Lifeboat Foundation

A completely new kind of molecule has been made by combining an extremely cold ion and a super-sized atom. The unusual molecular bond between the two particles was thousands of times longer than those in most room-temperature molecules, and the method to make and study it could kick-start a new branch of ultracold quantum chemistry.

Reprogramming without having to insert genes.

When people think of cellular reprogramming, converting a differentiated cell into a stem cell, they often refer to the overexpression of Yamanaka factors[Oct4, Klf4, Sox2 & c-Myc]. Rightly so. But what if i told you that stem cells could be induced with just chemicals. Well you would reply “show me the data”. So, let’s take a look at this recent Nature paper that showed how combinations of small molecules/chemicals converted human differentiated cells to stem cells.

Continue reading “Making stem cells with chemicals” »

MIT researchers can now control the physical and mechanical properties of lab-grown plant materials. This could enable an environmentally friendly process to produce wood-like structures with specific properties, like stiffness or density, tailored to certain applications.

The speed of operations leaves manual inspectors with just seconds to decide if the product is really defective, or not.

That’s where Microsoft’s Project Brainwave could come in. Project Brainwave is a hardware architecture designed to accelerate real-time AI calculations. The Project Brainwave architecture is deployed on a type of computer chip from Intel called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, to make real-time AI calculations at competitive cost and with the industry’s lowest latency, or lag time. This is based on internal performance measurements and comparisons to other organizations’ publicly posted information.

Continue reading “Real-time AI: Microsoft announces preview of Project Brainwave” »

Understanding technological disruption & opportunity.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing technology gives access to cell cycle dynamics without externally perturbing the cell. Here the authors present DeepCycle, a robust deep learning method to infer the cell cycle state in single cells from scRNA-seq data.

The world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot, measuring just half a millimetre wide, has been demonstrated by Northwestern University. Its potential applications include the clearing of blocked arteries.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. and one in Japan has developed a new type of vaccine that helps the immune system destroy cancerous tumors by overcoming their defense system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes the new vaccine and its effects in mouse and rhesus macaque models.

Until recently, the only tools available to doctors treating cancer patients have been chemotherapy, radiation treatment and surgery. More recently, medical researchers have been exploring vaccines in the fight against cancer—the development of a vaccine against HPV-related diseases, for example, has reduced the risks of cervical and other types of cancers. Other research efforts have involved targeting peptide antigens and have proven to be effective, but only in limited circumstances. In this new effort, the researchers developed a more generalized vaccine that they believe can be used against multiple types of cancers in many types of cancer patients.

The new vaccine works by taking away one of the major defense strategies used by tumors, which is the ability to cleave T cells and natural killer cells from their surfaces. Such cells are deployed when the body detects a growing tumor and alerts the immune system. By shedding them after they affix themselves to MICA and MICB proteins on their surface, tumors are free to grow. The new vaccine works by interceding in the cleaving process, preventing the tumor from shedding the immune cells sent to kill it. The vaccine disrupts this cleaving process by increasing the density of proteins on the surface of tumor cells, which the researchers describe as “inciting protective immunity.”

How psilocybin evolved has more to do with sending insects on terrifying trips than it does making Phish sound good.