What will it take for a same-sex couple—two males or two females—to be able to produce a biological child by combining their genomes in the same way that male-female couples do? Just to be clear, we’re not talking about adopting. Nor do we mean one mate fertilizes a donor egg or is fertilized with donated sperm. Those things have long existed. We mean you take two women or two men and make a baby.
And they’ve already done it with two male mice.
Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions— biocomputers of sorts.
Graduate students and researchers from Technion—Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.
The genetic material was inserted into the bacterial cell in the form of a plasmid: a relatively short DNA molecule that remains separate from the bacteria’s “natural” genome. Plasmids also exist in nature, and serve various functions. The research group designed the plasmid’s genetic sequence to function as a simple computer, or more specifically, a simple artificial neural network. This was done by means of several genes on the plasmid regulating each other’s activation and deactivation according to outside stimuli.
Synopsis: In this talk we articulate a positive vision of the future that is both viable given what we know, and also utterly radical in its implications. We introduce two key insights that, when taken together, synergize in powerful ways. Namely, (a) the long-tails of pleasure and pain, and (b) the correlation between wellbeing, productivity, and intelligence. This informs us how to distribute resources if we want to maximize wellbeing. Given the weight of the extremes, it is important to take them into account. But because of the causal significance of more typical hedonic ranges, engineering our baseline is a key consideration. This makes it natural to break down the task of paradise engineering into three components:
Avoid negative extremes.
increase hedonic baseline, and.
achieve new heights of experience.
Continue reading “The Future of Consciousness — Andrés Gómez Emilsson” »
Accelerating a new wave of personalized healthcare through more effective, efficient, and ethical drug and therapy discovery, development, and testing.
The new study found a correlation between outdoor artificial light at night (LAN) and higher rates of diabetes.
According to a new study, exposure to outdoor artificial light at night (LAN) is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, along with impaired glucose control.
Koszubarev/iStock.
A result of the gradual increase in human lifespan and high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries.
The world’s population hit eight billion today, November 15, and this is a “milestone in human development,” according to a statement by the United Nations (UN).
This unprecedented growth is due to the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene, and medicine.
Continue reading “The world’s population has reached 8 billion and counting” »
Circa 2011 face_with_colon_three
By Amanda Gefter.
Frank Close tells the human story of how we solved The Infinity Puzzle – once the bane of physics
A counter to deepfakes.
Deepfakes, which usually involve superimposing someone’s face and voice onto another person, started gaining attention a few years ago when adult websites began banning videos where the technique was used to add famous actresses’ faces to porn stars’ bodies.
Continue reading “Intel detection tool uses blood flow to identify deepfakes with 96% accuracy” »
Advancing Novel Therapeutic Interventions For Unmet Medical Needs — Dr. Michael Hufford, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO, LyGenesis; Interim CEO, Morphoceuticals; Scientific Advisor, Juvenescence.
Dr. Michael Hufford, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of LyGenesis (https://www.lygenesis.com/), a clinical-stage cell therapy company that transforms patient’s lymph nodes into bioreactors capable of growing functioning ectopic organs. He also serves as the Interim CEO of Morphoceuticals (https://www.morphoceuticals.com/) a company focused on modifying electric potentials in cells and tissues for a variety of applications in regenerative medicine, from improving amputation stump health and limb regeneration, to organogenesis, to creating a bioelectric atlas where numerous disease indications may be corrected.
The patients had some, although severely diminished, visual function during the day, however, at night they were essentially blind, with light sensitivity 10,000–100,000 times less than normal.
According to researchers at the Scheie Eye Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, adults with a genetic form of childhood-onset blindness experienced remarkable recoveries of night vision within days of receiving an experimental gene therapy.
The patients had Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), a congenital blindness caused by GUCY2D gene mutations. The findings were published in the journal iScience. The researchers administered AAV gene therapy, which contains the DNA.
