Critical flaws discovered in an Azure app that Microsoft secretly installed on Linux virtual machines.
The UK government has approved Europe’s first field trials of Crispr-edited wheat. The experiments will be conducted in Hertfordshire by the agricultural science institute Rothamsted Research.
The Rothamsted project is aiming to produce wheat with lower levels of the amino acid asparagine. When bread is baked or toasted, asparagine is converted into acrylamide – a carcinogenic contaminant that requires close monitoring under EU law.
Laboratory and greenhouse studies have already shown Crispr can be used to create wheat plants that produce much lower levels of asparagine. Rothamsted Research says that the new five-year project will examine ‘how the plants fare in the field and whether asparagine concentrations continue to be low in grain produced under field conditions’.
A research laboratory in Berlin is using automation and artificial intelligence to develop “digital twins” of cells for cell-line development.
Dementia has many faces, and because of the wide range of ways in which it can develop and affect patients, it can be very challenging to treat. Now, however, using supercomputer analysis of big data, researchers from Japan were able to predict that a single protein is a key factor in the damage caused by two very common forms of dementia.
In a study published this month in Communications Biology, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have revealed that the protein HMGB1 is a key player in both frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer disease, two of the most common causes of dementia.
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration can be caused by mutation of a variety of genes, which means that no one treatment will be right for all patients. However, there are some similarities between frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer disease, which led the researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) to explore whether these two conditions cause damage to the brain in the same way.
The Kidney Project’s implantable bioartificial kidney, one that promises to free kidney disease patients from dialysis machines and transplant waiting lists, took another big step toward becoming reality, earning a $650,000 prize from KidneyX for its first-ever demonstration of a functional prototype of its implantable artificial kidney.
KidneyX is a public–private partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) founded to “accelerate innovation in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of kidney diseases.”
The Kidney Project, a nationwide collaboration led by Shuvo Roy, PhD of UC San Francisco and William Fissell, MD of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), combined the two essential parts of its artificial kidney, the hemofilter and the bioreactor, and successfully implanted the smartphone-sized device for preclinical evaluation.
In the early days of the pandemic, with commercial COVID tests in short supply, Rockefeller University’s Robert B. Darnell developed an in-house assay to identify positive cases within the Rockefeller community. It turned out to be easier and safer to administer than the tests available at the time, and it has been used tens of thousands of times over the past nine months to identify and isolate infected individuals working on the university’s campus.
Now, a new study in PLOS ONE confirms that Darnell’s test performs as well, if not better, than FDA-authorized nasal and oral swab tests. In a direct head-to-head comparison of 162 individuals who received both Rockefeller’s “DRUL” saliva test and a conventional swab test, DRUL caught all of the cases that the swabs identified as positive—plus four positive cases that the swabs missed entirely.
“This research confirms that the test we developed is sensitive and safe,” says Darnell, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology. “It is inexpensive, has provided excellent surveillance within the Rockefeller community, and has the potential to improve safety in communities as the pandemic drags on.”
Jan. 29 2021 — An international team of researchers studying COVID-19 has made a startling and pivotal discovery: The virus appears to cause the body to make weapons to attack its own tissues.
The finding could unlock a number of COVID’s clinical mysteries. They include the puzzling collection of symptoms that can come with the infection; the persistence of symptoms in some people for months after they clear the virus, a phenomenon dubbed long COVID; and why some children and adults have a serious inflammatory syndrome, called MIS-C or MIS-A, after their infections.
“It suggests that the virus might be directly causing autoimmunity, which would be fascinating,” says lead study author Paul Utz, MD, who studies immunology and autoimmunity at Stanford University in Stanford, CA.
Trials will take place in 2023 of laser and radio frequency weapons mounted on a Type-23 frigate and a Wolfhound vehicle, Jeremy Quin will say. Full capabilities are expected to be in service within 10 years.
British Army and Royal Navy will mount high-tech weapons on Wolfhound vehicle and Type-23 frigate, with aim of full capabilities in 10 years.
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We’re excited to announce Spot 3.0! This release adds flexible autonomy and repeatable data capture, making Spot the dynamic solution for real-world sensing.
The Spot Release 3.0 adds flexible autonomy and repeatable data capture; Spot is the data collection solution for safer and more efficient inspections.
September 15 2021 — Breathe in, breathe out. That’s how easy it is for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to enter your nose. And though remarkable progress has been made in developing intramuscular vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 such as the readily available Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, nothing yet – like a nasal vaccine – has been approved to provide mucosal immunity in the nose, the first barrier against the virus before it travels down to the lungs.
But now, we’re one step closer.
Navin Varadarajan, University of Houston M.D. Anderson Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and his colleagues, are reporting in iScience the development of an intranasal subunit vaccine that provides durable local immunity against inhaled pathogens.