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Gene therapy in a box could reduce costs and save lives.

unnamed-1Gene therapy — the process of genetically altering cells to treat disease — is a highly promising process being studied as a way to cure devastating conditions like genetic disorders, HIV, and even cancer.

But despite the great need for medical advances in these areas, gene therapy can only be performed at a handful of high-tech clinics around the world and require highly trained staff, meaning that it may never be accessible to the millions of people whose lives it could save.

Enter “gene therapy in a box,” a table-top device developed at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle, which could provide gene therapy treatments without the expensive and rare medical infrastructure currently needed. My hope is that this technology… could open the door to saving millions of lives.

Continue reading “Newly-developed ‘gene therapy in a box’ could save millions of lives” | >

Nextbigfuture has interviewed Ryan Weed, CEO of Positron Dynamics. Positron Dynamics is developing antimatter catalyzed fusion propulsion which they will first demonstrate in a cubesat launch. They are getting around the still mostly unsolved difficulties of storing antimatter. They are doing this by using Sodium 22 isotopes.

Positron Dynamics has previously received a lot of press coverage when it was funded by the Thiel Breakthrough foundation to work on antimatter.

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Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself.

The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.

The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.

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For the first time, an experiment has directly imaged electron orbits in a high-magnetic field, illuminating an unusual collective behavior in electrons and suggesting new ways of manipulating the charged particles.

The study, conducted by researchers at Princeton University and the University of Texas-Austin was published Oct. 21, in the journal Science. The study demonstrates that the electrons, when kept at very low temperatures where their quantum behaviors emerge, can spontaneously begin to travel in identical elliptical paths on the surface of a crystal of bismuth, forming a quantum fluid state. This behavior was anticipated theoretically during the past two decades by researchers from Princeton and other universities.

“This is the first visualization of a quantum fluid of electrons in which interactions between the electrons make them collectively choose orbits with these unusual shapes,” said Ali Yazdani, the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton, who led the research.

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