Lifeboat Foundation

As the novel coronavirus outbreak continues to batter China, the country’s central bank has implemented a new strategy to contain the virus — deep cleaning and destroying potentially infected cash.

The new measures, announced by the People’s Bank of China on Saturday, aim to contain the spread of the virus, officially known as Covid-19. There is still a lot unknown about the virus, which has infected more than 71,000 people globally and killed 1,775, the majority in China — but it appears to survive for at least several hours on surfaces, according to the World Health Organization.

This is why buildings in affected areas are regularly disinfecting elevator buttons, door handles, and other commonly-touched surfaces — and why people are worried about cash, which changes hands multiple times a day.

“It’s a 320-square-foot shipping container like you would see on a boat, a train, a truck, outfitted with an automated growing system,” he says, “to grow about 3.5 acres worth of produce with no pesticides, no herbicides, and about 98.5% less water.” Inside the Greenery, plants grow vertically, with their roots in a nutrient solution instead of soil. Sensors, pumps, and LED lights automatically maintain ideal growing conditions, so you don’t have to be an expert to start farming. “You plug it in and you’re growing same day,” McNamara says.

The crops grow vertically under LED lights.

The Human Genome Project launched in 1990 with the goal to read genomes. Now scientists are working to write them.

Gene editing of human embryos — yes or not?

If there is a discernible duty here it is surely to create the best possible child. That is what it is to act for the best, all things considered. This we have moral reasons to do; but they are not necessarily overriding reasons.

Continue reading “Why human gene editing must not be stopped” »

Steven Hawking: “I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”

Probably the most notable direct result of space exploration is satellites. Once we could position a ship in orbit and take telemetry, we knew we could place unmanned pieces of equipment there and just let it orbit, running on its own, while receiving orders from the ground. From those satellites, we have created a global communication system and the global positioning system (GPS) that powers most of our communications capabilities today. What can bring peace and harmony on the planet more than our ability to communicate with each other beyond geographic and political boundaries? These technologies have been enhancing and saving for years.

Continue reading “The Value of Space Exploration” »

In October 2019, Liu and his colleagues published a paper in Nature, describing an even newer technology, called prime editing. Prime editing can not only make all twelve of the possible base substitutions, it can also make multiple-base insertions or deletions, without requiring a double-strand break. It achieves this with a multi-step operation that first cuts one strand, then performs the appropriate substitution, insertion, or deletion, and then nicks the second strand to allow the bases on the second strand to be replaced by bases that complement the ones substituted, inserted into or deleted from the first strand. The result is a modified stretch of DNA that had never been completely separated. This has the effect of massively reducing the number of off-target modifications.

This new prime editing variant of CRISPR technology, can make the same corrections to the defects that cause sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia that standard CRISPR/Cas9 has now made in human subjects, but with less opportunity for unwanted off-target changes. Furthermore, its possible applicability is much wider. The ClinVar database lists over 75,000 pathogenic mutations in the human genome. Of these, over 89% are potentially correctable by prime editing.

Continue reading “Gene Editing is Advancing at Breakneck Speed” »

The Human Genome Project is probably the most ambitious scientific proposal ever made.

ii. writing DNA

Continue reading “Writing Our Genome” »

How close are we to creating a synthetic human genome?

Creating humans is also an ethical minefield. Unsettled questions about who might own a synthetic human genome abound. Boeke warns that ownership could come down to who ends up funding the project development. Rob Carlson, a co-author of the GP-Write proposal, is even more skeptical of the idea of a patented artificial human genome, pointing out via email that “as soon as there is any possibility of a synthetic genome being used to germinate a live human, then ownership is obviously out of the question anyway…because you are now talking about owning a person.”

Continue reading “Synthetic genomics – Inside the effort to create entire genomes from scratch” »

BEIJING: The head of a leading hospital in China’s central city of Wuhan, the epicentre of a coronavirus outbreak, died of the disease on Tuesday (Feb 18), state television said, becoming the second prominent Chinese doctor to have succumbed to the pathogen.

Liu Zhiming, the director of Wuhan Wuchang Hospital, died at 10.30am, it said.