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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,412

These stingless bees make medicinal honey. Some call it a ‘miracle liquid.’

They come in many colors: golden, solid onyx, or striped dandelion and cinnamon. Their eyes can be beady black, slate gray, or even bluish-green. Their bodies may be as small as lentils or big as wine grapes. But the most amazing thing about stingless bees are the honeys they produce, which are increasingly being sought after for food and medicine.

In the Peruvian Amazon, people are just beginning to raise a few of the area’s 175 different species of stingless bees, which promise to help beekeepers and their communities. Historically, such honey has typically been harvested from the wild, which destroys the hives.

But in the last few years, scientists including Cesar Delgado, with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP), are teaching people to raise and keep the insects in sustainable ways.

Chemical-to-mechanical molecular computation using DNA-based motors with onboard logic

Current DNA computation techniques are slow in generating chemical outputs in response to chemical inputs and rely heavily on fluorescence readouts. Here, the authors introduce a new paradigm for DNA computation where the chemical input is processed and transduced into a mechanical output in the form of macroscopic locomotion using dynamic DNA-based motors.

Wind and solar energy amounted to 10% of the global energy consumption in 2021

There’s still a long way to go, but it’s an important milestone.

Ten years ago, solar and wind didn’t even make up 1% of our global energy mix. Now, in just a decade, they’ve reached 10%. It may not seem like much, but becoming such a significant part of the global energy mix in such a short time is remarkable — though there’s still a long way to go.

The past couple of years have been horrendous in more ways than one, but that doesn’t mean all is bad in the world. In fact, renewable energy continued its impressive growth, according to research from Ember, a climate and energy think tank.

As the world recoiled after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, economies were eager to reopen, and demand for energy surged. Some of what growth was covered by coal, which experienced its fastest growth since 1985, but renewables also rose to the challenge.

A recent study published in Nature Genetics identified 10 new genetic regions associated with Brugada syndrome

a cardiac arrhythmia disorder associated with sudden death in young adults.

The findings expand possibilities for predictive risk scoring and provide new targets for therapeutic study, according to Alfred George, Jr., MD, chair and the Alfred Newton Richards Professor of Pharmacology and a co-author of the study.

“Prior to this work, there were only two genomic regions associated with Brugada syndrome risk that were identified by genome-wide studies. Data from the new study greatly expands this to 12 regions with a total of 21 genetic signals to better explain risk for Brugada syndrome,” George said. “The results also provide the basis for a polygenic risk score that can be used to assess risk in individuals.”

Novel Risk Factors for Arrhythmia Uncovered

A recent study published in Nature Genetics identified 10 new genetic regions associated with Brugada syndrome, a cardiac arrhythmia disorder associated with sudden death in young adults.

The findings expand possibilities for predictive risk scoring and provide new targets for therapeutic study, according to Alfred George, Jr., MD, chair and the Alfred Newton Richards Professor of Pharmacology and a co-author of the study.

“Prior to this work, there were only two genomic regions associated with Brugada syndrome risk that were identified by genome-wide studies. Data from the new study greatly expands this to 12 regions with a total of 21 genetic signals to better explain risk for Brugada syndrome,” George said. “The results also provide the basis for a polygenic risk score that can be used to assess risk in individuals.”

This portable lantern hosts a customizable OLED screen that transforms into a projection screen

Rén is a customizable lantern with an integrated OLED screen for users to project whatever moving images or videos they’d like.

Over the past few years, we’ve learned to prioritize what is most important to us. From going to the virtual family reunion to getting creative in the arts, we’re keeping the stuff that matters most to us extra close. Since the pandemic has transformed many of those experiences into digital ones, designers shave been getting creative in making them as large as real life, and sometimes even larger.

Designer: Merve Nur Sökme

Scientists Create Robot to Put Inside Your Body That Looks Like, Um

It’s like “Venom” or “Flubber” come to life.

Scientists have created a bizarre magnetic slime that can be remotely controlled via a magnetic field, New Scientist reports. They’re hoping the odd entity could be used to navigate narrow passages inside the human body, likely to collect objects that were mistakenly swallowed.

Of course, that’s if you’re willing to swallow this thing and have it poking around inside of you — video footage of the thing certainly doesn’t make it look appetizing. In fact, people online are already cracking potty humor jokes about it.

Our DNA is Older Than Earth Itself — Where Did It Come From? — Oct 2, 2018

How can you prove that we may not be from here? The complexity of our DNA doubles every 600M years (Moores Law) so if you take the timeline back to where it intersects when life must have begun, it would be about 9.5B years ago, but the Earth has only been around for about 4.5B years. What gives?

This video is a short 1 min 12 second clip from a great documentary by Caroline Cory, “ET Contact: They Are Here”, available on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/e-t-contact-they-are-here/id1286966239

Trailer: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/e-t-contact-they-are-here/id1286966239

More info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7230004/

—About Making Contact Project

Continue reading “Our DNA is Older Than Earth Itself — Where Did It Come From? — Oct 2, 2018” | >

CRISPR and HIV: New technique in human blood unveils potential paths toward cure

Scientists at Northwestern Medicine are using new advances in CRISPR gene-editing technology to uncover new biology that could lead to longer-lasting treatments and new therapeutic strategies for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.

Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the . How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins—and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2—hijack the body’s cells to replicate and spread across systems?