled up for mass production at industrial levels, they note.
The research, published in Material… read more
Physical activity reorganizes the brain so that its response to stress is reduced and anxiety is less likely to interfere with normal brain function, according to a Princeton University research team.
The researchers report in the Journal of Neuroscience that when mice allowed to exercise regularly experienced a stressor — exposure to cold water — their brains exhibited a spike in the activity of neurons… read more
An international group of researchers, headed by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, has shown that a graphene layer can reduce the working temperature in hotspots inside a processor by up to 25 percent — which can significantly extend the working life of computers and other electronics.
“This discovery opens the door to increased functionality and continues to push the boundaries when it comes to… read more
A discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may represent a significant advance in the quest to create a “hydrogen economy” that would use this abundant element to store and transfer energy.
Theoretically, hydrogen is the ultimate non-carbon, non-polluting fuel for storing intermittent energy from the wind or sun. When burned for energy, hydrogen produces water but no carbon dioxide. But practically speaking, producing hydrogen from… read more
In work that will raise hope that organs could be repaired or even grown from scratch using a patient’s own tissue as the raw material, Japanese researchers have created functioning liver tissue from stem cells and successfully transplanted them into mice, MIT Technology Review reports.
The researchers found that a mixture of human liver precursor cells and two other cell types can spontaneously form three-dimensional structures dubbed… read more
Imperial College London scientists say improving “crystallization,” an industrial process for making plastics, could revolutionize the way we produce electronic products, reducing the cost and improving the design of solar cells and other electronic devices.
The process of making many well-known products from plastics involves controlling the way that microscopic crystals are formed within the material.
That allows engineers to determine the exact properties they want,… read more