Lifeboat Foundation

I was at HudsonAlpha’s spinoff clinic for rare diseases, the Smith Family Clinic for Genomic Medicine. Most people don’t know this, but the second largest biomedical research campus in the USA and the fourth in the entire world is in Alabama. Long-read genome sequencing is essential for aging research because it is able to detect methylation and acetylation very conveniently, as well as major structural changes to the genome that are associated with both rare disease AND aging. This is an explanation of how long-read sequencing is able to fill in sequence gaps caused by Illumina short-read technology.

In 2020, Chromosome X and 8 were finished end-to-end with long-read sequencing, for the first time. And now in 2021, a complete gapless human genome is on the horizon. The Human Genome Project may finally, truly become complete.

February 3, 2021 (Huntsville, Ala.) – Researchers at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology used a new, cutting-edge genomic sequencing technology to help physicians make diagnoses for two pediatric patients who had been on long diagnostic journeys.

Continue reading “HudsonAlpha researchers use highly accurate long-read sequencing technology to help diagnose rare disease” »

A new AI dubbing technology syncs actors’ mouths with recorded dialogue to make the experience of watching a movie in an unknown language less jarring.

The challenge: If you want to watch a movie in a language you don’t understand, you have two choices: you can either read subtitles, which can be distracting, or you can watch a dubbed version of the film.

During the dubbing process, voice actors who do speak your language record all of the film’s dialogue in a sound booth. The original dialogue is then replaced with that audio.

Are there any individuals out there who, like myself, believe that our wonderful planet probably hosts the only lifeforms to be found anywhere? Should this ideed be the case, it places a colossal responsibility upon humankind. A responsibility, I would maintain, to not only share the gift of Earth-life with the silent, barren worlds which surround us but also to do our utmost to safeguard the splendid variety of life, in all of its myriad forms which inhabit our fecund and bountiful planet. If there are like minded folk out there please respond-I would like to link up with the view to working collaboratively. As this will be an extremely lengthy endeavour, probably lasting for many generations, my own area of interest is in popularising the subject among the young.

Life beyond might not exist — or we just don’t know how to find it.

Mix pair is “elusive missing piece of the family picture of compact object mergers.”

A long time ago, in two galaxies about 900 million light-years away, two black holes each gobbled up their neutron star companions, triggering gravitational waves that finally hit Earth in January 2020.

Discovered by an international team of astrophysicists including Northwestern University researchers, two events — detected just 10 days apart — mark the first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star. The findings will enable researchers to draw the first conclusions about the origins of these rare binary systems and how often they merge.

A bumper crop of applications for the ESA’s astronaut corps is providing a boost to proposals for Europe to develop its own human spaceflight capability.

WASHINGTON — A bumper crop of applications for the European Space Agency’s astronaut corps is providing a boost to proposals for Europe to develop its own human spaceflight capability.

ESA announced June 23 that it received 22589 applications in a solicitation that ended June 18. That’s far more than the 8413 applications it received in the previous astronaut selection round in 2018.

Continue reading “Europe considering concepts for human spaceflight” »

The mosaic image is a composition of seven subsequent frames taken from Nellysford, Virginia, as the space station traversed the face of the sun at the speed of roughly 5 miles per second, which is about 18000 mph (29000 kph), according to a NASA photo description.

The six-hour and 45-minute spacewalk was the third for Pesquet and Kimbrough in less than two weeks as they completed work on augmenting the space station’s power systems. The iROSA panel deployed on Friday was the second of six new panels to be installed at the station.

Friday’s extravehicular activity (EVA) positioned the second iROSA opposite the first on the far left, or port side of the space station’s backbone truss. Now both the 2B and 4B power channels on the port 6 (P6) truss have the new arrays deployed.

“I’m at [email protected],” he tells CNBC Make It. He gives it out to everyone because he likes helping people and it keeps him on top of his game.

“I end up learning things that I never imagined I’d want to know,” Draper says.

Draper is a legend in the world of venture capital. Since the mid-1980s, he has built a fortune making early investments in companies like Hotmail, Skype, Baidu, Tesla and SpaceX.

Separate collisions of a neutron star and a black hole are detected in a short space of time.

Big fan of long-read sequencing. It helped diagnose my rare disease when conventional sequencing failed.

What’s the Difference between Short-Read Sequencing and Long-Read Sequencing? Like their names suggest, short-read sequencing looks at DNA in short snippets (100−350 base pairs) while long-read sequencing measures long fragments of DNA (tens of thousands of base pairs). Why does that matter? Well, when trying to characterize a human genome that has two copies (one maternal and one paternal), each 3.2 billion base pairs in length — having longer snippets of DNA means you: Need fewer snippets to make up the length of the whole genome and have no gaps where the sequence is unknown Can more easily map how one region of the genome is connected to another region Have the ability to phase or determine which copy of a gene, maternal or paternal, a mutation occurs in.

PacBio long-read sequencing provides the most comprehensive view of genomes, transcriptomes, and epigenomes.