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Stanford develops CRISPR ‘lab on a chip’ for detecting COVID-19

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a CRISPR-based “lab on a chip” to detect COVID-19, and are working with automakers at Ford to develop their prototype into a market-ready product.

This could provide an automated, hand-held device designed to deliver a coronavirus test result anywhere within 30 minutes.

In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the test spotted active infections quickly and cheaply, using electric fields to purify fluids from a nasal swab sample and drive DNA-cutting reagents within the system’s tiny passages.

An Amazonian Tea Stimulates the Formation of New Neurons

Summary: DMT, a natural component of ayahuasca tea, promotes neurogenesis, a new study reports. Researchers found DMT was capable of activating neural stem cells and promoted the formation of new neurons.

Source: Complutense University of Madrid.

One of the main natural components of ayahuasca tea, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), promotes neurogenesis (the formation of new neurons) according to research led by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

Seeing the Future: Longevity Research and Glaucoma (Video)

Dr David Sinclair (Harvard) : “I want to mention one thing that nobody except the insiders would know, is that I was at a conference a couple weeks ago with all 15 of us talking about this reprogramming work, and a lot of it is not published yet. I’ve seen things that make my head spin, the ability to turn back aging in a whole animal,…”


On October 27, 2020, Glaucoma Research Foundation presented the 2020 Weston Lecture featuring a talk by world-renowned Harvard Medical School genetics researcher and best-selling author David Sinclair, PhD, AO discussing longevity research and glaucoma.

Julian Beinart: A life of carefully chosen words

Professor Emeritus Julian Beinart, an internationally celebrated architect and longtime MIT professor known for his highly influential course on urbanism, died on Oct. 2 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 88.

“Julian Beinart’s best ideals were the best ideals of this department,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, head of the MIT Department of Architecture. “A tireless student of form, he believed architecture’s role in the city also made it inextricable from politics. His legacy — in South Africa, the U.S., and beyond — also reminds us that the professional obligation of architects to the city stands alongside the civic demands on every one of us, architect or not.”

“Julian’s strengths came from an old-school faith,” says Arindam Dutta, professor of architectural history at MIT. “He believed cities were somehow designed artifacts, and in being so, they could be designed better. It was his task to train designers for this job.”

NASA finally makes contact with Voyager 2 after longest radio silence in 30 years

There’s never been a radio silence quite like this one. After long months with no way of making contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the record-setting interstellar spacecraft.

The breakdown in communications – lasting since March, almost eight months and a whole pandemic ago – wasn’t due to some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with interstellar space weirdness (although there’s that too).

The US Election & Aylmer Pastor Hildebrandt Speaks Again: The November 5th, 2020 Age of Ingenuity

If last week was a heavy political week in Canada, then this Tuesday was the culmination of an unprecedented period of political turmoil in the US. We’re going to take a look at what the alternative media, but not what the legacy media, is saying about this.

We’ve also reconnected with Henry Hildebrandt, the pastor of the Church of God in Aylmer Ontario. He’s been at the centre of the anti-lockdown protest movement in Ontario almost since the beginning of this so-called pandemic in March 2020.

He’s been so effective, the local Mayor has declared a “state of emergency” in an effort to shut down a planned protest featuring him in Aylmer Ontario on November 7th.

For the show notes, check out http://acuriousguy.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-us-election-aylmer-pastor-henry.html.

Is China banking on ‘disruptive technologies’ for a military edge?

Military observers said the disruptive technologies – those that fundamentally change the status quo – might include such things as sixth-generation fighters, high-energy weapons like laser and rail guns, quantum radar and communications systems, new stealth materials, autonomous combat robots, orbital spacecraft, and biological technologies such as prosthetics and powered exoskeletons.


Speeding up the development of ‘strategic forward-looking disruptive technologies’ is a focus of the country’s latest five-year plan.

Data analysis identifies the ‘mother’ of all SARS-CoV-2 genomes

In the field of molecular epidemiology, the worldwide scientific community has been sleuthing to solve the riddle of the early history of SARS-CoV-2.

Since the first SARS-CoV-2 virus infection was detected in December 2019, tens of thousands of its genomes have been sequenced worldwide, revealing that the coronavirus is mutating, albeit slowly, at a rate of 25 per per year.

But despite major efforts, no one to date has identified the first case of human transmission, or “patient zero” in the COVID-19 pandemic. Finding such a case is necessary to better understand how the virus may have jumped from its animal host first to infect humans as well as the history of how the SARS-CoV-2 has mutated over time and spread globally.

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