Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

Narnia author, C.S. Lewis warned about genetically edited babies 74 years ago

Meadow Clark
Natural Blaze
Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Baby
C.S. Lewis, beloved author of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had an important warning about genetically edited babies...and he said it 74 years ago - in 1944.

The Internet is enraptured that science may have crossed yet another threshold: another gene-edited baby greets the world.

The first genetically edited babies have already have been born.

Yet many scientists are condemning the news that a Chinese scientist recently used CRISPR gene-editing technology on twin girl embryos to prevent them from potentially contracting HIV and AIDS viruses. Believe it or not, many countries including China and the United States do not allow genetic editing on babies because it could pass on untold consequences through the genetic line.

Of course, there have been exceptions.

Comment: See also:

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Cow Skull

Prehistoric Arctic burial pit containing 13 species of animals baffles scientists


Siberian Times
Wed, 12 Sep 2018 12:00 UTC
Prehistoric Arctic burial pit
© Pavel KosintsevMany of the bones were adults: this is where the animals died.
Almost 1,300 bones of 13 species of mammals unearthed at new site on Gydan peninsula aged between 10,000 and 50,000 years old.

Judging by the bones, the animals came to this remote Arctic site give birth - and also to die.

This was a prehistoric maternity hospital and necropolis for mammals that included the extinct mammoth and cave lion, along with species of horse, musk ox, bison and reindeer.

Found here too were the bones of an ancient hare, a wolf, a polar fox, a brown bear, and rodents.

And not only mammals. There were many bird bones too.

Many of the bones were adults: this is where the animals died.

Comment: Research of similar pits and caves from all over the globe show that the bones have suffered the kind of damage that can only be associated with a cataclysmic event:

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Life Preserver

Paul Stamets' epiphany that mushrooms could help save the world's bees

Evan Bush
The Seattle Times
Sat, 06 Oct 2018 14:59 UTC
mushrooms
Paul Stamets, a renowned expert on mushrooms, nurtures fungi near his home in Shelton, Washington
The epiphany that mushrooms could help save the world's ailing bee colonies struck Paul Stamets while he was in bed.

"I love waking dreams," he said. "It's a time when you're just coming back into consciousness."

Years ago, in 1984, Stamets had noticed a "continuous convoy of bees" traveling from a patch of mushrooms he was growing and his beehives. The bees actually moved wood chips to access his mushroom's mycelium, the branching fibers of fungus that look like cobwebs.

"I could see them sipping on the droplets oozing from the mycelium," he said. They were after its sugar, he thought.

Comment: Read more about Magic Mycellum: The healing power of mushrooms

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Moon

Meet you on the dark side of the moon: China launches historic lunar exploration mission


RT
Sat, 08 Dec 2018 14:06 UTC
Earth's moon
© Reuters / Dinuka Liyanawatte
China has launched a lunar rover on a historic mission to explore the dark side of the moon, with the potential to make revolutionary discoveries about the possibility of extraplanetary life.

Friday's successful launch sent China's Chang'e-4 into orbit, scheduled to make an unprecedented touch down on the dark side of the moon in January of next year, Chinese state media reports. The rover will land in the 3.9 billion year old "Von Kármán" crater, where it will take measurements and conduct experiments with the potential to uncover new information about the moon's formation and history.

The rover is scheduled to observe the possibilities for sustaining plant life and seek potential water sources in the previously unexplored expanse, as well as conduct astronomical experiments aided by the far-side's natural shielding from Earth's electromagnetic waves.
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Cut

A loophole is letting genetically modified foods sidestep American GMO regulations

Akshat Rathi
Quartz
Fri, 15 Apr 2016 13:56 UTC
A gateway fungus
A gateway fungus
A rather standard-looking white button mushroom has just planted itself at the center of the debate over genetically modified foods in the US. In a letter published on April 13 (pdf), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it won't regulate a genetically modified mushroom as it does other "genetically modified organisms" (GMOs).

The mushroom was developed by Yinong Yang of Pennsylvania State University using a revolutionary new technology called CRISPR. The technology allows modification of genes with greater precision than ever before. Yang used CRISPR to change two letters of the mushroom DNA code to create a variant that is more resistant to browning from oxidization.

Comment: The overlooked threats of gene editing
Perhaps no technology yet has been poised to change the world so profoundly. All life on Earth, every living organism, now stands the possibility of potentially being "edited" on the most basic genetic level, enhancing or degrading it, but forever changing it.


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Laptop

Computer program can quite accurately predict gender just from keystrokes

Kimberly Hickok
Science Mag
Fri, 09 Feb 2018 12:00 UTC
keyboard typing
Your webcam may know your face, but your keyboard knows your gender.

Computer models can predict with 95.6% accuracy whether a man or woman is typing, according to a new study. To conduct the research, computer engineers installed keystroke-logging software onto the personal computers of 75 volunteers-36 men, 39 women-which monitored their daily computer use for 10 months.

The researchers then used a program they created, called "ISqueezeU" to calculate the relative helpfulness of different typing features for determining gender-things like the time between two specific keystrokes, or the amount of time a key is pressed down during a single keystroke.

A few features stood out as being more useful than others. For example, the average time between pressing the "N" key to pressing the "O" key was the most helpful, followed by the average time between pressing the "M" and "O" keys.

Comment: It seems even the most mundane things about us reveal our gender, and one can imagine these subtle, and obvious, inherent differences permeate our entire lives, which further confirms just how absurd the relatively recent gender 'self-identification' propaganda push really is:

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Magnify

COSINE-100 experiment: Investigating the dark matter mystery

Yale University
Science Daily
Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Cosine detector array
© Chang Hyon HaCOSINE-100's sodium-iodide detector array inside an acrylic tank lined with reflective foil. The tank was later filled with liquid scintillator to tag cosmic ray muons.
Yale scientists are part of a new international experiment that challenges previous claims about the detection of non-luminous dark matter.

Astrophysical evidence suggests that the universe contains a large amount of non-luminous dark matter, yet no definite signal of it has been observed despite concerted efforts by many experimental groups. One exception to this is the long-debated claim by the DArk MAtter (DAMA) collaboration, which has reported positive observations of dark matter in its sodium-iodide detector array.

The new COSINE-100 experiment, based at an underground, dark-matter detector at the Yangyang Underground Laboratory in South Korea, has begun to explore DAMA's claim. It is the first experiment sensitive enough to test DAMA and use the same target material of sodium iodide.
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Hammer

The CRISPR baby scandal gets worse by the day

Ed Young
The Atlantic
Mon, 03 Dec 2018 14:01 UTC
baby
© Gigazine
The alleged creation of the world's first gene-edited infants was full of technical errors and ethical blunders. Here are the 15 most damning details.

Before last week, few people had heard the name He Jiankui. But on November 25, the young Chinese researcher became the center of a global firestorm when it emerged that he had allegedly made the first crispr-edited babies, twin girls named Lulu and Nana. Antonio Regalado broke the story for MIT Technology Review, and He himself described the experiment at an international gene-editing summit in Hong Kong. After his talk, He revealed that another early pregnancy is under way.

It is still unclear if He did what he claims to have done. Nonetheless, the reaction was swift and negative. The crispr pioneer Jennifer Doudna says she was "horrified," NIH Director Francis Collins said the experiment was "profoundly disturbing," and even Julian Savulescu, an ethicist who has described gene-editing research as "a moral necessity," described He's work as "monstrous."
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Info

Elowan - Cyborg plant that uses robotic augmentation to reach the light

Harpreet Sareen / Elbert Tiao
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 21:33 UTC
Elowan is a cybernetic lifeform, a plant in direct dialogue with a machine. Using its own internal electrical signals, the plant is interfaced with a robotic extension that drives it toward light.
Cyborg Elowan
© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyElowan
Plants are electrically active systems. They get bio-electrochemically excited and conduct these signals between tissues and organs. Such electrical signals are produced in response to changes in light, gravity, mechanical stimulation, temperature, wounding, and other environmental conditions.
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Microscope 2

A universal DNA nano-signature common to all cancers


Phys.org
Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:01 UTC
Killer T cells surround cancer cell
© NIHKiller T cells surround a cancer cell.
Researchers from the University of Queensland's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) have discovered a unique nano-scaled DNA signature that appears to be common to all cancers.

Based on this discovery, the team has developed a novel technology that enables cancer to be quickly and easily detected from any tissue type, e.g. blood or biopsy.

The study, which was supported by a grant from the National Breast Cancer Foundation and is published in the journal Nature Communications, reveals new insight about how epigenetic reprogramming in cancer regulates the physical and chemical properties of DNA and could lead to an entirely new approach to point-of-care diagnostics.

Comment: Exciting stuff in the field of cancer research. Better diagnostics means quicker detection and more effective treatments. This looks like something to keep an eye on.

See also:

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