Lifeboat Foundation

Check out this amazing video about Synthetic Biology! (Credit: Vasil Hnãtiuk, Denis Sibilev, and Andrei Myshev)

Arsenic may be deadly to us, but now a microbe that can live and grow entirely off the poison has been discovered.

People with depression have a distinguishing feature in their brains, according to a new study.

Hydrocarbons and petroleum are almost synonymous in environmental science. After all, oil reserves account for nearly all the hydrocarbons we encounter. But the few hydrocarbons that trace their origin to biological sources may play a larger ecological role than scientists originally suspected.

OEC promoting STEM education in Africa.

If we know a protein’s structure, we can make educated guesses about its function. And by mapping thousands of protein structures, we can begin to decipher the biology of life.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s AlphaFold Is Close to Solving One of Biology’s Greatest Challenges” »

Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can break under a set of conditions.

Arsenic — may be good for you, if you are a microbe!

This normally toxic substance might have been useful in the oxygen-deprived environment of early Earth.

3D printing is a universal process in the sense that pretty much any part that can be drawn up in a CAD program can be printed, at least within a certain resolution. Machining a part on a mill or lathe, while having the advantage of greater accuracy and material options, is a slightly less universal process in that many possible designs that exist in theory could never be machined. A hollow sphere can easily be printed, but a ball could never be milled as a single part into a hollow sphere—unless you happen to have a milling machine tiny enough to fit inside the ball. But what about biological parts, and whole animals? How universal, from a design perspective, is growth?

DeepMind figures out protein folding using artificial intelligence.