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Apr 30, 2021

EU calls for rethink of GMO rules for gene-edited crops

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics

But the biotech industry has argued that much of gene-editing simply accelerates processes that occur naturally, and that GMO-style regulation would shackle efforts to develop sustainable crops or advance research into human disease.


The European Commission launched a review of EU rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on Thursday, opening the door to a possible loosening of restrictions for plants resulting from gene-editing technology.

Prompted by a 2018 ruling from the European Union’s top court that techniques to alter the genome of an organism should be governed by existing EU rules on GMOs, the Commission concluded that its 2001 legislation was “not fit for purpose”.

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Apr 30, 2021

Katherine Sizov — Strella Biotech — Bio-Sensing To Reduce Food Waste And Optimize Supply Chains

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, engineering, food

Novel bio-sensing technologies to reduce food waste and optimize supply chains — a US$1 trillion need — katherine sizov — founder, strella biotechnology.


An estimated 40% of all global produce is wasted due to spoilage that occurs before it ever reaches consumers’ grocery bags. And this loss, not only represents loss due to quality or ripeness standards that consumers desire, but also a significant impact on global emissions and fresh water supplies that it took to produce and transport that produce, representing a combined figure of US$1 Trillion annually.

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Apr 30, 2021

GFS 2020 — Aubrey de Grey — Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging

Posted by in categories: biological, biotech/medical, health

Between 19:39 and 24 minutes we have Aubrey giving a list of companies and stating that investing is now taking off. Project 21 seems to be on track to start next year, and therapies available in 10–15 years will add 30 years to life and really be indefinite beyond that.


Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging.
People are living longer — no longer because of reduced child mortality, but because we are postponing the ill-health of old age. But we’ve seen nothing yet: regenerative medicine and other new medicines will eventually be so comprehensive that people will stay truly youthful however long they live, which means they may mostly live very long indeed.

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Apr 30, 2021

These strange salt ‘creatures’ could help unclog power plant pipes

Posted by in category: energy

Modifying the surface of power plant pipes to make it easier to prevent the build up of salt.


Behold the salt monsters. These twisted mineral crystals—formed from the buildup of slightly salty water in power plant pipes—come in many shapes and sizes. But the tiny monsters are a big problem: Each year, they cost the world’s power plants at least $100 billion, as workers have to purge the pipes and scrub them from filters.

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Apr 30, 2021

Tiny Mercury Was Likely Our Inner Solar System’s ‘Lone Survivor’

Posted by in category: space

Lone Mercury was likely the product of a very different early environment, in which short-period protoplanets collided with and continually eroded its mantle, says new study.

Apr 29, 2021

Here’s how the Koenigsegg Gemera’s 600bhp camless engine works

Posted by in categories: business, transportation

One critical part of the Koenigsegg Gemera’s brain-scrambling powertrain is its ‘Freevalve’ petrol engine. You might have glossed over it while trying to compute the outputs, and they way that engine combines with three electric motors to produce, er, 1700bhp in all. Or in metric, 1.27 Megawatts. Or the power draw of a couple of hundred houses cooking dinner.

Christian von Koenigsegg, though, will talk for hours about this engine. He’s so affectionate about the thing he’s got a nickname rather than the usual dreary car-business habit of codenames. This, then, is the Tiny Friendly Giant.

Giant because 600bhp. Tiny because it’s just two litres and three cylinders. Maybe two litres isn’t that tiny in displacement (though CvK’s cars have mostly had big V8s) but it’s physically very small and easy to package. It has just the three cylinders, and no overhead camshaft casings, and no camshaft drive on the front.

Apr 29, 2021

What Is Dark Matter?

Posted by in category: cosmology

Circa 2018


An elusive substance that permeates the universe exerts many detectable gravitational influences yet eludes direct detection.

Apr 29, 2021

New Hubble Data Explains Missing Dark Matter

Posted by in category: cosmology

Circa 2018 o.o


In 2018 an international team of researchers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories uncovered, for the first time, a galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood that is missing most of its dark matter.

Apr 29, 2021

Radical new gene therapy restores sight to patients with rare eye condition — BBC News

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists have been using a new form of gene therapy to treat a rare inherited eye condition which eventually causes severe tunnel vision.

Scientists have been using the new treatment on patients to try to halt further loss of sight. And they’ve been astonished to find that it has actually improved their vision.

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Apr 29, 2021

A modular building platform for the most ingenious of robots

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have developed a system with which they can fabricate miniature robots building block by building block, which function exactly as required.

As one would do with a Lego system, the scientists can randomly combine individual components. The blocks or voxels—which could be described as 3D pixels—are made of different materials: from basic matrix materials that hold up the construction to magnetic components enabling the control of the soft machine. “You can put the individual soft parts together in any way you wish, with no limitations on what you can achieve. In this way, each has an individual magnetisation profile,” says Jiachen Zhang. Together with Ziyu Ren and Wenqi Hu he is first author of the paper entitled “Voxelated three-dimensional miniature magnetic soft machines via multimaterial heterogeneous assembly.” The paper was published in Science Robotics on April 28, 2021.

The project is the result of many previous projects conducted in the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS. For many years, scientists there have been working on magnetically controlled robots for wireless medical device applications at the small scale, from millimeters down to micrometers size. While the state-of-the-art designs they have developed to date have attracted attention around the world, they were limited by the single material with which they were made, which constrained their functionality.