Lifeboat Foundation

Gene editing has already been used to fight diseases, but there’s now hope that it might eliminate the diseases altgether. Researchers have shown that it’s possible to eliminate facial muscular dystrophy using a newer editing technique, CRISPR (Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) to replace the offending gene and ‘turn off’ the condition. The approach sends a mix of protein and RNA to bind to a gene and give it an overhaul.

This doesn’t mean that doctors suddenly have a cure-all on their hands. They haven’t tried CRISPR on real live people, and there’s no guarantee that it’d work with every genetic condition under the Sun. The initial test was only 50 percent effective, too. If this gene mending is useful in the field, though, it could do a lot to transform medicine. Doctors could treat the root cause of a genetic disease rather than deal with the symptoms, and possibly wipe it out entirely — or at least, make it more bearable.

[Image credit: Getty Images].

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A NEW anti-ageing wonder drug could see us living until 120, claim scientists.

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It will be a replay of the same catastrophic explosion astronomers first saw in November 2014.

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Artificial meat will be on our plates sooner than we may realize.

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For some time now, graphene has been the wonder material that scientists have been most excited about using: as it develops, it promises to transform everything from night-vision goggles to energy storage. Now researchers across the globe think they’ve come up with a material to rival it: diamond nanothread.

The clues are in the name. This potentially revolutionary, next-generation material is partly made from diamond and is incredibly thin as well as incredibly strong. Technically speaking, we’re looking at a type of carbon (like graphene) taking the form of a one-dimensional diamond crystal that’s topped with hydrogen. To create the material, benzene molecules were stacked together and pressurised.

It’s too early to say how diamond nanothread could be used — right now scientists are still at the research and simulation stage — but one of the appeals of a material like this is its versatility. And a team of scientists working at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia has been looking into the properties of diamond nanothread and think it might be more versatile and robust than originally believed.

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At what state are we leaving earth to the next generation?

We’re likely living in a post-400 ppm world. Here’s what it means to scientists that study the climate.

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LG really, really wants your next TV, smartwatch, and car to use an OLED panel and, preferably, one that’s come off its new $8.71bn production line. The company’s panel arm, LG Display, has announced a whopping 1.84 trillion South Korean Won investment into a brand new facility dubbed P10, which will cater for what LG predicts will be blockbuster demand for OLED in a range of sizes.

That $8.71bn is only the tip of the iceberg, mind, and the plant — to be constructed in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, Korea — is expected to eventually cost more than five times that amount.

Continue reading “LG pumps $8.7bn into OLED for your car, TV and wrist” »

A week and a half ago, we learned that Tesla is on a quest to hire more engineers to accelerate the development of its self-driving car technologies.

Tesla was already no slouch in the autonomous-vehicle world, having released its Autopilot feature into the wild just over a month ago.

We sampled Autopilot as soon as it hit the streets and were quite impressed, to put it mildly.

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An Italian surgeon hopes to perform the first-ever head transplant. Is he a genius or a crank?

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