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Category: innovation – Page 52

Southern Company has a historic commitment to energy innovation. Since the 1960s, the company has invested well over $2 billion in research and development (R&D), and currently, their employees are on the forefront of delivering new ideas to build the future of energy.

Enter Spot—an agile robot. Chethan Acharya, a principal research engineer within Southern Company R&D, first discovered Spot on social media.

At the time, Acharya’s job was to find and test new sensors, analytics tools, and other solutions to help Southern Company improve operations and maintenance (O&M) activities while also lowering costs.

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Shift Robotics is set to introduce its latest innovation, the Moonwalkers X, at CES 2024, showcasing advancements that make these robotic shoes significantly lighter, quicker, and smarter than their predecessor.

The Moonwalkers X, with six wheels instead of 10, is poised to redefine the landscape of commercial mobility. Xunjie Zhang, CEO and founder of Shift Robotics, expressed excitement about the upcoming launch, stating, “With Moonwalkers X, we’ve redefined lightweight mobility by trimming nearly a pound from the original design.”

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All these previous innovations pale in the face of tools like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly.

These generative AI image systems, the kind that easily spits out this image below of a flooded downtown Manhattan, are dream weavers that make the literal out of the imagined.

When Midjourney builds an image, there are no easily identifiable sources, mediums, or artists. Every pixel can look as imaginary or real as you want and when they leave the digital factory, these images (and video) travel fleetfooted around the world, leaving truth waiting somewhere in the wilderness.

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Just like a doctor adjusts the dose of a medication to the patient’s needs, the expression of therapeutic genes, those modified in a person to treat or cure a disease via gene therapy, also needs to be maintained within a therapeutic window. Staying within the therapeutic window is important as too much of the protein could be toxic, and too little could result in a small or no therapeutic effect.

Although the principle of has been known for a long time, there has been no strategy to implement it safely, limiting the potential applications of gene therapy in the clinic.

In their current study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine report on a technology to effectively regulate gene expression, a promising solution to fill this gap in gene therapy clinical applications. A Research Briefing on the breakthrough has been published in the same journal issue.

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Unlike older methods that use things foreign to our bodies, this one doesn’t trigger our immune system and employs small molecules to interact with RNA.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have developed a breakthrough technology to regulate gene expression in gene therapy, addressing the crucial issue of maintaining therapeutic gene levels within a safe range.

This is important because having too much or too little of a gene’s activity within a therapeutic window can cause problems. Their method uses tiny substances in amounts approved by the FDA to control the genes.

Current methods have issues

Continue reading “Gene on/off? New tech lets scientists control genes like a light switch” | >

The use of artificial intelligence by the general population in developed countries such as the US to a “significant” degree will start to take place in the next 18 to 24 months, according to Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates in his year-end letter released last week.

The impact on things such as productivity and innovation could be unprecedented, says Gates.

“Artificial intelligence is about to accelerate the rate of new discoveries at a pace we’ve never seen before,” wrote Gates on his blog.

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