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Do the stimulus checks being sent to individuals to help in the coronavirus crisis count as a form of universal basic income? Andrew Yang thinks so. But, as WSJ’s Jason Bellini reports, others believe the intention behind UBI is misguided. Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images.

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Thank you my hero.

Elon Musk has joined the global tech crusade now underway to revolutionize vaccine manufacturing — now aimed at delivering billions of doses of a new mRNA vaccine to fight Covid-19. And he’s cutting right to the front.

In a late-night tweet Wednesday, the Tesla chief announced:

Continue reading “Tesla chief Elon Musk teams up with Covid-19 player CureVac to build ‘RNA microfactories’” »

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Tesla, the electric car company founded and run by Elon Musk, is building mobile molecular printers to assist Germany’s CureVac in manufacturing its experimental COVID-19 vaccine. Musk tweeted the information on Wednesday, July 1.

The “printers” are portable, automated messenger RNA (mRNA) production units, which Musk referred to as “RNA microfactories.”

Lurking just beneath the surface of just about every common nursery rhyme is a complex record of times long gone. For example, the “crooked man” who “laid a crooked sixpence upon a crooked style” was none other than the great 17th-century Scot General Sir Alexander Leslie. The crooked stile was the uneasy border between Scotland and England established by the controversial covenant he signed. Quite similarly, many enigmatic structures that permanently persist or otherwise transiently appear and resorb in the development of the nervous systems of many creatures also encode a rich evolutionary past.

One such functioning relic is Reissner’s fiber, a glycoprotein sheet secreted by the subcommissural organ (SCO) that inexorably treadmills down the central canal of the spinal cord. Although the SCO was one of the first structures of the mammalian brain to differentiate, in humans, it begins regressing around age three or four and typically becomes vestigial by adulthood. The main component of Reissner’s fiber is a giant 5000-amino-acid vertebrate molecule called SCO-spondin. This protein contains axonal pathfinding domains critical to development of the posterior commissure, a transhemispheric highway that bears axons controlling the pupillary light reflex.

The other product of the SCO is a thyroid-hormone-transporting protein called transthyretin. Much like all the organified metals fixed by life, iodine has a unique story to tell in the evolution of the body plan. Recently, an intriguing connection between Reissner’s fiber and development of the spine that houses it has been discovered in the model organism, zebrafish. These fish, as recently observed for the serotonergic control of neurogenesis, have proven to be an exemplary model for studying all things neural. In the latest issue of Current Biology, author Nathalie Jurisch-Yaksi reviews a remarkable confluence of ideas that establish an indisputable role for Reissner’s membrane building a straight and strong spine.

If there’s one myth that has persisted through the years without much evidence, it’s this: multiply your dog’s age by seven to calculate how old they are in “human years.” In other words, the old adage says, a four-year-old dog is similar in physiological age to a 28-year-old person.

But a new study by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine throws that out the window. Instead, they created a formula that more accurately compares the ages of humans and dogs. The formula is based on the changing patterns of methyl groups in dog and human genomes — how many of these chemical tags and where they’re located — as they age. Since the two species don’t age at the same rate over their lifespans, it turns out it’s not a perfectly linear comparison, as the 1:7 years rule-of-thumb would suggest.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in South Korea has found that stimulating production of a certain enzyme in roundworms can increase their lifespan. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their study of the protein VRK-1 and what they learned about its impact on the longevity of roundworms.

Prior research has shown that one way to increase longevity in some species is to use techniques that slow down mitochondrial respiration. In this new effort, the researchers were looking to better understand why slowing energy use in mitochondria has an impact on aging. As part of their effort, they looked at an energy sensor in mitochondria called adenosine 5’-monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), known to play a role in controlling how much energy is used in cells in roundworms. Prior research had suggested its level of activity is controlled by the protein VRK-1. To learn more about its impact on aging, the researchers genetically engineered two lines of roundworms to force them to produce more VRK-1 and two lines of roundworms to force them to produce less VRK-1. They then monitored the roundworms to see how long they lived.

The researchers found those roundworms expressing more than the normal amount of VRK-1 tended to live longer than average, while those expressing less than average amounts of VRK-1 had shorter lifespans. More specifically, control worms representing the normal lifespan of a roundworm lived on average 16.9 days. In their experiments, one of the lines expressing more VRK-1 lived on average 20.8 days, while the other lived on average 23.7 days. And one of the lines producing less VRK-1 lived on average just 12.7 days and the other just 15.9 days. The researchers suggest this finding indicates that VRK-1 has a direct impact on roundworm longevity.

A team of quantitative biology researchers from Northwestern University have uncovered new insights into the impact of stochasticity in gene expression, offering new evolutionary clues into organismal design principles in the face of physical constraints.

In cells, genes are expressed through transcription, a process where genetic information encoded in DNA is copied into messenger RNA (mRNA). The mRNA is then translated to make protein molecules, the workhorses of cells. This entire process is subject to bursts of natural stochasticity—or randomness—which can impact the outcome of biological processes that proteins carry out.

The researchers’ new experimental and theoretical analyses studied a collection of genes in Drosophila, a family of fruit flies, and found that gene expression is regulated by the frequency of these transcriptional bursts.

Mystery surrounds the “completely unprecedented” deaths of hundreds of elephants in Botswana over the last two months.

Dr Niall McCann said colleagues in the southern African country had spotted more than 350 elephant carcasses in the Okavango Delta since the start of May.

But they have been unable to rule out either poisoning or disease. The way the animals appear to be dying — many dropping on their faces — and sightings of other elephants walking in circles points to something potentially attacking their neurological systems, Dr McCann said.

April 2020 Japan has offered to provide an anti-flu drug free to countries including Turkey to treat coronavirus patients, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said on Tuesday.

According to Kyodo News, Motegi said 20 countries could get the drug Avigan, which is currently undergoing clinical tests, including Turkey, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Iran, Myanmar, and Saudi Arabia.

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