International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

Antioxidants proved a bust for life extension almost 25 years ago, but glutathione stands out as an exception. We lose glutathione as we age, and supplementing to increase glutathione levels has  multiple benefits , possibly on lifespan. Glutathione is manufactured in the body via an ancient mechanism taking as input cysteine, glutamic acid, and glycine. Supplementing N-Acetyl Cysteine ( NAC ) and  glycine  are independently associated with health benefits, and possibly increased lifespan. Glutamine seems to be in adequate supply for most of us. Each cell manufactures its own glutathione. (GSH is an abbreviation for the reduced form of glutathione.) Concentrations of GSH within a cell a typically 1,000-fold higher than in blood plasma. When we look for glutathione deficiency, we measure the blood level, because that is convenient. It is much harder to measure intracellular levels of GSH. These two studies [ 2011 ,  2013 ] demonstrated that intracellular levels decl...

A month into the Russian invasion in Ukraine, several journalists covering the refugee emergency have reported on the lengths that some refugees are taking to bring their pets across the conflict frontlines and international borders into relative safety. Ukraine’s neighbouring countries were quick to allow all refugees to bring their non-human animal household members without documentation, and non-profit organisations responded to the call to save animals caught up in the conflict or its border areas, even including farm and zoo animals. Meanwhile, reports highlighted how after an arduous journey from their lost homes in Ukraine, some refugees were forced to give up their pets upon arrival in emergency shelters, and while airlines provided free tickets across their networks to refugees, these excluded their beloved animals, eliciting an emotional public response. These wrongs were soon addressed by other countries across the European Union easing immigration and import regulations ...

To transform human mobility, exoskeletons need to interact seamlessly with their user, providing the right level of assistance at the right time to cooperate with our muscles as we move. To help achieve this, University of Michigan researchers gave users direct control to customize the behavior of an ankle exoskeleton. Not only was the process faster than the conventional approach, in which an expert would decide the settings, but it may have incorporated preferences an expert would have missed. For instance, user height and weight, which are commonly used metrics for tuning exoskeletons and robotic prostheses, had no effect on preferred settings. “Instead of a one-size-fits-all level of power, or using measurements of muscle activity to customize an exoskeleton’s behavior, this method uses active user feedback to shape the assistance a person receives,” said Kim Ingraham, first author of the study in Science Robotics, and a recent mechanical engineering Ph.D. graduate. Experts u...

The shift towards clean, secure energy hinges on the participation of women. © Waraphorn Aphai, Shutterstock The transition to energy security and climate-neutrality means we need to close the gender gap to fully involve women in a technical, scientific and business transformation. While it has been in the works for some time,  the EU’s strategy to move away from dependency on fossil fuels  has gained a new impetus with geopolitical developments in Europe. Already, on 8 March, the European Commission proposed the outline of a plan for joint European action for more affordable, secure and sustainable energy. The goal is to reduce demand for Russian gas by two-thirds by the end of this year. The shift towards clean, secure energy supplies in Europe and efforts to tackle climate change hinge on several key factors. One factor you may not yet have thought about is a better inclusion of women in developing the technical solutions required. Diverse thinkers ‘With the comple...

Kista Science City, just north of Stockholm, is Sweden’s version of Silicon Valley. Anchored by a few big firms and a university, it has become northern Europe’s main high-tech center, with housing mixed in so that people live and work in the same general area. Around the globe, a similar pattern is visible in many urban locales. Near MIT, Kendall Square, once home to manufacturing, has become a biotechnology and information technology hub while growing as a residential destination. Hamburg, Germany, has redeveloped part of its famous port with new business, recreation, and housing. The industrial area of Jurong, in Singapore, now features commerce, residential construction, parks, and universities. Even Brooklyn’s once-declining Navy Yard has become a mixed-use waterfront area. In place after place, cities have developed key neighborhoods by locating 21st-century firms near residential dwellings and street-level commerce. Instead of heavy industry pushing residents out of cities...

Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is tricky because the shape of dough can change in many ways, which are difficult to represent with an equation. Plus, creating a new shape out of that dough requires multiple steps and the use of different tools. It is especially difficult for a robot to learn a manipulation task with a long sequence of steps — where there are many possible choices — since learning often occurs through trial and error. Researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California at San Diego, have come up with a better way. They created a framework for a robotic manipulation system that uses a two-stage learning process, which could enable a robot to perform complex dough-manipulation tasks over a long timef...

The day after lead author Daniel Winstead approved the final proofs for a study to be published in Ambio, the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Russia put its nuclear forces on high alert. “In no way, shape or form had I thought that our work —  ‘Food Resilience in a Dark Catastrophe: A new Way of Looking at Tropical Wild Edible Plants’  — would be immediately relevant while we were working on it,” said the research technologist in Penn State’s  College of Agricultural Sciences . “In the short term, I viewed it as an abstract concept.” Winstead and study co-author  Michael Jacobson , professor of forest resources, had to look back at the Cold War era to get information for their review. “So, it did not enter my mind that it would be something that could happen anytime soon,” Winstead said. “This paper was published during this latest invasion by Russia into Ukraine, but our work on it began two years ago. The idea that nuclear war could break out...

Many people dread experiencing the cognitive and mood declines that often accompany reaching an advanced age, including memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and mood conditions like depression. At  Baylor College of Medicine  and the  Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute  (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital researchers have been investigating new ways to prevent or treat these and other related conditions. In a study published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the team reports a missing piece of the puzzle of how memory and mood are sustained and regulated in the brain. Their findings may inform potential new therapeutic strategies to counteract cognitive and mood decline in patients with neurological disorders. Neurogenesis: The brain’s ‘fountain of youth’ “Years ago, scientists thought that the adult mammalian brain was not able to repair and regenerate. But research has shown that some brain regions hav...

Although the U.S. Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in mortgage lending, biases still impact many borrowers. One 2021 Journal of Financial Economics study found that borrowers from minority groups were charged interest rates that were nearly 8 percent higher and were rejected for loans 14 percent more often than those from privileged groups. When these biases bleed into machine-learning models that lenders use to streamline decision-making, they can have far-reaching consequences for housing fairness and even contribute to widening the racial wealth gap. If a model is trained on an unfair dataset, such as one in which a higher proportion of Black borrowers were denied loans versus white borrowers with the same income, credit score, etc., those biases will affect the model’s predictions when it is applied to real situations. To stem the spread of mortgage lending discrimination, MIT researchers created a process that removes bias in data that are used to trai...

Refining metals, manufacturing fertilizers and powering fuel cells for heavy vehicles are all processes that require purified hydrogen. But purifying, or separating, that hydrogen from a mix of other gases can be difficult, with several steps. A research team led by Chris Arges, Penn State associate professor of chemical engineering, demonstrated that the process can be simplified using a pump outfitted with newly developed membrane materials. The researchers used an electrochemical hydrogen pump to both separate and compress hydrogen with an 85% recovery rate from fuel gas mixtures known as syngas and 98.8% recovery rate from conventional water gas shift reactor exit stream — the highest value recorded. The team detailed their approach in  ACS Energy Letters . Traditional methods for hydrogen separations employ a water gas shift reactor, which involves an extra step, according to Arges. The water gas shift reactor first converts carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, which is th...

At least hundreds of so-far unidentified species of mammals are hiding in plain sight around the world, a new study suggests. Researchers found that most of these hidden mammals are small bodied, many of them bats, rodents, shrews, and moles. These unknown mammals are hidden in plain sight partly because most are small and look so much like known animals that biologists have not been able to recognize they are actually a different species, said study co-author  Bryan Carstens , a professor of  evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University . “Small, subtle differences in appearance are harder to notice when you’re looking at a tiny animal that weighs 10 grams than when you’re looking at something that is human-sized,” Carstens said. “You can’t tell they are different species unless you do a genetic analysis.” The study was published today (March 28, 2022) in the journal  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The team, led by ...

Since its invention, chemotherapy has proven to be a valuable tool in treating cancers of many kinds, but it has a big downside. In addition to killing cancer cells, it can also kill healthy cells like the ones in hair follicles, causing baldness, and those that line the stomach, causing nausea. Scientists at Caltech may have a better solution: genetically engineered, sound-controlled bacteria that seek and destroy cancer cells. In a new paper appearing in the journal  Nature Communications , researchers from the lab of  Mikhail Shapiro , professor of chemical engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, show how they have developed a specialized strain of the bacteria  Escherichia coli  ( E. coli ) that seeks out and infiltrates cancerous tumors when injected into a patient’s body. Once the bacteria have arrived at their destination, they can be triggered to produce anti-cancer drugs with pulses of ultrasound. “The goal of this technology is ...

Despite their reputation as living fossils, scorpions have remained evolutionarily nimble — especially in developing venom to fend off the rise of mammal predators. A new genetic analysis of scorpions’ toxin-making reveals recent evolutionary steps and may actually be a boon for researchers studying scorpion venom’s benefits to human health. An international team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin–Madison biologists has assembled the largest evolutionary tree of scorpions yet, showing seven independent instances in which the distinctive eight-legged creatures evolved venom compounds toxic to mammals. “The last major changes to their body shape, their morphology, happened about 430 million years ago, when they left the water and moved onto land,” says Carlos Santibáñez-López, a former postdoctoral researcher at UW–Madison and lead author of the new study published today in the journal Systematic Biology. “But we know now that they have evolved in very important ways much ...