This is one of the major problems in medicine — organ transplantation,” said Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the Cell study. “The demand for that is much higher than the supply.
An international team has put human cells into monkey embryos in hopes of finding new ways to produce organs for transplantation. But some ethicists still worry about how such research could go wrong.
A multivariate genome-wide association study highlighting loci that influence both face and brain shape suggesting shared developmental axes during early embryogenesis. These loci did not overlap with those governing behavioral–cognitive traits or neuropsychiatric risk indicating divergence between early brain development and cognitive function.
Circa 2020
Everyone should be well aware at this point that you need to have a face mask and good hand sanitizer on you every single time you go out. It’s the only way to protect yourself and those around you from the novel coronavirus. The CDC says so, the WHO says so, doctors say so, and experts all over the world agree. In fact, the CDC tells people right on its coronavirus site to always wear face masks anytime they have to leave their homes for any reason. It really couldn’t be any clearer: “Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth face cover when around others.”
Take my micro-transaction.
We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”
Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.
So what’s “the metaverse,” anyway? The term was coined in 1992 when Neal Stephenson published his hit sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which the protagonist moves between a virtual world and the real world fighting a computer virus. In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality.
Covid variants will be the next big challenge. Can vaccines protect us?
All viruses mutate. They do this to adapt and survive better in their specific host. The virus that causes Covid-19 is no different: it has moved from the animal realm, where it most likely originated in bats, to the human world. Since then, scientists have been locked in a battle between the spread of the virus and the ability to immunise against it. We now have the vaccines to protect us against Covid-19 – but what happens when this virus mutates further, as it likely will? {“uid”:0.9208093413637026,” hostPeerName”:” https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.
The reality is Benny and Josh both have Canavan disease, a fatal inherited brain disorder. They are buckled into wheelchairs, don’t speak, and can’t control their limbs.
On Thursday, April 8, in Dayton, Ohio, Landsman and his family rolled the older boy, Benny, into a hospital where over several hours, neurosurgeons drilled bore holes into his skull and injected trillions of viral particles carrying the correct version of a gene his body is missing.
The material is one of the thinnest antimicrobial coatings developed to date and is effective against a broad range of drug-resistant bacteria and fungal cells, while leaving human cells unharmed.
Importantly, the BP also began to self-degrade in that time and was entirely disintegrated within 24 hours—an important feature that shows the material would not accumulate in the body.
The laboratory study identified the optimum levels of BP that have a deadly antimicrobial effect while leaving human cells healthy and whole.
The researchers have now begun experimenting with different formulations to test the efficacy on a range of medically-relevant surfaces.