Lifeboat Foundation

See some of the top images and discoveries that will form Cassini’s legacy: https://go.nasa.gov/2oec6H2

There are a lot of bad ways to wake up from a nap. Getting hit with a space rock is certainly one of them.

One afternoon in 1954, Ann Hodges was dozing on her living room couch. At 12:45 pm, a meteorite ripped through her living room ceiling and woke her up with a direct hit to the stomach.

Turn.bio is based on the scientific breakthrough work at Stanford of Vittorio Sebastiano, Jay Sarkar, and Marco Quarta. They are now leading the team to develop therapies that return mature differentiated cells to a dramatically younger state leaving their differentiated identity unaltered. Congrats!

More info on kizoo.com/en

On the Transhumanist Wishlist by Prof George Church, or the genes we have to change to enhance the human body and mind, a new post.

Here are some selections from the so-called Transhumanist Wishlist, drawing upon the philosophical movement of transhumanism that calls for using technology to enhance human physiology and intellect, leading to a transformation of what it means to be human:

Continue reading “‘The Transhumanist wishlist’ – what genes can be enhanced to give us super abilities” »

The gene-editing approach might prove more useful outside the clinic.

Credit card info and autofill data is up for grabs as browser-based attacks surge.

The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of solar sailing for space travel.

Charlotte Trainer thought she was out of options when she was diagnosed with Stage-4 inoperable Endometrial cancer in November of 2017. After having a full hysterectomy and 25 rounds of radiation, her doctors told her that the cancer had metastasized to her lungs. There was nothing else they could offer her.

Today, she celebrates being cancer free for one full year after being treated at CHIPSA hospital.

More broadly, biologists are wondering how else deep learning — the AI technique used by both approaches — might be applied to the prediction of protein arrangements, which ultimately dictate a protein’s function. These approaches are cheaper and faster than existing lab techniques such as X-ray crystallography, and the knowledge could help researchers to better understand diseases and design drugs. “There’s a lot of excitement about where things might go now,” says John Moult, a biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park and the founder of the biennial competition, called Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP), where teams are challenged to design computer programs that predict protein structures from sequences.

Deep learning makes its mark on protein-structure prediction.