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Category: education – Page 97

JPL & the Space Age: To the Rescue.

In 1990, Hubble meant trouble. The highly touted space telescope was designed to escape Earth’s blurry atmosphere to capture unparalleled visual images of the universe, but its creators were shocked to discover that a minuscule flaw rendered it nearsighted.

Enter NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers, who offered up an ingenious solution to Hubble’s visual woes. But would it work?

Hubble wasn’t the only space misadventure getting JPL’s attention during the 1990s: The Magellan spacecraft, nicknamed “Salvage 1” for its reliance on spare parts, barely survived its arrival at Venus. Galileo, destined for Jupiter, barely skirted failure when its main communications antenna refused to unfurl. And Mars Observer, the first mission to the Red Planet in nearly two decades, would mysteriously disappear just before going into orbit.

“To the Rescue” explores these iconic examples of the tireless effort and indomitable ingenuity of JPL engineers as they attempt to rescue the machines they had lofted into the heavens.

Continue reading “JPL & the Space Age: To the Rescue” | >

Quinn SenaAuthor.

Tenor.

Jose Ruben Rodriguez Fuentes shared a link.

Carrie Arnold is a freelance health and science writer living in Virginia.

At the age of 20, I committed my first mass murder. I didn’t, of course, mean to kill anyone. But my good intentions meant nothing to the small mound of deceased fruit flies in the bottom of the vial.

My goal was simply to anesthetize them and then search their wrinkled, vellum wings and bulging eyes for mutations. It was a classic introductory genetics experiment, one taught to countless aspiring biologists for a century. I doused a cotton ball with ether, the fruity-smelling liquid that would render the flies temporarily unconscious (and easier to count). The instructor warned us to make sure the flies were completely knocked out, so that they didn’t wake up mid-experiment. So I left the ether-soaked cotton on the vial an extra minute or two. Just to be safe.

Continue reading “The Surprisingly Sophisticated Mind Of An Insect” | >

The chief inspector of schools in England has told parliament that children’s rights should take priority over religious concerns and schoolgirls should be free from pressure to wear hijabs.

The National Secular Society has welcomed the remarks from Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman, which came in an appearance before the Commons public accounts committee on Wednesday.

Spielman defended a recent assertion that schools should enforce “muscular liberalism” and said religion should not “get priority over all the other protected characteristics”, referring to anti-discrimination protections in equalities legislation.

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Ah, NFT’S. I genuinely am not sure how I feel or think about them, though I DEFINITELY lean towards an annoyed 🤔MEH🙄.

What I DO know is that this is a great, brief look at the legal aspects of the issues surrounding it and the thing itself.

Thoughts?

NFTs: legal nonsense? 🚀 Get access to the exclusive companion video! — For a LIMITED TIME get CuriosityStream & Nebula for 26% OFF! https://legaleagle.link/curiositystream.
And see my collaboration with Steve Mould! https://youtu.be/IZaTd0hDtkI

Welcome back to LegalEagle. The most avian legal analysis on the internets.

Continue reading “NFTs Are Legally Problematic ft. Steve Mould & Coffeezilla” | >

I have created an educational guide to the adenovirus capsid! The adenovirus is one of the most frequently used types of viruses for gene therapy (along with AAV and lentivirus). It is a powerful vehicle for delivering DNA to cells in the body. But to work with adenovirus as a technology, it is important to understand its fundamental biological structure and function. This guide will help you to gain a more holistic comprehension of a particularly important part of adenovirus biology: the capsid. I made the images using PyMol.

PDF version: Guide to the Structure and Function of the Adenovirus Capsid

For this guide, I will explain the fundamental biology of adenovirus capsid proteins with an emphasis on the context of gene therapy. While the guide is meant primarily for readers with an interest in applying adenovirus to gene therapy, it will not include much discussion of the techniques and technologies involved in engineering adenoviruses for such purposes. If you are interested in learning more about adenovirus engineering, you may enjoy my review paper “Synthetic Biology Approaches for Engineering Next-Generation Adenoviral Gene Therapies” [1]. Here, I will focus mostly on the capsid of human adenovirus serotype 5 (Ad5) since it is the most commonly used type of adenovirus employed in gene therapy research, but I will occasionally describe other types of adenoviruses when necessary. Many of the presented concepts remain the same or similar across other types of adenoviruses.

The adenovirus consists of an icosahedral protein capsid enclosing a double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) genome. It possesses 12 fiber proteins which protrude from the capsid and helps to facilitate cellular transduction. Adenoviruses are nonenveloped and approximately 90 nm in diameter (not including the fibers). The Ad5 genome is about 36 kb in size. Major capsid proteins of the adenovirus include the hexon, penton, and fiber. The minor capsid proteins are protein IIIa, protein VI, protein VIII, and protein IX. Inside the capsid, there are core proteins including protein V, protein VII, protein μ (also known as protein X), adenovirus proteinase (AVP), protein IVa2, and terminal protein (TP) [2].

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Thomas Fuller, an African sold into slavery in 1,724 at age 14, was sometimes known as the “Virginia Calculator” for his extraordinary ability to solve complex mathematical problems in his head. He was asked how many seconds there were in a year, he briefly answered 31,536,000 seconds.

He was asked again how many seconds a man who is 70 years old, 17 days and 12 hours lived, he answered in a minute and a half 2,210,500,800. One of the men was doing the problems on paper and informed Fuller that he was wrong because the answer was much smaller. Fuller hastily responded, “Nah, you forgot about leap years. When leap years were added to the account, the sums matched up.”

Fuller was one of the first cases recorded in the literature of the wise man syndrome, when in 1,789, Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, described his incredible ability to calculate, without having an education and training in mathematics, his ability was used as proof that enslaved African Americans were equal to whites in intelligence, fueling some pro-abolitionist discussions.

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US-based architecture studio NBBJ has released designs for a net-zero school in Encino, California, that will cater to neurodiverse students.

The design of the Lower School campus of Westmark School uses acoustic technologies, as well as the integration of flora and natural materials, to create a comfortable environment for students with special needs.

“Designers selected a variety of sound-absorbing materials for different spaces, developed reading nooks and other niches for creative learning both inside and outside the classroom, and oriented views to green space to enhance different educational modes,” said NBBJ.

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Remote robotic-assisted surgery is far from new, with various educational and research institutions developing machines doctors can control from other locations over the years. There hasn’t been a lot of movement on that front when it comes to endovascular treatments for stroke patients, which is why a team of MIT engineers has been developing a telerobotic system surgeons can use over the past few years. The team, which has published its paper in Science Robotics, has now presented a robotic arm that doctors can control remotely using a modified joystick to treat stroke patients.

That arm has a magnet attached to its wrist, and surgeons can adjust its orientation to guide a magnetic wire through the patient’s arteries and vessels in order to remove blood clots in their brain. Similar to in-person procedures, surgeons will have to rely on live imaging to get to the blood clot, except the machine will allow them to treat patients not physically in the room with them.

There’s a critical window of time after a stroke’s onset during which endovascular treatment should be administered to save a patient’s life or to preserve their brain function. Problem is, the procedure is quite complex and takes years to master. It involves guiding a thin wire through vessels and arteries without damaging any of them, after all. Neurosurgeons trained in the procedure are usually found in major hospitals, and patients in remote locations that have to be transported to these larger centers might miss that critical time window. With this machine, surgeons can be anywhere and still perform the procedure. Another upside? It minimizes the doctos’ exposure to radiation from X-ray imaging.

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