Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists develop the first CRISPR-Cas9-based gene drive in plants which may breed crops better able to withstand drought and disease.

Scientists have discovered a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that’s not been seen before. Excitingly, the discovery hints that our brains might be even more powerful units of computation than we realized.

Early last year, researchers from institutes in Germany and Greece reported a mechanism in the brain’s outer cortical cells that produces a novel ‘graded’ signal all on its own, one that could provide individual neurons with another way to carry out their logical functions.

Continue reading “A Never-Before-Seen Type of Signal Has Been Detected in The Human Brain” »

Sanofi will apply Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing capabilities toward developing new drugs, through a collaboration whose value was not disclosed.

The companies said they have agreed to create a virtual Innovation Lab to “radically” transform how future medicines and health services are developed and delivered.

Sanofi has articulated three goals for the collaboration with Google: better understand patients and diseases, increase Sanofi’s operational efficiency, and improve the experience of Sanofi patients and customers.

For the first time, CRISPR-Cas9-based gene drive technology has been developed in plants. Enabling the inheritance of both copies of a target gene from a single parent could greatly reduce the generations needed for plant breeding. Establishing this genome editing technology in plants may allow for breeding resilient crops that are better able to withstand drought and disease.

#GenomeEditing #AgBio #CRISPR #Cas9

Gene drives have been established in insects, including fruit flies and mosquitoes, and mammals such as mice. Now, for the first time, the CRISPR-Cas9-based technology that disrupts Mendelian inheritance and allows for selective acquisition of target genes has been developed in plants. Establishing this genome editing technology in plants may allow for breeding resilient crops that are better able to withstand drought and disease.

Continue reading “First CRISPR-Based Gene Drive Developed in Plants” »

The mineral pyrite was historically nicknamed fool’s gold because of its deceptive resemblance to the precious metal.

The term was often used during the California gold rush in the 1840s because inexperienced prospectors would claim discoveries of gold, but in reality it would be pyrite, composed of worthless iron disulfide (FeS₂).

Continue reading “‘Fool’s Gold’ Actually Contains a Newly Discovered Type of Real Gold, Scientists Find” »

Scientists created the mineral lonsdaleite in a lab and tested its strength using sound waves — before it was obliterated.

Scientists have revealed a fascinating new design for an incredibly tiny, inflatable spinal cord implant, suited for treating severe chronic back pain that doesn’t respond to medication.

The inflatable electronic device is part of a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) setup, a type of well-established therapy that delivers mild electric currents to a person’s spinal cord via implanted electrodes. That current is sent by a small, implanted pulse generator device, and the whole thing reduces pain because the electrical pulses help to mask pain signals traveling to the brain via the spinal cord.

If that all sounds rather invasive, that’s because it is. But this new device, designed by a team led by scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, could help to change that — with less invasive surgery requirements.

Imagine you sit down and pick up your favourite book. You look at the image on the front cover, run your fingers across the smooth book sleeve, and smell that familiar book smell as you flick through the pages. To you, the book is made up of a range of sensory appearances.

But you also expect the book has its own independent existence behind those appearances. So when you put the book down on the coffee table and walk into the kitchen, or leave your house to go to work, you expect the book still looks, feels, and smells just as it did when you were holding it.

Expecting objects to have their own independent existence – independent of us, and any other objects – is actually a deep-seated assumption we make about the world. This assumption has its origin in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and is part of what we call the mechanistic worldview. According to this view, the world is like a giant clockwork machine whose parts are governed by set laws of motion.

A team led by astronomers at UC Santa Barbara have confirmed the existence of an elusive new type of supernova.

A worldwide team led by UC Santa Barbara scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory has discovered the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion — an electron-capture supernova. While they have been theorized for 40 years, real-world examples have been elusive. They are thought to arise from the explosions of massive super-asymptotic giant branch (SAGB) stars, for which there has also been scant evidence. The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, also sheds new light on the thousand-year mystery of the supernova from A.D. 1054 that was visible all over the world in the daytime, before eventually becoming the Crab Nebula.

Historically, supernovae have fallen into two main types: thermonuclear and iron-core collapse. A thermonuclear supernova is the explosion of a white dwarf star after it gains matter in a binary star system. These white dwarfs are the dense cores of ash that remain after a low-mass star (one up to about 8 times the mass of the sun) reaches the end of its life. An iron core-collapse supernova occurs when a massive star — one more than about 10 times the mass of the sun — runs out of nuclear fuel and its iron core collapses, creating a black hole or neutron star. Between these two main types of supernovae are electron-capture supernovae. These stars stop fusion when their cores are made of oxygen, neon and magnesium; they aren’t massive enough to create iron.

The money was awarded through DoE’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.