Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past several years, DARPA-funded researchers have pioneered RNA vaccine technology, a medical countermeasure against infectious diseases that uses coded genetic constructs to stimulate production of viral proteins in the body, which in turn can trigger a protective antibody response. As a follow-on effort, DARPA funded research into genetic constructs that can directly stimulate production of antibodies in the body.^, DARPA is now launching the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, aimed at developing that foundational work into an entire system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status. Such a capability would offer a stark contrast to the state of the art for developing and deploying traditional vaccines—a process that does not deliver treatments to patients until months, years, or even decades after a viral threat emerges.

“DARPA’s goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers’ hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration. We need to be able to move at this speed considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control,” said Matt Hepburn, the P3 Program Manager. “The technology needs to work on any viral disease, whether it’s one humans have faced before or not.”

Recent outbreaks of viral infectious diseases such as Zika, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola have cast into sharp relief the inability of the global health system to rapidly contain the spread of a disease using existing tools and procedures. State-of-the-art medical countermeasures typically take many months or even years to develop, produce, distribute, and administer. These solutions often arrive too late—if at all—and in quantities too small to respond to emerging threats. In contrast, the envisioned P3 platform would cut response time to weeks and stay within the window of relevance for containing an outbreak.

Ring Garden is a finalist of LAGI 2016: Santa Monica, a biennial design competition that encourages interconnectivity between art, renewable energy and education.

The machine-learned smarts that enable Microsoft’s Skype Translator, Bing and Cortana to accomplish tasks such as translating conversations, compiling knowledge and understanding the intent of spoken words are increasingly finding their way into third-party applications that people use every day.

These advances in the democratization of artificial intelligence are coming in part from Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of 25 tools that allow developers to add features such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, and language understanding to their applications with zero expertise in machine learning.

Continue reading “Microsoft Cognitive Services push gains momentum” »

DNA — now with a new base pair! (credit: Romesberg Lab)

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed the first stable semisynthetic organism — a bacterium with two new synthetic bases (called X and Y) added to the four natural bases (A, T, C, and G) that every living organism possesses. Adding two more letters to expand the genetic alphabet can be used to make novel proteins for new therapeutics, according to the researchers.

All life as we currently know it contains just four bases that pair up to form two “base pairs” — the rungs of the DNA ladder — which are simply rearranged to create different organisms.

Continue reading “First stable semisynthetic organism created” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eg2TrS0lGDo

Innocorp has a new drone that is a flying submarine. It is an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone and iot can transitio from water to air to land without any individual or multiple deployments, fission of elements, (as in rockets), or complicated maneuvering.

Like the Murres, a unique seabird which can circumnavigate in the air and in water, SubMurres does both in unprecedented fashion. SubMurres has all the key features of a submarine, including complete marine functionality, communication tower with periscope for panoramic viewing of above-water landscape, dual propulsion blades, fully-articulated rotors that emerge as needed, sensors, and more. But it doesn’t end there.

Continue reading “A real flying submarine drone” »

Foundation and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging join forces on a research program against neurodegenerative diseases.

#aging #crowdfundthecure

Research can seem bland to us laypersons. But, Marko Vukolić shares many of my research interests and he exceeds my academic credentials (with just enough overlap for me to understand his work). So, in my opinion, his writing is anything but bland…

Vukolić started his career as a post-doc intern at IBM in Zurich Switzerland. After a teaching stint as assistant professor at Eurecom and visiting professor at ETH Zurich, he rejoined the IBM research staff in both cloud computing infrastructure and the Blockchain Group.*

As a researcher and academic, Vukolić is a rising star in consensus-based mechanisms and low latency replicated state machines. At Institut Mines-Télécom in Paris, he wrote papers and participated in research projects on fault tolerance, scalability, cloud computing and distributed trust mechanisms.

Now, at IBM Zurich, Vukolić has published a superior analysis addressing the first and biggest elephant in the Bitcoin ballroom, Each elephant addresses an urgent need:

Continue reading “Blockchain Scalability: Proof-of-Work vs BFT Replication” »

RNA interference (RNAi) is an important process, used by many different organisms to regulate the activity of genes. This animation explains how RNAi works and introduces the two main players: small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs). We take you on an audio-visual journey, diving into a cell to show how genes are transcribed to make messenger RNA (mRNA) and how RNAi can silence specific mRNAs to stop them from making proteins. The animation is based on the latest research, to give you an up-to-date view.

If you’d like to know more about the structures and processes you see in this video, check out the accompanying slideshow: http://www.nature.com/nrg/multimedia/rnai/animation/index.html

Continue reading “RNA interference (RNAi)” »

Recent evidence suggests that a variety of organisms may harness some of the unique features of quantum mechanics to gain a biological advantage. These features go beyond trivial quantum effects and may include harnessing quantum coherence on physiologically important timescales.

Quantum Biology — Quantum Mind Theory