Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX is set to launch a beta version of its Starlink internet connectivity constellation.

Tales of the ocean swallowing places are as ancient as the myth of Atlantis, but there is an element of truth in the science, according to a NOAA-backed expedition set for Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The ocean does open up and consume areas of sea floor.

However, these are basically sink holes, similar to those that gobble suburban homes in Florida, NOAA says.

CRISPR-guided DNA cytosine and adenine base editors are widely used for many applications^1,2,3,4 but primarily create DNA base transitions (that is, pyrimidine-to-pyrimidine or purine-to-purine). Here we describe the engineering of two base editor architectures that can efficiently induce targeted C-to-G base transversions, with reduced levels of unwanted C-to-W (W = A or T) and indel mutations. One of these C-to-G base editors (CGBE1), consists of an RNA-guided Cas9 nickase, an Escherichia coli –derived uracil DNA N-glycosylase (eUNG) and a rat APOBEC1 cytidine deaminase variant (R33A) previously shown to have reduced off-target RNA and DNA editing activities^5,6. We show that CGBE1 can efficiently induce C-to-G edits, particularly in AT-rich sequence contexts in human cells. We also removed the eUNG domain to yield miniCGBE1, which reduced indel frequencies but only modestly decreased editing efficiency. CGBE1 and miniCGBE1 enable C-to-G edits and will serve as a basis for optimizing C-to-G base editors for research and therapeutic applications.

An international team of scientists has collated all known bacterial genomes from the human gut microbiome into a single large database, allowing researchers to explore the links between bacterial genes and proteins, and their effects on human health.

This project was led by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and included collaborators from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Trento, the Gladstone Institutes, and the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Their work has been published in Nature Biotechnology.

DUBAI: If you’ve ever wondered what messages the Ancient Egyptians were trying to convey with their hieroglyphics, Google’s new tool might just be able to help. In celebration of the anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, Google Arts and Culture has released a new AI-powered tool, Fabricius, that allows you to decode and translate the ancient symbols and characters into both Arabic and English. The aim is to raise awareness and preserve the history and traditions of Ancient Egyptian civilization.

But now, all the Arab world’s universities must be ready to run with the baton that Hope is handing to them. Currently, the overwhelming majority of the young people who watched the launch on their smartphones and decided on a career in space science will have to study abroad, because the Arab world largely lacks the capacity to educate them in astrophysics or space science.

The United Arab Emirates’ Mars probe is a stunning and historic effort, but it needs to be transformational, too.

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AstraZeneca shares fell on Monday even after the publication of positive results from a trial of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine developed in partnership with Oxford University.

The study, published in The Lancet on Monday, said healthy volunteers who received the experimental vaccine, called AZD1222, showed immune responses.

Read more:A $47 billion fund manager shares 3 trades she’s making for huge upside as the economy recovers — including a play on the Tesla-led boom of electric vehicles

Continue reading “AstraZeneca slides even as the company’s coronavirus vaccine trial results show ‘promise’” »

A group of international scientists have substantially lengthened the duration of time that a spin-orbit qubit in silicon can retain quantum information for, opening up a new pathway to make silicon quantum computers more scalable and functional.

Spin-orbit qubits have been investigated for over a decade as an option to scale up the number of qubits in a quantum computer, as they are easy to manipulate and couple over long distances. However, they have always shown very limited coherence times, far too short for quantum technologies.

The research published today in Nature Materials shows that long coherence times are possible when spin-orbit coupling is strong enough. In fact, the scientists demonstrated coherence times 10,000 times longer than previously recorded for spin-orbit qubits, making them an ideal candidate for scaling up silicon quantum computers.