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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,485

Okay, maybe not as big as the one in the picture.

Potatoes are my favorite vegetable; you can turn them into fries, bake them for an exquisite dish or mash them and eat them as a side dish. There are endless possibilities to cook a potato and what can be better than adding human fat gene in them to make them bigger and juicier?

Scientists have been experimenting with growing larger crops and it seems like they found the perfect solution; adding the human gene related to obesity and fat mass into the plants to yield super crops. The potato plants were inserted with a fat-regulating protein called FTO which changed the genetic code into producing extra proteins which resulted in large potatoes that were almost twice the size of regular ones grown from the same plant crop. “It [was] really a bold and bizarre idea. To be honest, we were probably expecting some catastrophic effects,” said Chuan He, a chemist at University of Chicago.

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ABOVE: MAPT, one of the genes linked to both heavy drinking and neurodegenerative diseases, codes for the protein tau (blue in this illustration) inside a neuron. NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING/ NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH

Some genetic risk factors for alcohol use disorder overlap with those for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, scientists reported in Nature Communications on August 20. The study, which relied on a combination of genetic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic data, also offers insight into the molecular commonalities among these disorders, and their connections to immune disfunction.

“By meshing findings from genome wide association studies… ith gene expression in brain and other tissues, this new study has prioritized genes likely to harbor regulatory variants influencing risk of Alcohol Use Disorder,” writes David Goldman, a neurogenetics researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), in an email to The Scientist. “Several of these genes are also associated with neurodegenerative disorders—an intriguing connection because of alcohol’s ability to prematurely age the brain.”

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Pico technology is hypothetical future level of technology which will revolutionized the scientist world. This technology is combination of pico and meter with scale of trillionths of a meter (10−12). This atomic and subatomic range particles reveals extraordinary properties and pave the way for tremendous applications [1].

The way lengths and angles attach together is the main determine of the materials properties. Alterable or reversible bonds distortions at pico-meter scale which changes the electronic conformation causes multiple properties for materials.

On the other hand, pico-scale particles changes the material properties by converting energy state of electrons within an atom. Physical and chemical properties of systems such as melting point, fluorescence, electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability, and chemical reactivity changes basically at pico-scale due to quantum effects of materials [2]. Moreover, surface energy of atoms increases by alternation of electron distribution and therefore, enhances protein and molecules adsorption on to materials. This privileges will resulting in tracing proteins, DNA and molecules and labeling them for various purpose.

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New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI) analyzing medical scans can identify the race of patients with an astonishing degree of accuracy, while their human counterparts cannot. With the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approving more algorithms for medical use, the researchers are concerned that AI could end up perpetuating racial biases. They are especially concerned that they could not figure out precisely how the machine-learning models were able to identify race, even from heavily corrupted and low-resolution images.

In the study, published on pre-print service Arxiv, an international team of doctors investigated how deep learning models can detect race from medical images. Using private and public chest scans and self-reported data on race and ethnicity, they first assessed how accurate the algorithms were, before investigating the mechanism.

“We hypothesized that if the model was able to identify a patient’s race, this would suggest the models had implicitly learned to recognize racial information despite not being directly trained for that task,” the team wrote in their research.

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New information from a study reported in Stem Cells might result in more effective treatments for osteoarthritis and other cartilage diseases, as well as hereditary disorders affecting cartilage development. Their findings might also point to a new way to accelerate stem cell differentiation for bioengineering cartilage, the researchers say.

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The scientists behind the new device were working within the realm of nano-supercapacitors (nBSC), which are conventional capacitors but scaled down to the sub-millimeter scale. Developing these types of devices is tricky enough, but the researchers sought to make one that could work safely in the human body to power tiny sensors and implants, which requires swapping out problematic materials and corrosive electrolytes for ones that are biocompatible.

These devices are known as biosupercapacitors and the smallest ones developed to date is larger than 3 mm3, but the scientists have made a huge leap forward in terms of how tiny biosupercapacitors can be. The construction starts with a stack of polymeric layers that are sandwiched together with a light-sensitive photo-resist material that acts as the current collector, a separator membrane, and electrodes made from an electrically conductive biocompatible polymer called PEDOT: PSS.

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Novel Cultivated Meats For Earth (And Space!) — Dr. Neta Lavon Ph.D., CTO / VP of R&D, Aleph Farms.

Dr. Neta Lavon is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President of R&D at Aleph Farms (https://www.aleph-farms.com/), a cultivated meat company that is shaping the future of food by growing high-quality, slaughter-free beef steaks directly from cow cells, preserving natural resources, and avoiding the use of antibiotics.

Dr. Lavon is an expert in stem cell applications in biotechnology. In her previous position as the COO of Kadimastem (KDST), she developed cell therapy products from stem cells for ALS and Diabetes.

As a researcher in Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, USA, Dr. Lavon established and banked 25 novel pluripotent stem cell lines.

Dr. Lavon holds a PhD, an M.Sc. in Biotechnology and B.Sc. in Food Sciences from the Hebrew University, Israel.

Continue reading “Dr. Neta Lavon, Ph.D. — CTO and Vice President of R&D — Aleph Farms — Meat For Earth (And Space)” | >

The ‘Joker’ virus hides in several apps on the Google Play Store and the user does not realize it until their bank accounts are emptied. See how this malware operates and what are the dangerous applications.

In September 2,020 the ’Joker’ virus was found in 24 Android applications that registered more than 500 thousand downloads before being removed. It is estimated that that time it affected more than 30 countries including the United States, Brazil and Spain. Through unauthorized subscriptions, hackers could steal up to $7 (about 140 Mexican pesos) per subscription weekly, a figure that has most likely increased in recent months.

How does the Joker virus work in Android apps?

The ’Joker’ Trojan virus belongs to a family of malware known as Bread 0 whose objective is to hack cell phone bills and authorize operations without the user’s consent.

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