Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,741

A team of Harvard Medical School scientists, which includes genetics professor George Church, have designed a bacterial genome that has been rewritten on a massive scale, with changes in more than 62,000 spots.

They haven’t used it to make living E. coli yet, but the findings, reported today in Science, mark progress towards genetically engineered bacteria that could make new materials without risk of exchanging genes with organisms in the wild.

“It‘s an important step forward for demonstrating the malleability of the genetic code and how entirely new types of biological functions and properties can be extracted from organisms through genomes that have been recoded,” Farren Isaacs of Yale University, who has worked with the team in the past, told Nature.

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Is Market Capitalism simply an accident of certain factors that came together in the 19th and 20th centuries? Does the innovation of economics require a new economics of innovation? Is the study of economics deeply affected by the incentive structures faced by economists themselves, necessitating a study of the “economics of economics”? In this broad ranging interview INET Senior Economist Pia Malaney sits down with Eric Weinstein — mathematician, economist, Managing Director of Thiel Capital (as well as her co-author and husband) to discuss these and other issues.

Underlying the seismic shifts in the economy in the last ten years, Dr. Weinstein sees not just a temporary recession brought on by a housing crisis, but rather deep and fundamental shifts in the very factors that made market capitalism the driving force of economic growth for the past two centuries. The most profound of these shifts as Dr. Weinstein sees it, is an end to 20th century style capitalism brought about not by a competing ideology, as many had once feared, but instead by changing technology. As production is driven increasingly by bits rather than atoms, he sees the importance of private goods give way to public goods, undermining a basic requirement of market models. In a different line of thinking, as software becomes increasingly sophisticated it takes on the ability to replace humans not only in low level repetitive tasks but also, with the use of deep learning algorithms, in arbitrarily complex repetitive tasks such as medical diagnosis.

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August 19th, 2016 – Creative Peptides, a professional supplier of peptides manufacturing upon academic, clinical, commercial and government laboratories in diverse applications, has released its efficient Glycopeptide Synthesis service, to help speed up the advance in solid phase methods.

Nowadays, glycopeptides have played a pivotal role in a myriad of organisms and systems, such as biology, physiology, medicine, bioengineering and technology, etc. As is known, synthetic glycopeptides are able to offer an unique frontier for research in glycobiology and proteomics as well as for drug discovery & development, drug delivery & targeting, diagnostics development and biotechnological applications, which also promotes the development of modern biomarker discovery process.

Based on rapid achievements in peptides research, increasing number of scientists are trying to discover more effective methods in modern scientific research, such as deslorelin acetate, aviptadil acetate, Chimeric Peptides, and so on. Technically, the Glycan chains of glycopeptides are involved in numerous biological recognition events, including protein folding, cell-cell communication and adhesion, cell growth and differentiation, as well as bacterial and viral infection. Actually, a framework of probing human implicit intentions for the purpose of augmented cognition has been described at Creative Peptides in recent days, which helps more and more people gain new insights in peptide application.

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3D Map of the cell-building protein tied to cancer.

The unprecedented view of the protein doublecortin kinase like domain 1 (DCLK1) could provide clues to how it contributes to cancer formation and progression.

DCLK1 is a protein that assembles scaffolds within cells called microtubules. These rope-like structures give cells shape, enable movement and cell division, and are crucial in enabling the growth and spread of cancer cells. More than one in 10 stomach cancers have defective forms of DCLK1, which have also been found in kidney, rectal and pancreatic cancers.

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute scientists Dr Onisha Patel and Dr Isabelle Lucet used the Australian Synchrotron to reveal the three-dimensional structure of a part of DCLK1 known as the ‘kinase domain’.

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We are entering an era of directed design in which we will expand the limited notion that biology is only the ‘study of life and living things’ and see biology as the ultimate distributed, manufacturing platform (as Stanford bioengineer, Drew Endy, often says). This new mode of manufacturing will offer us unrivaled personalization and functionality.

New foods. New fuels. New materials. New drugs.

We’re already taking our first steps in this direction. Joule Unlimited has engineered bacteria to convert CO2 into fuels in a single-step, continuous process. Others are engineering yeast to produce artemisinin — a potent anti-malarial compound used by millions of people globally. Still other microbes are being reprogrammed to produce industrial ingredients, like those used in synthetic rubber.

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Hmmmm.

Technocrat scientists believe they can ‘code’ any kind of future they want, but what about what everyone else wants? These are the overlords of Technocracy who believe that we should just ‘trust them’ to build Utopia. ⁃ TN Editor.

Imagine a future where there is no need to cut down a tree and reshape that raw material into a chair or table. Instead, we could grow our furniture by custom-engineering moss or mushrooms. Perhaps glowing bacteria will light our cities, and we’ll be able to bring back extinct species, or wipe out Lyme disease — or maybe even terraform Mars. Synthetic biology could help us accomplish all that.

That’s the message of the latest video in a new mini-documentary Web series called Explorations, focusing on potentially transformative areas of scientific research: Genomics, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, transportation, space exploration and synthetic biology. It’s a passion project of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of OS Fund and the payments processing company Braintree.

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Interesting research paper on motor cortex-based brain-computer interface (BCI) research conducted by researchers from UW. Sharing with fellow partners and researchers trying to advance BMI as well as those researching and/ or re-creating brain/ neuro patterns in systems.

The neurons in the human brain are densely interlaced, sharing upwards of 100 trillion physical connections. It is widely theorized that this tremendous connectivity is one of the facets of our nervous system that enables human intelligence. In this study, over the course of a week, human subjects learned to use electrical activity recorded directly from the surface of their brain to control a computer cursor. This provided us an opportunity to investigate patterns of interactivity that occur in the brain during the development of a new skill. We demonstrated two fundamentally different forms of interactions, one spanning only neighboring populations of neurons and the other covering much longer distances across the brain. The short-distance interaction type was notably stronger during early phases of learning, lessening with time, whereas the other was not. These findings point to evidence of multiple different forms of task-relevant communication taking place between regions in the human brain, and serve as a building block in our efforts to better understand human intelligence.

Citation: Wander JD, Sarma D, Johnson LA, Fetz EE, Rao RPN, Ojemann JG, et al. (2016) Cortico-Cortical Interactions during Acquisition and Use of a Neuroprosthetic Skill. PLoS Comput Biol 12: e1004931. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004931

Editor: Olaf Sporns, Indiana University, UNITED STATES

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