Lifeboat Foundation

GSK forms CRISPR alliance with UC Berkeley and UCSF to create functional genomics insitute. The main one, technologywise, is this about using CRISPR as a gene function screen. One can do a gazillion experiments at once, fleshing out connections, sketching the biology, finding drug targets. http://bit.do/eU942

S AN FRANCISCO — The drug maker GlaxoSmithKline announced Thursday that it would team up with some of the nation’s most prominent CRISPR researchers to use the gene-editing technology in a search for new medicines, establishing a new lab in San Francisco and spending up to $67 million over five years.

Jennifer Doudna, the University of California, Berkeley, researcher who co-invented the CRISPR enzyme technology, will help lead the effort, along with Jonathan Weissman, a UC San Francisco researcher who has been using CRISPR to understand the function of individual human genes and how they work together. Both are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.

Continue reading “GSK partners with CRISPR pioneer Doudna to find new drugs” »

SET aims to study effects of radiation on satellites.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer and Co-founder of SENS Research Foundation, delivers an overview of aging and the many health problems that develop in our advanced years.

Dr. de Grey is a respected member of the science community; he is the noted biomedical gerontologist who devised the innovative SENS platform and co-founded the SENS Research Foundation to further it. Dr. de Grey has written about his work and as an established researcher, he has been appointed to the editorial and scientific advisory boards of many journals, organizations, etc. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America as well as the American Aging Association. He holds a BA in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Biology from the prestigious University of Cambridge.

Dr. de Grey discusses his research in aging and the motivations for tackling the career. As he states, aging is the number one medical problem as it causes more suffering. He was motivated to research in this area because he found that not enough was being done to focus on aging and the myriad of problems that come with it. He talks about the many excuses that are given as reasons to simply accept aging as it is, or not focus on it at all, such as “it’s inevitable…everything ages,” or the philosophical—“death gives meaning to life,” or social—“maybe we could do this, but it would create new problems worse than the problem we are solving.” And as the Ph.D. states, none of these excuses stand up to even the faintest scrutiny, however, they still remain quite popular.

There are many nutritional and delicious benefits of eating lobster. Some of them include protecting heart health, increasing energy, decreasing inflammation, speeding healing, promoting growth, boosting brain functioning and building strong bones. Lobsters are shelled marine creatures which are taking parts of crustaceans. They have the scientific name Homarus nephrops. This scientific name is the North Atlantic variety. This undersea creature is having old look and it is considered to be luxury or delicacy food in many parts of the world. Nowadays lobster is exported to many parts of the world. They are particularly popular in North America. Lobsters are delicious food but they have high prices which is a reason why they are not consumed a lot. It is important to know that the lobster has high amounts of cholesterol and sodium. If you suffer from cardiovascular issues, high blood pressure or any other health condition, then you should not consume lobster because it has minerals and nutrients which are not ideal for these conditions. Every food should be consumed in moderation. Lobster is ideal food for people to get many vitamins and minerals that are essential for their health. People who live in North American coasts can have lobster in every time because here the price of it is very low.

The CRISPR gene-editing system is usually known for helping scientists treat genetic diseases, but the technology has a whole range of possible uses in synthetic biology too. Now researchers at ETH Zurich have used CRISPR to build functional biocomputers inside human cells.

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.

The peer-to-peer mobile payments service faced criticism last year after Hang Do Thi Duc, a former Mozilla fellow, downloaded 207 million transactions. The scraping effort was possible because Venmo payments between users are public by default. The scrapable data inspired several new projects — including a bot that tweeted out every time someone bought drugs.

New species of tardigrade, world’s toughest animal, has been discovered in Japan.

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HONOLULU, Hawaiʻi — The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a threat message, saying that there was no threat to Hawaiʻi but the tsunami waves were possible closer to the earthquake center.

What happens to the brain without oxygen?