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Land Rover is teaming up with Virgin Galactic for the Adventure of a Lifetime sweepstakes, which will see one lucky Land Rover owner literally fly to space at some point in the near future.

Anyone who currently owns a Land Rover can register online by submitting their vehicle’s VIN and some other bits of info, which counts as one entry. Placing an order for a new Land Rover nets 50 entries, while actually buying or leasing a vehicle gets you 100 entries. Anyone who enters also gets credit for referring people to the sweepstakes, and there’s no limit to how many entries you can get.

This isn’t the first time Land Rover has partnered with Richard Branson’s space-tourism venture. Range Rover SUVs have been used to tow the company’s space planes at various events and presentations, and in 2019 a special Range Rover Astronaut Edition was unveiled. That model could only be purchased by those who signed up to be an astronaut with Virgin, and it came with unique styling elements. As the Astronaut Edition was based on the now-old Range Rover, we wouldn’t be surprised if Land Rover releases a new version based on the fifth-gen Range Rover that was revealed last year.

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It is estimated that there would be more than 90 million people dead and injured within the first few hours of the conflict.

For more, see https://sgs.princeton.edu/the-lab/plan-a.

A collaboration with Alex Wellerstein (http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com) and Jeff Snyder (https://music.princeton.edu/people/jeff-snyder).

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Visit https://brilliant.org/Veritasium/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. Digital computers have served us well for decades, but the rise of artificial intelligence demands a totally new kind of computer: analog.

Thanks to Mike Henry and everyone at Mythic for the analog computing tour! https://www.mythic-ai.com/
Thanks to Dr. Bernd Ulmann, who created The Analog Thing and taught us how to use it. https://the-analog-thing.org.
Moore’s Law was filmed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Welch Labs’ ALVINN video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0igiP6Hg1k.

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Continue reading “We’re Building Computers Wrong” | >

Biologists from ETH Zurich have discovered speargun-like molecular injection systems in two types of bacteria and have described their structure for the first time. The special nanomachines are used by the microbes for the interaction between cells and could one day be useful as tools in biomedicine.

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The CRISPR gene-editing system is a powerful tool that could revolutionize medicine and other sciences, but unfortunately it has a tendency to make edits to the wrong sections of DNA. Now, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have identified a previously unknown structure of the protein that drives these mistakes, and tweaked it to reduce the likelihood of off-target mutations by 4,000 times.

CRISPR tools use certain proteins, most often Cas9, to make precise edits to specific DNA sequences in living cells. This can involve cutting out problematic genes, such as those that cause disease, and/or slotting in beneficial ones. The problem is that sometimes the tool can make changes to the wrong parts, potentially triggering a range of other health issues.

And in the new study, the UT researchers discovered how some of these errors can happen. Usually, the Cas9 protein is hunting for a specific sequence of 20 letters in the DNA code, but if it finds one where 18 out of 20 match its target, it might make its edit anyway. To find out why this occurs, the team used cryo-electron microscopy to observe what Cas9 is doing when it interacts with a mismatched sequence.

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