Lifeboat Foundation

The random nature of genetic mutation implies evolution is largely unpredictable. But recent research suggests this may not be entirely so, with interactions between genes playing a bigger role than expected in determining how a genome changes.

It’s known that some areas of the genome are more likely to be mutable than others, but a new study now suggests a species’ evolutionary history may play a role in making mutations more predictable too.

“The implications of this research are nothing short of revolutionary,” says University of Nottingham evolutionary biologist James McInerney.

In the future Biotechnology may allows us repair, modify, or augment humans, but how will this be done? What will these technologies look like and should we embrace them?

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Should all patients with COPD exacerbations receive oral steroids, or only those with eosinophilia?

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Give people a barrier, and at some point they are bound to smash through. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Yuri Gagarin burst into orbit for the first manned spaceflight in 1961. The Human Genome Project finished cracking the genetic code in 2003. And we can add one more barrier to humanity’s trophy case: the exascale barrier.

The exascale barrier represents the challenge of achieving exascale-level computing, which has long been considered the benchmark for high performance. To reach that level, however, a computer needs to perform a quintillion calculations per second. You can think of a quintillion as a million trillion, a billion billion, or a million million millions. Whichever you choose, it’s an incomprehensibly large number of calculations.

Continue reading “Supercomputer uses machine learning to set new speed record” »

Japan’s Moon Snipper Landed on the Moon making Japan the fifth nation to accomplish a lunar landing and Astrobiotic’s Peregrine lunar lander reenters Earth’s atmosphere.

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ABC News anchor Robin Roberts was brought to tears on Thursday while reporting on a new cancer treatment breakthrough. The story was about a new means of helping cancer patients find donors for blood stem cell transplants – something that Roberts herself had to deal with during her own cancer battle and subsequent health issues. She shed tears thinking of families who will not have to worry as much as she did.

Roberts presented this story along with Good Morning America co-hosts George Stephanopoulos and Lara Spencer. They explained how patients previously had to find a near perfect match for a blood stem cell transplant. This was a particular issue for people of color, but this new breakthrough more than doubles their chances of finding a match. They illustrated the effects with the real-life story of a girl who recently survived a cancer diagnosis that would have been much more dangerous beforehand. Roberts explained how broadening the list of potential donors can be so helpful – and can improve the mindsets of patients and their families as well.

Researchers from the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences have published a new study exploring the use of positron emission particle tracking (PEPT) in a living subject for the first time.

PEPT technology allows for the 3D localization and tracking of a single radioactive particle within large, dense, and/or optically opaque systems, which is difficult to study using other methodologies. The technology is currently used to study flows within complex mechanical systems such as large engines, industrial mixers, etc., but has not yet been translated for use in biomedical applications.

PEPT has previously been an unexplored area in biomedical imaging due to the lack of methods to isolate and radiolabel a single particle of a small enough size and with enough radioactivity which to would enable it to be injected and detected in a living subject.

Talk to any structural biologist, and they’ll tell you how a cool new method is taking over their field. By flash freezing proteins and bombarding them with electrons, cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can map protein shapes with near-atomic resolution, offering clues to their function and revealing bumps and valleys that drug developers can target. The technique can catch wriggly proteins in multiple configurations, and it can even capture those that have been off-limits to traditional x-ray analysis because they stubbornly resist being crystallized. Many researchers expect cryo-EM will surpass x-ray crystallography in the number of new protein structures solved next year.

Yet for all its charms, cryo-EM has flaws: The freezing process is finicky, and the microscopes are expensive. High-end machines can cost more than $5 million to buy, about as much to install, and hundreds of thousands per year to operate and maintain. Many U.S. states—and countries—don’t have a single cryo-EM microscope. “The haves and have-nots is what it is right now,” says Rakhi Rajan, a structural biologist at the University of Oklahoma, which currently lacks one.

Researchers at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) have been working to democratize the field. Today, in the, the U.K. team describes cobbling together a prototype cryo-EM microscope that has solved its first structures. The machine—what LMB physicist Chris Russo calls a “cheap little hatchback” rather than a “Ferrari”—could rival high-end machines in capabilities for one-tenth of the cost.

A method that provides cloned embryos with a healthy placenta could pave the way for more research involving the primates.