Lifeboat Foundation

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The world’s largest music label has yanked its artists’ music off TikTok Universal Music Group claims TikTok is unwilling to compensate musicians appropriately. (The Guardian) + Taylor Swift fans are kicking off. (Wired $) + Indie record labels don’t like the sound of Apple’s pay plans either. (FT $)

Chemotherapy can be toxic to heart cells. To help protect the hearts of cancer patients, Cedars-Sinai investigators have created a three-dimensional “heart-on-a-chip” to evaluate drug safety. In a study published in the journal Lab on a Chip, they show that the heart-on-a-chip, created using stem cells, accurately predicts the effects of drugs on human heart cells.

The investigators worked with induced pluripotent stem cells, which are blood cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells and can be turned into any cell type in the body. They used the stem cells to create two types of heart cells, but instead of placing them all together in an unstructured cell culture dish, as is usually done in heart toxicity testing, the investigators introduced the cells into specialized chips.

The 3D chips feature two channels that are arranged to cross each other, keeping each cell type separate but allowing them to interact. The chips also allow for movement and the introduction of fluids.

Researchers found Llama 2 fared not much better than random guessing in a medical test, while GPT-4 almost got a passing grade.

Windswept piles of dust, or layers of ice? ESA’s Mars Express has revisited one of Mars’s most mysterious features to clarify its composition. Its findings suggest layers of water ice stretching several kilometers below ground—the most water ever found in this part of the planet.

Over 15 years ago, Mars Express studied the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), revealing massive deposits up to 2.5 km deep. From these early observations, it was unclear what the deposits were made of—but new research now has an answer.

“We’ve explored the MFF again using newer data from Mars Express’s MARSIS radar, and found the deposits to be even thicker than we thought: up to 3.7 km thick,” says Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution, U.S., lead author of both the new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, and the initial 2007 study. “Excitingly, the radar signals match what we’d expect to see from layered ice, and are similar to the signals we see from Mars’s polar caps, which we know to be very ice rich.”

There are approximately 425 million people worldwide with diabetes. Approximately 75 million of these inject themselves with insulin daily. Now, they may soon have a new alternative to syringes or insulin pumps. Scientists have found a new way to supply the body with smart insulin.

The new insulin can be eaten by taking a capsule or, even better, within a piece of chocolate.

Inside these are tiny nano-carriers in which the insulin is encapsulated. The particles are 1/10,000th the width of a human hair and so small that you cannot even see them under a normal microscope.

With the support of electrical transport and magnetic measurement systems of Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF), a research team from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), discovered a new superconducting material called (InSe2)xNbSe2, which possesses a unique lattice structure. The superconducting transition temperature of this material reaches 11.6 K, making it the transition metal sulfide superconductor with the highest transition temperature under ambient pressure.

The results were published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.

TMD materials have received lots of attention due to their numerous applications in the fields of catalysis, energy storage, and integrated circuits. However, the relatively low superconducting transition temperatures of TMD superconductors have limited their potential use.

In the presence of protospacer adjacent motif (PAM), sgRNA accurately leads the Cas9 endonuclease to the target regions, where it causes DNA double strand breaks (DSBs), resulting in site‐specific genomic change. Endogenous DNA repair can take place following the creation of a DSB via two primary genome editing pathways: nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) or homology‐directed repair (HDR).

By using the biological characteristics of Cas9 targeting specific DNA sequences under the guidance of sgRNA, scientists have further developed gene targeting activation and gene targeting inhibition tools based on dCas9, called CRISPRa and CRISPRi respectively.

In the paper, characteristics of three forms of CRISPR/Cas9 cargos are outlined. Three delivery forms of the CRISPR/Cas9 system are plasmids, mRNA/sgRNA, and ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complexes, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The recently published tech policy document by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reflects their dedication to fostering innovation and development in future industries. The roadmap emphasizes the importance of forward-looking planning, policy guidance, and cultivating new quality productive forces to support the country’s aspirations for global technological leadership.

The race for supremacy in brain-computer interfaces intensifies as the world watches China’s technological journey unfold. With Neuralink marking its milestones, China’s bold ambitions signal a new era of competition in the ever-evolving landscape of cutting-edge technologies.

The question now is not just about who will lead the race but what groundbreaking innovations lie ahead for humanity.

A new test measures genomic changes in thyroid biopsy samples and generates a score based on how strongly each change is associated with thyroid cancer.