Engineers have created a DNA-based chemical oscillator, opening the door to molecular computing.
- By Rachel Nuwer on February 21, 2018
Read more
Programming a DNA Clock
Posted in biotech/medical, computing
Bigelow Aerospace — the Las Vegas-based company manufacturing space habitats — is starting a spinoff venture aimed at managing any modules that the company deploys into space. Called Bigelow Space Operations (BSO), the new company will be responsible for selling Bigelow’s habitats to customers, such as NASA, foreign countries, and other private companies. But first, BSO will try to figure out what kind of business exists exactly in lower Earth orbit, the area of space where the ISS currently resides.
Bigelow makes habitats designed to expand. The densely packed modules launch on a rocket and then inflate once in space, providing more overall volume for astronauts to roam around. The company already has one of its prototype habitats in orbit right now: the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, which has been attached to the International Space Station since 2016. The BEAM has proven that Bigelow’s expandable habitat technology not only works, but also holds up well against the space environment.
Read more
Trinity College Dublin (TCD), in Ireland, is to be the recipient of a new specialist 3D bioprinting facility supported by a collaboration between multinational medical device and pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, and the AMBER research center.
With preparations beginning in the first quarter of this year, the new 3D bioprinting laboratory is due to be opened by the close of 2018.
Professor Michael Morris, AMBER director, comments.
Read more
IBM Research Photo
Posted in computing, quantum physics, space
How do IBM scientists keep qubits colder than outer space?
IBM quantum physicists Dr. Stefan Filipp and Dr. Andreas Fuhrer (pictured) will be discussing quantum computing live from the IBM Zurich Research Lab, and will demonstrate how they keep qubits so cold, explain why, and take your questions.
Join us on Friday, Feb. 23 at 16:00 Paris time / 10:00 am EST.
Read more
Waiting on research advances is the rationale behind cryopreservation, and more broadly, a worldview known as transhumanism. A person killed by cancer or heart disease could reasonably be revived in a future when such ailments no longer exist. “They believe in the advance of technology,” says Giuseppe Nucci, an Italian photographer who visited with transhumanists and toured the facilities of Russia-based cryonics company KrioRus. “They hope that someone will wake them up.”
This hope, that the future will vanquish the ills of the present, is as old as the first civilisations that realized that with each passing year life got a little better. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov helped create an early 20th-century movement known as cosmism that was rooted in the idea that, given enough time, humans could defeat evil and death. If the human life span was too short, then the simple solution was to extend it, even after death, and suspend its decomposition until the world caught up.
Employees of a liquid nitrogen and dry ice factory on the outskirts of Moscow are shrouded in fog while refilling their liquid nitrogen tanks. Founded by former KrioRus employees, the company now supplies them. PHOTOGRAPH BY GIUSEPPE NUCCI
Read more
Researchers have achieved a new kind of chimeric first, producing sheep-human hybrid embryos that could one day represent the future of organ donation – by using body parts grown inside unnatural, engineered animals.
With that end goal in mind, scientists have created the first interspecies sheep-human chimera, introducing human stem cells into sheep embryos, resulting in a hybrid creature that’s more than 99 percent sheep – but also a tiny, little bit like you and me.
Admittedly, the human portion of the embryos created in the experiment – before they were destroyed after 28 days – is exceedingly small, but the fact it exists at all is what generates considerable controversy in this field of research.
Read more
Oganesson (Og) is the heaviest chemical element in the periodic table, but its properties have proved difficult to measure since it was first synthesised in 2002.
Now an advanced computer simulation has filled in some of the gaps, and it turns out the element is even weirder than many expected.
At the atomic level, oganesson behaves remarkably differently to lighter elements in several key ways – and that could provide some fundamental insights into the basics of how these superheavy elements work.
Read more