Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 5529

Janice Chen, Ph.D., one of Olympic gold medalist Nathan Chen’s siblings, is on a mission to build a $100 billion biotech company.

In 2018, she co-founded Mammoth Biosciences with Trevor Martin, Lucas Harrington and Jennifer Doudna 0, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry two years later for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing. Doudna also served as Chen’s mentor while she pursued her doctorate degree in molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Mammoth is built on Chen’s work as a graduate student researcher in Doudna’s lab. Since the dawn of COVID-19 in 2020, the startup has seen accelerated growth as it snagged $100 million in multiple contracts and government grants.

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This disparity gets at the difference between one’s chronological age — how old they are in years — and their biological age, which is how their body has aged naturally and in response to its environment. The two can diverge in ways that are either blessings or curses. Hence why those who grow up under extreme stress or in polluted environments may look much older than they actually are.

And yellow-bellied marmots can tell us something about these two ages.

Yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) are no burrow-dwelling meteorologists like the groundhog. They may sound craven, but these quirky critters, also known as whistle pigs, make for fascinating subjects: the cat-sized rodents have a longer lifespan than expected for a mammal of their size. On average, marmots live 15 years.

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New research from Griffith University has shown that a bacterium commonly present in the nose can sneak into the brain and set off a cascade of events that may lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

Associate Professor Jenny Ekberg and colleagues from the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research at Menzies Health Institute Queensland and Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, have discovered that the bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can invade the brain via the nerves of the nasal cavity.

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Decentralizing talent

More than 50 million creators are driving their own economy of talent, attracting in excess of $800 million in venture capital. Such figures are but a shadow of what they can become later, as new venues are rapidly becoming available.

The development of blockchain technologies has resulted in a sweeping revolution across financial markets, empowering individuals instead of institutions and channeling ownership of data and funds to their holders. The qualities of the blockchain — immutability, full transparency and the trustless nature of operations — have permeated many industries, swooning the balance of business orientation from centralized corporate reliance to decentralization. This shift in the basic concepts that govern relations between participants to transactions, facilitated by smart contracts, has not gone unnoticed in the creator economy.

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Work will aid design of other unusual quantum materials with many potential applications.

MIT physicists and colleagues, including scientists from Berkeley Lab, have discovered the “secret sauce” behind the exotic properties of a new quantum material known as a kagome metal.

Kagome metals have long mystified scientists for their ability to exhibit collective behavior when cooled below room temperature.

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