Lifeboat Foundation

Floorplanning is the process by which an integrated circuit is designed using a top-down view. Rather like the architectural plan of a home, garden, and walkways, each of the major functional blocks is placed in a schematic representation that provides a guide for where everything needs to be. This layout can include transistors, capacitors, resistors, wires and other components, all packed into extremely tiny spaces.

Determining the optimal configuration for processing speed and power efficiency is a detailed and lengthy task, involving many iterations. It can often take weeks or even months for expert human engineers. Attempts to fully automate the process have been unsuccessful.

However, researchers from Google have this week reported a new machine-learning approach to floorplanning. Not only does it reduce the design workload to a matter of hours, it also results in chips with superior designs.

Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins. But polymerases were thought to only work in one direction DNA into DNA or RNA. This prevents RNA messages from being rewritten back into the master recipe book of genomic DNA. Now, Thomas Jefferson University researchers provide the first evidence that RNA segments can be written back into DNA, which potentially challenges the central dogma in biology and could have wide implications affecting many fields of biology.

“This work opens the door to many other studies that will help us understand the significance of having a mechanism for converting RNA messages into DNA in our own cells,” says Richard Pomerantz, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University. “The reality that a human polymerase can do this with high efficiency, raises many questions.” For example, this finding suggests that RNA messages can be used as templates for repairing or re-writing genomic DNA.

The work was published June 11th in the journal Science Advances.

Biopesticide might become safer alternative to existing treatments.

A new study has revealed that humans — along with all other mammals and reptiles — have the capability of producing venom. The study, published on Monday (March 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said humans apparently have a “tool kit” to produce venom.

According to a report in Live Science, humans already produce a key protein used in many venom systems.

It said kallikreins, a kind of protein that digest other proteins, are secreted in saliva and are a key part of many venoms. They are a natural starting point for theoretically venomous humans.

Using the full system, farmers could reduce costs by 40% and chemical usage by up to 95%.

Small Robot Company (SRC), a British agritech startup for sustainable farming, has developed AI-enabled robots – named Tom, Dick and Harry – that identify and kill individual weeds with electricity. These agricultural robots could reduce the use of harmful chemicals and heavy machinery, paving the way for a new approach to sustainable crop farming.

Continue reading “New agricultural robots kill individual weeds with electricity” »

Could this be the future of pizza?

Simply log onto the pizza maker’s mobile application, input the number and type of pizzas you want, and the machine will do the rest of the work.

Art illustration for upcoming Shenzhou-12 crewed flight mission for China’s space station.

Shenzhou-12, China’s first crewed space station mission, explained Graphic: Jin Jianyu, Xu Zihe/GT.

Scientists have successfully grown liver tissue capable of functioning for 30 days in the lab as part of NASA’s Vascular Tissue Challenge.

In 2016, NASA put forth this competition to find teams that could “create thick, vascularized human organ tissue in an in-vitro environment to advance research and benefit medicine on long-duration missions and on Earth,” according to an agency challenge description. Today (June 9), the agency announced not one, but two winners of the challenge.

The results of the study have been extremely encouraging, with 12 of the 13 patients showing signs of improved neurological functionality shortly after the treatment was administered. More than half of the patients showed significant improvement, including regaining the ability to walk, as well as regaining fine motor control (such as the ability to use their hands).

Unlike many stem cell treatments which have been successful in the past, this approach does not require the patient to have a reserve of stem cells available (such as cord blood cells), and instead relies on stem cells which are obtained directly from the patient. A bone marrow sample was extracted in order to first acquire a sample of stem cells (known as mesenchymal stem cells), which were then grown (expanded) in a laboratory for the number of weeks before being injected into the patient’s bloodstream via intravenous injection. These cells would then migrate to the spinal cord and repair the damaged tissue.