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Category: biotech/medical

Bioscience Breakthrough Turns Plant Waste Into Gasoline

KU Leuven, Belgium bioscience engineers have developed a roadmap, so to speak, for industrial cellulose gasoline.

The bioscience engineers already knew how to make gasoline in the laboratory from plant waste such as sawdust. In 2014, at KU Leuven’s Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, the researchers succeeded in converting sawdust into building blocks for gasoline.

A chemical process made it possible to convert the cellulose – the main component of plant fibers – in the sawdust into hydrocarbon chains. These hydrocarbons can be used as an additive in gasoline. The resulting cellulose gasoline is a second-generation biofuel.

After 20 years, scientists finally shrink a powerful laser onto a chip

Researchers at EPFL have developed a chip-scale ultrafast laser that performs on par with traditional tabletop femtosecond lasers. The innovation could make advanced laser technologies far smaller, cheaper, and more accessible for applications ranging from medical diagnostics to atomic clocks.

How a single mutation rewired a 23-species bacterial community over four years

The time-development of species communities cannot be understood solely through ecological interactions or environmental factors, as evolution can also alter community dynamics. This observation helps to understand, among other things, the consequences of antibiotic resistance.

Evolution can alter the composition of communities, but its effects are difficult to investigate in nature, as they begin to manifest only after long periods of time. However, the rapid pace of microbial reproduction makes it possible to observe evolution in the laboratory “in real time,” from one generation to the next.

“In studies focusing on the microbiome, using synthetic microbial communities, as we did in this study, has opened up new avenues for investigating key questions related to complex communities,” says Professor Teppo Hiltunen from the University of Turku.

Mapping brain network changes linked to bipolar disorder severity and treatment

New research from the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC has discovered subtle but widespread differences in the brain’s communication networks in people with bipolar disorder, offering new insight into how illness severity and treatment may relate to brain wiring.

Published in Biological Psychiatry, the study was led by Leila Nabulsi, Ph.D., a senior research associate at the Stevens INI, together with Dara M. Cannon, Ph.D., professor at the University of Galway, Ireland. The team analyzed brain scans from 449 people with bipolar disorder and 510 healthy controls across 16 international research sites through the ENIGMA Bipolar Disorder Working Group.

This work was made possible by ENIGMA, an international consortium founded and led in part by Paul M. Thompson, Ph.D., associate director of the Stevens INI. ENIGMA brings together researchers worldwide to pool their brain imaging and clinical data, allowing them to detect subtle patterns that would be difficult to identify in smaller studies.

A brain-computer interface that works with—not against—the brain

It might soon be “game over” for the video game controller. Yale researchers have developed a new kind of brain-computer interface (BCI) that lets humans play video games directly with their brains. Using real-time fMRI (functional MRI), they confirmed that the technology could help humans control a computer with their brain activity in a highly efficient way. The study appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

A BCI is technology that allows a human to control a computer with brain activity. Historically, they have not been effective. BCIs built using real-time neurofeedback from fMRI—a type of MRI scan showing which areas of the brain are most active over time—require up to 10 long training sessions per person, and even then the learning effects are modest. About a third of users never gain control, regardless of how many hours they practice.

Space Plants Could Be Future Pharmacies for Astronauts

Scientists have successfully tested a non-destructive method to harvest life-saving medicines from plants under simulated space conditions, enabling on-demand drug production for long-duration missions. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30644/space-plants-f…tronauts-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30644/space-plants-f…tronauts-2)

How can plants help produce pharmaceuticals for future astronauts? This is what a recent study published in npj Science of Plants hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) investigated using plants to produce drugs for astronauts to treat a variety of ailments. This study has the potential to help scientists, mission planners, and astronauts develop new methods for addressing medical concerns on long-term space missions.

For the study, the researchers examined how cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) could be produced under space-like conditions, including a vacuum environment, microgravity, using a centrifuge, the latter of which is commonly used in space for science experiments. CPMV is a plant virus-based compound that has been found to treat cancer while also possessing immunotherapy characteristics. The primary motivation behind the study was to address how to provide medical treatments to astronauts on long-term space missions without relying on Earth supplies. In the end, the researchers found that CPMV could successfully be extracted without harming the plants.

The study notes, “The combination of process-level and host-level optimization facilitates sustainable CPMV production under the constrained conditions of long-duration space missions while also offering practical advantages for terrestrial biomanufacturing.”

Peak Protocol: Mountain Longevity Retreat

Science-first longevity retreat in Colorado.

Hey friends, we’re running a longevity retreat in the CO mountains this August!

Peak Protocol is a 4-day science-first retreat at SageStone Adventure Lodge in Granite, CO (August 6–9).

The idea is to bring together people who want to get serious about their health, put them in a gorgeous venue with longevity doctors and scientists, and give everyone a personalized longevity plan to leave with.

What’s included:

✅ Custom biomarker panel before you arrive.

Continue reading “Peak Protocol: Mountain Longevity Retreat” | >

Why this $10 spectrometer chip could bring real-time chemical sensing to wearables

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and GlitterinTech, a startup founded by the same research group, have unveiled a fundamentally new type of optical spectrometer that delivers laboratory-grade precision in a device small enough to be embedded in portable and wearable technologies. By rethinking how spectra are measured and processed, the team has demonstrated a spectrometer costing only around $10, operating at a centimeter scale, and capable of applications ranging from industrial quality control to real-time health care monitoring.

Optical spectrometers underpin countless technologies, from chemical analysis and manufacturing to environmental sensing and medicine. Yet shrinking these instruments has historically involved painful trade-offs: Miniaturized devices typically sacrifice bandwidth, resolution or accuracy, limiting them to rough identification rather than true metrological measurements. The newly reported convolutional spectrometer overcomes these barriers by introducing a conceptually elegant operating principle grounded in the convolution theorem, offering unprecedented performance metrics compared with existing dispersive, Fourier-transform and reconstructive spectrometers.

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