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A new approach to the organ transplant procedure devised by researchers at Stanford University and their collaborators minimizes the risk of organ rejection, ScienceAlert reported. Moreover, the technique does not require the organ recipient to remain immune-compromised after the procedure.

The first successful solid organ transplant was that of a kidney in 1954, and the world has not looked back. Modern medicine is now able to transplant eyes, liver, kidneys as well as heart, procedures which are saving lives the world over. To tide over the shortages of organs that are available for transplantation, companies are even rearing genetically modified pigs to be safely transplanted in the future.

However, organ rejection post-transplantation is a major issue that science has still not completely conquered. To avoid rejections, organ recipients are given immunosuppressive drugs that need to be taken throughout their lifetimes, which also increases their risk of diseases such as diabetes and even cancer.

A Google engineer who was suspended after he said the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot had became sentient says he based the claim on his Christian faith.

Blake Lemoine, 41, was placed on paid leave by Google earlier in June after he published excerpts of a conversation with the company’s LaMDA chatbot that he claimed showed the AI tool had become sentient.

Now, Lemoine says that his claims about LaMDA come from his experience as a “Christian priest” — and is accusing Google of religious discrimination.

See why NASA KSC denied SpaceX Starship from KSC. What does this mean for SpaceX’s future?

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Circa 2020


Gene therapy shows promise for clinical benefit in demyelinating, neurodegenerative disease.

Krabbe disease is an aggressive, incurable pediatric neurodegenerative disease caused by mutations in the galactosylceramidase (GALC) gene. Deficiency of the GALC protein activity leads to cytotoxic accumulation of a cellular metabolite called psychosine, which compromises normal turnover of myelin in the central and peripheral nervous system (CNS, PNS). The ensuing damage leads to progressive disease, including paralysis, loss of sensory functions and death, in the developing infant. The incidence of Krabbe disease is estimated at 1 in 100,000 live births.

The standard of care for presymptomatic babies is hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT); however, the morbidity and mortality of HSCT is high due to the strong ablative chemotherapy just after birth, and notably, this treatment is not curative. Furthermore, affected babies must be diagnosed and receive HSCT prior to symptom onset, typically a mere 4 weeks of age. No standard of care has been established for post-symptomatic treatment of the disease.

The possibility also remains that if aliens are sending us, or unintentionally leaking, signals across the vast expanse of the cosmos, they may not be encoded in radio waves, but in ways that we haven’t yet developed the technology to understand.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if we were on the wrong track. If you look at the history of SETI, the original ideas proposed around 200 years ago were things like ‘let’s build some big fires on Earth’; ‘let’s have some big mirrors that reflect sunlight to the Martians’ or ‘let’s build some mile-long right-angled triangles to show aliens we know about Pythagorean Theorem,’ and now we look back and say those guys were idiots,” Werthimer said. “So, what’s to say that 200 years from now people won’t look back at us and ask why we didn’t use tachyons or subspace communication? But you’ve got to do what you know how to do.”

Despite the dispiriting likelihood that these signals have an Earthbound source, SETI astronomers are still fairly confident that we’re not alone in the universe. And that one day, we may dig up something real amid all of our own backchatter.

The semiconductor industry just can’t catch a break.

After grappling with pandemic-fueled supply bottlenecks, chipmakers are facing a new headache: Russia, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of gases used to make semiconductors, has started to limit exports.

Moscow began restricting exports of inert, or “noble” gases, including neon, argon and helium to “unfriendly” countries at the end of May, according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS.

A nested conical passive magnetic bearing is presented. The bearing consists of a nested conical rotor inside a conical stator, i.e. two coaxial tilted rings of permanent magnets, both with a rectangular cross section. Varying the cone or tilt angle of the rotor and stator we determine the rotor radius that provides the highest force for three different magnetization cases. For this optimal rotor radius, we show that the bearing with the highest volume normalized force also has the highest stiffness, and furthermore often also the highest varying stiffness with axial displacement. Finally, we show that a conical bearings with a tilt angle of $$60^\circ$$ has an almost constant stiffness and a linearly varying force with axial displacement, making it ideal as a bearing.