A genetically modified version of the herpes virus has shown great potential in treating advanced cancers, according to a report by the Institute of Cancer Research in London published on Thursday.
A promising therapy
Although the treatment is still in early trials, researchers have found that RP2, a modified version of the herpes simplex virus, managed to kill cancer cells in a quarter of patients. The patients had cancers so advanced and complicated that they had run out of treatments to try.
Circa 2017 face_with_colon_three
LA JOLLA—Salk scientists have created a new version of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology that allows them to activate genes without creating breaks in the DNA, potentially circumventing a major hurdle to using gene editing technologies to treat human diseases.
Most CRISPR/Cas9 systems work by creating “double-strand breaks” (DSBs) in regions of the genome targeted for editing or for deletion, but many researchers are opposed to creating such breaks in the DNA of living humans. As a proof of concept, the Salk group used their new approach to treat several diseases, including diabetes, acute kidney disease, and muscular dystrophy, in mouse models.
The competition for lithium-ion batteries is heating up in a good way.
And then there are lithium-metal solid-state batteries which promise to be safer, faster charging and last longer than existing lithium-ion technology.
The State of Aluminium-Sulphur Batteries
This type of battery has been around for a while but the main shortcoming of the technology has been durability. The batteries using ambient temperature ionic liquid electrolytes form dendrites over time that interfere with the flow of electrons between the anodes. The results are short circuits. The cure appears to be raising the operating temperature of the battery and switching out the electrolyte. At 110 Celsius (230 Fahrenheit) degrees this new version of the aluminum-sulphur battery doesn’t form dendrites.
We’ve done almost no research into this area, but human reproduction in space is going to be key to us living on Mars.
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This is a guest piece by Richard Fox – retired media director, now a singer/songwriter and blogger who writes on a variety of topics. You can.
A survey of artificial intelligence researchers found that 36 per cent believe AIs could cause a catastrophe on the scale of nuclear war.
Posted in cosmology, space travel
Issac Arthur play list.
SFIA looks at uses for black holes ranging from spaceships to artificial worlds to escaping the Heat Death of the Universe.
Posted in entertainment, media & arts
Film : colossus: the forbin project.
Music : erste, unversicherte allgemeinheit — extrawelt
By helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, an ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing, and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful. The device is described in new research that was recently published in the journal Science.
This device could replace a roomful of equipment to link photons in a bizarre quantum effect called entanglement, according to scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. It is a kind of nano-engineered material called a metasurface and paves the way for entangling photons in complex ways that have not been possible with compact technologies.
When photons are said to be entangled, it means they are linked in such a way that actions on one affect the other, no matter where or how far apart the photons are in the universe. It is a spooky effect of quantum mechanics, the laws of physics that govern particles and other very tiny things.
According to recent research from Sweden’s Lund University, the most commonly used analytical method in population genetics is deeply flawed. This could have caused incorrect results and misconceptions regarding ethnicity and genetic relationships. The method has been used in hundreds of thousands of studies, influencing findings in medical genetics and even commercial ancestry tests. The findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The pace at which scientific data can be gathered is increasing rapidly, resulting in huge and very complex databases, which has been nicknamed the “Big Data revolution.” Researchers employ statistical techniques to condense and simplify the data while maintaining the majority of the important information in order to make the data more manageable. PCA (principal component analysis) is perhaps the most widely used approach. Imagine PCA as an oven with flour, sugar, and eggs serving as the input data. The oven may always perform the same thing, but the ultimate result, a cake, is highly dependent on the ratios of the ingredients and how they are mixed.
“It is expected that this method will give correct results because it is so frequently used. But it is neither a guarantee of reliability nor produces statistically robust conclusions,” says Dr. Eran Elhaik, Associate Professor in molecular cell biology at Lund University.
