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Jun 2, 2018

The FDA Puts the Brakes on a Major CRISPR Trial in Humans

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The FDA has denied CRISPR Therapeutics’s application to move forward with a study intended to treat sickle cell disease with CRISPR.

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Jun 2, 2018

A Major Physics Experiment Just Detected A Particle That Shouldn’t Exist

Posted by in category: particle physics

Scientists have produced the firmest evidence yet of so-called sterile neutrinos, mysterious particles that pass through matter without interacting with it at all.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don’t exist at all.

That means there’s something strange happening in the universe that is making humanity’s most cutting-edge physics experiments contradict one another. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics].

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Jun 2, 2018

Hawaii volcano lava burns 2 buildings at geothermal plant

Posted by in category: futurism

The company that owns a geothermal plant near Hawaii’s erupting volcano says lava has burned down a substation and adjacent warehouse at the complex.

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Jun 2, 2018

This Smartphone Pioneer Is Fighting to Create a Transhumanist Superdemocracy

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI, sustainability, transhumanism

It’s a philosophy best exemplified by Wood’s book released last month, Transcending Politics: A Technoprogressive Roadmap to a Comprehensively Better Future, which starts by declaring politics “broken,” technology as something that “risks making matters worse,” and deems transhumanism the force that can fix it all “comprehensively”:


David Wood, a transhumanist who co-founded Symbian in 1998, is working to develop a transhumanist superdemocracy that uses the best parts of artificial intelligence and communication to draw on the likes of Zoltan Istvan and Peter Thiel in a new movement to create longevity and sustainable abundance for all.

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Jun 2, 2018

8 Amazing CRISPR projects that could change life as we know it

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics

8 Amazing CRISPR gene editing projects that could change life as we know it.


Since it burst onto the scene a decade ago, CRISPR-Cas9 has shaken the field of genetics to its core. Offering a new genomic editing tool that’s faster, cheaper and more accurate than previous approaches, it opens up an astonishing breadth of possible applications.

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Jun 1, 2018

News: SMAP, the spacecraft I once worked on, is providing relative moisture data from the Earth’s surface

Posted by in categories: food, health, space travel

It’s interesting to note that eastern Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are experiencing much less soil moisture during the middle of May…


Data from the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring the water content of soils is now being used operationally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to monitor global croplands and make commodity forecasts.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, or SMAP, launched in 2015 and has helped map the amount of water in soils worldwide. Now, with tools developed by a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, SMAP soil moisture data are being incorporated into the Crop Explorer website of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, which reports on regional droughts, floods and crop forecasts. Crop Explorer is a clearinghouse for global agricultural growing conditions, such as soil moisture, temperature, precipitation, vegetation health and more.

Continue reading “News: SMAP, the spacecraft I once worked on, is providing relative moisture data from the Earth’s surface” »

Jun 1, 2018

Evidence Found for a New Fundamental Particle

Posted by in category: particle physics

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted — a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.

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Jun 1, 2018

This Filter Makes Your Photos Indecipherable to Facial Recognition Software

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

By selectively altering specific pixels, and AI system can block facial-recognition software without making visible changes to a photo.

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Jun 1, 2018

Engineered antibody summons immune system to kill cancer cells

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Researchers have engineered an anti-cancer antibody that attaches specifically to cancer cells and summons immune killer cells to destroy the target.

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Jun 1, 2018

Quantum Computing Key Could Protect Blockchain Security

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, computing, quantum physics, security

Although blockchain is traditionally seen as secure, it is vulnerable to attack from quantum computers. Now, a team of Russian researchers say they have developed a solution to the quantum-era blockchain challenge, using quantum key distribution (QKD).

Quantum computers are different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation uses quantum bits, which can have more by being in superpositions of states.

Writing in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, the researchers set out a quantum-safe blockchain platform that uses QKD to achieve secure authentication.

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