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Comment Re: Didn't we know this a decade ago? (Score 1) 36

Nothing weird about sodium fluoride, fluorosilicic acid, or sodium fluorosilicate. Sodium fluoride is a simple salt, dissociates immediately upon dissolution to Na+ and F-. Fluorosilicic acid and sodium fluorisilicate result in a fluorosilicate ion (SiF-2) which rapidly hydrolyzes to Si(OH)4 + 6F- + 4H+. Si(OH)4 (orthosilicic acid) is the form of soluble silicon which plants and diatoms consume and is perfectly normal in water in the tiny amounts from fluoridation (like 6 micromolar concentration). Ocean surface water near Antarctica for example is up to ~80 micromolar concentration. And it goes without saying that minuscule amounts of sodium in water are also perfectly normal. The addition of the fluoride ion is the only actually meaningful impact.

Comment Re:Microsoft's Palladium is here (Score 1) 84

How would you feel shooting someone only for the bullet to be registered as never fired because actually you were dead 100ms earlier but didn't know about it yet because the server was still processing hit boxes and hasn't managed to let you know you were dead yet

That's annoying, but it's a problem of lag. It happens in FPS games that calculate things on the client, too.

Hardware

PCIe 8.0 Announced With 256 GT/s For AI Workloads (nerds.xyz) 6

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: PCI-SIG says PCI Express 8.0 will hit a raw bit rate of 256.0 GT/s, doubling what PCIe 7.0 offers. The spec is expected to be ready by 2028, and the goal is to support massive data loads from AI, machine learning, edge computing, and even quantum systems. The group says PCIe 8.0 will allow up to 1 terabyte per second of bidirectional throughput with a full x16 configuration. They're also looking at new connector designs, improving protocol efficiency, reducing power use, and maintaining backward compatibility.

Comment Re:Couple of possibilities (Score 1) 36

Lithium is naturally present in the diet, but it varies by orders of magnitude depending on where you get your water and where your food was grown / grazed, with most people today on the lower end of the intake. Mineral spring waters in particular tend to be much richer in lithium than river / lake water, and also the fact that municipal water supplies' range limitations on the quantities of common minerals (sodium, potassium, calcium, etc) will also tend to reduce lithium, could be argued that, on average, the average person in the past might have consumed more. But it still would be quite varied on a regional basis.

Note that drinking lithiated water used to be a popular health trend. Indeed, 7-Up was originally called 7up Lithiated Lemon Soda (though the claim of being lithiated was actually a lie in their case, and they ultimately had to remove it!).

Comment Re:Couple of possibilities (Score 2) 36

It always strikes me as weird that people would be shocked that a substance commonly prescribed to affect the brain... affects the brain.

Beyond increasing BDNF activity (which promotes neuron survival and new growth), one of the main therapeutic targets is Glycogen synthase kinase-3 beta, which controls a wide range of developmental parameters for neuronal development, including discouraging regeneration and promoting apoptosis, and is pro-inflammatory (CNS inflammation is itself associated with Alzheimers). Lithium reduces its activity, both with direct and indirect inhibition. While GSK-3B is essential to a degree, overactivity of GSK-3B is associated with a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's.

Lithium also helps promote cleanup (misfolded proteins, degradation products, etc) via autophagy by reducing the activity of IMPase... at least at low doses. At high doses, it can cause the inverse effect, due to its GSK-3B and mTOR impacts. In general, though, it seems to typically be pro-autophagy.

Comment Re:There should be an easy natural observation (Score 3, Informative) 36

There have been quite a few studies that do just that. Well, not "taking lithium", as in the medication, because typical psychiatric doses of lithium (hundreds of milligrams per day) are like 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than typical dietary doses. But dietary doses themselves vary by orders of magnitude (some European studies put consumption in some places in Europe as low as a couple micrograms per day, while in places in northern Chile some people consume ~10mg per day), because lithium is so widely varied from place to place. One study found for example that one Slovakian bottled water product had 10 milligrams per litre, while the mean European bottled water had less than a microgram per litre. In most places, peoples' dietary consumption is closer to the lower end than the upper end. And the studies strongly suggest that people who naturally consume the higher amounts of lithium have lower rates dementia (there's also positive, though weaker, evidence for lower rates of violent crime and suicide). In general, it seems to be neuroprotective.

It's been argued that we should probably be lithiating water, e.g. that there should be minimum and maximum standards for lithium in drinking water the same way that there are minimums and maximums for numerous other minerals, with a provisional recommended daily intake of 1mg per day based on the evidence. But given the huge backlash to fluoride in water, I can't even imagine how harsh the backlash to lithium would be, given that people associate it with being a psychiatric medication (even though that's at doses orders of magnitude higher). It's just not going to happen.

I personally take 1mg of lithium a day. Which is well within the normal dietary range (in some places in northern Chile people naturally consume ~10mg per day!). A common supplement form is lithium orotate, but it's a weird choice - it's chosen because it's covalently bonded into a molecule which is delivered into cells whole, to "make it more effective", but A) that's not how normal dietary lithium is delivered, and B) orotic acid isn't exactly healthy. Instead, I make my own (both concentrate and diluted solution). I start with lithium carbonate, and while it's not available in food grade (anywhere I've found), it's a very common compound available at high purity (>99,5%), with easy composition tests - crimson flame test, density tests (offset by a typically poor packing density), low solubility in water but high bubbling solubility in weak acids (with no precipitate), etc). Because it's poorly soluble & tastes like baking soda / mineral water, I also add citric acid to the solution, forming lithium citrate. Even if the impurities were pure lead, the amount would still be small when you're only taking 1mg a day. But actual impurities are mostly (A) water, (B) other lithium compounds (hydroxide, chloride, sulfate, etc etc), and (C) other similar mono- and divalent cations to lithium, such as sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, plus some iron, alumium and silicon due to their ubiquity in nature and presence in processing.

Science

New Work Achieves a Pure Quantum State Without the Need For Cooling (phys.org) 13

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Three nano-glass spheres cling to one another. They form a tower-like cluster, similar to when you pile three scoops of ice cream on top of one another -- only much smaller. The diameter of the nano cluster is ten times smaller than that of a human hair. With the help of an optical device and laser beams, researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in keeping such objects almost completely motionless in levitation. This is significant when it comes to the future development of quantum sensors, which, together with quantum computers, constitute the most promising applications of quantum research.

As part of their levitation experiment, the researchers, led by adjunct professor of photonics Martin Frimmer, were able to eliminate the gravitational force acting on the glass spheres. However, the elongated nano object still trembled, similar to how the needle on a compass moves when settling into position. In the case of the nano cluster, the trembling motion was very fast but weak: the object made around one million deflections per second, each measuring only a few thousandths of a degree. This tiny rotational oscillation is a fundamental quantum motion exhibited by all objects, which physicists call zero-point fluctuation.

To date, no one has been successful in detecting these tiny movements for an object of this size as precisely as the ETH researchers have now done. They achieved this because they were able to largely eliminate all motions that originate from the field of classical physics and obscure the observation of quantum movements. The ETH researchers attribute 92% of the cluster's movements in their experiment to quantum physics and 8% to classical physics; they therefore refer to a high level of quantum purity. And the records do not stop there: The researchers accomplished all of this at room temperature. Quantum researchers usually have to cool their objects to a temperature close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) using special equipment. This was not required here.
The research has been published in the journal Nature Physics.
Medicine

Low Dose of Lithium Reverses Alzheimer's Symptoms In Mice (newscientist.com) 36

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: People withAlzheimer's disease have lower levels of lithium in their brains, and giving lithium to mice with symptoms of the condition reverses cognitive decline. Together, the findings suggest that lithium deficiency could be a driver of Alzheimer's disease and that low-dose lithium medications could help treat it. [...] [Bruce Yanknerat Harvard University] and his colleagues analyzed levels of 27 metals in the brains of 285 people after they died, 94 of whom were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 58 of whom had mild cognitive impairment, a precursor of the condition. The other participants showed no signs of cognitive decline at the time of their death.

Lithium levels in the prefrontal cortex -- a brain region crucial for memory and decision-making -- were about 36 percent lower, on average, in people with Alzheimer's disease than in those without any cognitive decline. For those with mild cognitive impairment, lithium levels were about 23 percent lower. "We suspect that's due to a number of environmental factors: dietary intake, genetics and so forth," says Yankner. Yet there seemed to be another reason, too. In those with Alzheimer's disease, clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques contained nearly three times the amount of lithium as plaque-free regions of their brain. "Lithium becomes sequestered in these plaques," says Yankner. "We have two things going on. There is impaired uptake of lithium [in the brain] very early on and then, as the disease progresses, the lithium that is in the brain is further diminished by being bound to amyloid."

To understand how this influences cognition, the team genetically engineered 22 mice to develop Alzheimer's-like symptoms and reduced their lithium intake by 92 percent. After about eight months, the animals performed significantly worse on multiple memory tests compared with 16 mice on a standard diet. It took lithium-deficient mice around 10 seconds longer to find a hidden platform in a water maze, for example, even after six days of training. Their brains also contained nearly two and a half times as many amyloid plaques. Genetic analysis of brain cells from the lithium-deficient mice showed increased activity in genes related to neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's. They also had more brain inflammation and their immune cells were less able to clear away amyloid plaques, changes also seen in people with Alzheimer's disease.

The team then screened different lithium compounds for their ability to bind to amyloid and found that lithium orotate -- a naturally occurring compound in the body formed by combining lithium with orotic acid -- appeared to be the least likely to get trapped within plaques. Nine months of treatment with this compound significantly reduced plaques in mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, and they also performed as well on memory tests as normal mice. These results suggest lithium orotate could be a promising treatment for Alzheimer's.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
Government

Taiwan's High 20% Tariff Rate Linked To Intel Investment (notebookcheck.net) 76

EreIamJH writes: German tech newsletter Notebookcheck is reporting that the unexpectedly high 20% tariff the U.S. recently imposed on Taiwan is intended to pressure TSMC to buy a 49% minority stake in Intel -- including an IP transfer and to spend $400 billion in the U.S., in addition to the $165 billion previously planned.
Privacy

'Facial Recognition Tech Mistook Me For Wanted Man' (bbc.co.uk) 34

Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A man who is bringing a High Court challenge against the Metropolitan Police after live facial recognition technology wrongly identified him as a suspect has described it as "stop and search on steroids." Shaun Thompson, 39, was stopped by police in February last year outside London Bridge Tube station. Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said the judicial review, due to be heard in January, was the first legal case of its kind against the "intrusive technology." The Met, which announced last week that it would double its live facial recognition technology (LFR) deployments, said it was removing hundreds of dangerous offenders and remained confident its use is lawful. LFR maps a person's unique facial features, and matches them against faces on watch-lists. [...]

Mr Thompson said his experience of being stopped had been "intimidating" and "aggressive." "Every time I come past London Bridge, I think about that moment. Every single time." He described how he had been returning home from a shift in Croydon, south London, with the community group Street Fathers, which aims to protect young people from knife crime. As he passed a white van, he said police approached him and told him he was a wanted man. "When I asked what I was wanted for, they said, 'that's what we're here to find out'." He said officers asked him for his fingerprints, but he refused, and he was let go only after about 30 minutes, after showing them a photo of his passport.

Mr Thompson says he is bringing the legal challenge because he is worried about the impact LFR could have on others, particularly if young people are misidentified. "I want structural change. This is not the way forward. This is like living in Minority Report," he said, referring to the science fiction film where technology is used to predict crimes before they're committed. "This is not the life I know. It's stop and search on steroids. "I can only imagine the kind of damage it could do to other people if it's making mistakes with me, someone who's doing work with the community."
Bruce66423 comments: "I suspect a payout of 10,000 pounds for each false match that is acted on would probably encourage more careful use, perhaps with a second payout of 100,000 pounds if the same person is victimized again."

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