Lifeboat Foundation

Watch a strange, sprouting mushroom reach out like an octopus … or the devil’s fingers.
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Continue reading “This Sprouting, Octopus-like Fungus Is the Stuff of Nightmares | National Geographic” »

Scientists have developed a new system using the CRISPR genome-editing system to attack and kill cancer cells. The system targets cancel cells directly and, like “scissors,” cuts their DNA, killing them.

Circa 2014

Forget blue whales and giant redwood trees. The biggest living organism is over 2 miles across, and you’ll hardly ever see it.

After a decade, National Ignition Facility nears a self-heated, sustained reaction, though net energy gain is still elusive.

A public dispute between a 17-year-old transgender woman and her family has shone a spotlight on the existence of ‘schools’ that exist to ‘regulate’ the behaviour of the country’s teenagers.

Circa 2018

Children from the Uighur community are said to be ‘locked up like farm animals’ in ‘re-education’ camps in western China mirror.

RIP… I hope we see more mainstream studies related to the CCR5 mutation and it’s relationship to the HIV virus soon…

Mr Brown, known as the Berlin patient, was cured after a bone marrow transplant to treat leukaemia.

My most recent article published in my LinkedIn profile. Opinions and thoughts are welcome.

Elon Musk has been warning for years of the risks that the progress in AI can pose to humanity. Long story short, his position is that AI, once it eventually becomes AGI, is going to be so advanced that it will make humans irrelevant.

In order to prevent this from happening, Elon Musk argues that a symbiosis between the human mind and AI is necessary, so that a sort of “Brain Computer Interface” or BCI allow humans direct communication with the cloud, and allow to process information at the speed that things are done in the cloud. Also, it would allow to limitlessly increase the scarce memory that our brains are capable of holding.

Continue reading “The dilemma we face with the advent of brain-computer interfaces” »

For more than two decades, I have been working to improve several staple food crops in Africa, including bananas, plantains, cassavas and yams. As principal scientist and a plant biotechnologist at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Nairobi, I aim to develop varieties that are resistant to pests and diseases such as bacterial wilt, Fusarium wilt (caused by the fungus F. oxysporum) and banana streak virus.

[Editor’s note: Abdullahi Tsanni is a freelance science journalist based in Abuja, Nigeria.]

In 2011, my team and I created a set of tools, the only one of its kind in Africa, for changing DNA sequences so that we could develop genetically modified and genome-edited products in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, we pioneered the first application of CRISPR gene-editing technology to deactivate banana streak virus in plantains. This technology overcame a major hurdle in banana breeding on the continent, and is the first reported successful use of genome editing to improve bananas.