Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Microsoft have found a new critical zero-day RCE vulnerability (CVE-2021–35211) affecting SolarWinds Serv-U.

Austrian shoe company Tec-Innovation has partnered with students at the Graz University of Technology in Austria to implement camera-based AI image recognition into their line of shoes that are specifically made to help those who are visually impaired.

The original version of these “seeing eye” shoes features ultrasonic sensors, which warn the person wearing them of obstacles in their way through haptic or auditory signals. AI image recognition that constantly learns, allows the shoes to provide more specific information to the wearer.

Recently, we found dramatic mitochondrial DNA divergence of Israeli Chamaeleo chamaeleon populations into two geographically distinct groups. We aimed to examine whether the same pattern of divergence could be found in nuclear genes. However, no genomic resource is available for any chameleon species. Here we present the first chameleon transcriptome, obtained using deep sequencing (SOLiD). Our analysis identified 164000 sequence contigs of which 19000 yielded unique BlastX hits. To test the efficacy of our sequencing effort, we examined whether the chameleon and other available reptilian transcriptomes harbored complete sets of genes comprising known biochemical pathways, focusing on the nDNA-encoded oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) genes as a model. As a reference for the screen, we used the human 86 (including isoforms) known structural nDNA-encoded OXPHOS subunits. Analysis of 34 publicly available vertebrate transcriptomes revealed orthologs for most human OXPHOS genes. However, OXPHOS subunit COX8 (Cytochrome C oxidase subunit 8), including all its known isoforms, was consistently absent in transcriptomes of iguanian lizards, implying loss of this subunit during the radiation of this suborder. The lack of COX8 in the suborder Iguania is intriguing, since it is important for cellular respiration and ATP production. Our sequencing effort added a new resource for comparative genomic studies, and shed new light on the evolutionary dynamics of the OXPHOS system.

Keywords: chameleon, oxidative phosphorylation, transcriptome.

Massive parallel sequencing (MPS) enables identifying the entire set of transcribed genes (transcriptome) of understudied organisms, thus providing novel genomic resources. However, because there is no genomic reference to those organisms, the short reads generated by MPS must be de novo assembled in order to form sequence contigs, which in turn could be annotated (Kusumi et al. 2011), thus creating reference sequences for further analyses.

What can the decline of the Roman Empire and the end of European feudalism tell us about COVID-19 and the future of the West?

❤️ Check out the Gradient Dissent podcast by Weights & Biases: http://wandb.me/gd.

📝 The paper “Endless Loops: Detecting and Animating Periodic Patterns in Still Images” and the app are available here:
https://pub.res.lightricks.com/endless-loops/

Continue reading “This Magical AI Makes Your Photos Move! 🤳” »

Here is a snapshot of our talks on synthetic biology. These videos will provide you with a basic understanding and appreciation for this field. These lectures start with an introduction to synthetic biology and go through the major discoveries and ethical controversies that arise from this field. You can check out the full Synthetic Biology Playlist here!

The four citizen astronauts flying to space with Inspiration4 this September experienced weightlessness for the first time this weekend during a zero-g training flight.

This animated map shows the last billion years of Earth’s tectonic plate movement in just 40 seconds, showing how continents formed.

Manufactured on tsmc’s 180 nm process.

Libre-SOC developers sent the first test ASIC to TSMC’s manufacturing facilities.