Case studies spotlight personalized approaches to tweaking brain circuits.
Two new methods make it possible to delete long sections of the genome, expanding the capabilities of the gene editor CRISPR. The techniques could lead to therapies that excise large insertions or duplications tied to autism, such as the DNA repeats that underlie fragile X syndrome.
To remove a segment of DNA, CRISPR systems typically use an enzyme called Cas9 to snip double-stranded DNA at two target sites. The cell’s own repair machinery can then join the cut ends, omitting the intervening sequence. But this process is error prone and can insert or delete unintended segments of DNA, called ‘indels,’ or rearrange large sections of the genome. Snipping double-stranded DNA can also cause cell death.
A different CRISPR-based system called ‘prime editing’ can make DNA repair more precise. In one version of the technique, a protein complex called a prime editor cuts only one strand of DNA at one of the two sites and the opposite strand at the other site. The prime editor adds a sequence to one of the cut strands to guide the repair.
The most promising application in biomedicine is in computational chemistry, where researchers have long exploited a quantum approach. But the Fraunhofer Society hopes to spark interest among a wider community of life scientists, such as cancer researchers, whose research questions are not intrinsically quantum in nature.
“It’s uncharted territory,” says oncologist Niels Halama of the DKFZ, Germany’s national cancer center in Heidelberg. Working with a team of physicists and computer scientists, Halama is planning to develop and test algorithms that might help stratify cancer patients, and select small subgroups for specific therapies from heterogeneous data sets.
This is important for precision medicine, he says, but classic computing has insufficient power to find very small groups in the large and complex data sets that oncology, for example, generates. The time needed to complete such a task may stretch out over many weeks—too long to be of use in a clinical setting, and also too expensive. Moreover, the steady improvements in the performance of classic computers are slowing, thanks in large part to fundamental limits on chip miniaturization.
NVIDIA’s GauGAN2 artificial intelligence (AI) can now use simple written phrases to generate a fitting photorealistic image. The deep-learning model is able to craft different scenes in just three or four words.
GauGAN is NVIDIA’s AI program that was used to turn simple doodles into photorealistic masterpieces in 2019, a technology that was eventually turned into the NVIDIA Canvas app earlier this year. Now NVIDIA has advanced the AI even further to where it only needs a brief description in order to generate a “photo.”
In an extremely shocking turn of events, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that he posts “at least” half of his tweets from the toilet.
“At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne,” Musk tweeted Sunday night, presumably from the toilet.
“It gives me solace,” he added.
Nearly 20 years after the Concorde made its final commercial flight, new efforts are underway to make supersonic passenger travel viable again. Bill Whitaker reports.
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Buccaneering billionaire polymath Elon Musk is obviously one smart cookie. So why do his old school friends insist he wasn’t the cleverest kid in class, or that the future Tesla boss was fundamentally “unspectacular” back then?
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The Connection Between Tesla’s New Phone Model Pi And Neuralink: So Elon has been one busy boy lately, from his incredible Twitter Poll the other day, to the subsequent selling of nearly 5billion in Tesla Shares. But one announcement that went under the radar updates to the rumored Tesla Pi.
So why would you want a phone from Tesla, well the same reason people have an iPhone with their iMac and their iWatch and their iTV sorry Apple TV…it’s the ecosystem, it’s the seamless transition.
Except we now going from your phone to your car, to a satellite to potentially directly to your brain. Now it’s still early days so information is scarce on exactly what will be included, however, information has leaked recently about possible features and I am excited.
Is the “good book” getting an upgrade? Join us… and find out more!
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Ever feel like you could do with a little guidance? A push in the right direction? Over the past couple thousand years or so, humans have often turned to religious texts to help get them through life’s trickier moments… but is science and technology now triggering a major paradigm shift? In this video, Unveiled takes a closer look at the reasons why we might soon… need a new Bible!
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