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On Wednesday, researchers revealed the first evidence that the approach appears to be working — improving vision for at least some patients with the condition, known as Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, a severe form of vision impairment.

So doctors genetically modified a harmless virus to ferry the CRISPR gene editor and infused billions of the modified viruses into the retinas of Knight’s left eye and Kalberer’s right eye, as well as one eye of five other patients. The procedure was done on only one eye just in case something went wrong. The doctors hope to treat the patients’ other eye after the research is complete.

Once the CRISPR was inside the cells of the retinas, the hope was that it would cut out the genetic mutation causing the disease, restoring vision by reactivating the dormant cells.

“We’re thrilled about this,” says Dr. Eric Pierce, director of the ocular genomics institute at Massachusetts Eye & Ear and professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School who’s helping run the experiment testing the approach.

Continue reading “A Gene-Editing Experiment Let These Patients With Vision Loss See Color Again” | >

Unprecedent measurements confirm galaxies idle when they run out of cold gas.

New research, published in Nature and led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has just answered one of the fundamental questions about our universe: Why did some of the oldest, most massive galaxies go quiescent early in their formation? The answer, we now know, is because they ran out of cold gas.

The most massive galaxies in our universe formed incredibly early, just after the Big Bang.

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In a new study from Skoltech and the University of Kentucky, researchers found a new connection between quantum information and quantum field theory. This work attests to the growing role of quantum information theory across various areas of physics. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Quantum information plays an increasingly important role as an organizing principle connecting various branches of physics. In particular, the theory of quantum error correction, which describes how to protect and recover information in quantum computers and other complex interacting systems, has become one of the building blocks of the modern understanding of quantum gravity.

“Normally, information stored in physical systems is localized. Say, a computer file occupies a particular small area of the hard drive. By “error” we mean any unforeseen or undesired interaction which scrambles information over an extended area. In our example, pieces of the computer file would be scattered over different areas of the hard drive. Error correcting codes are mathematical protocols that allow collecting these pieces together to recover the original information. They are in heavy use in data storage and communication systems. Quantum error correcting codes play a similar role in cases when the quantum nature of the physical system is important,” Anatoly Dymarsky, Associate Professor at the Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology (CEST), explains.

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Bill Andrews gives us the simplest definition of aging as well as what he thinks to be accomplished to really admit aging has been cured.

This is an excerpt of a presentation he made last year at the NHIMA. See the description of the video for details.

Longevity scientist Dr. Bill Andrews, PhD in Molecular Biology and President and CEO of Sierra Sciences, describes in few words and images what aging is.

Continue reading “Bill Andrews on age reversal and the Betty White Test (videoclip con S/T en Español)” | >

Not sure if this is new or not. We all know about the Carrington event, but it looks like tree rings reveal a number of much more massive events in the past 10,000 years — perhaps 10 times as strong as the Carrington event, perhaps 100 times or more. (This particular article only references the lower estimates.)

Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the Sun.

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Feeding the world uses enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, pesticide, and fuel. In a step towards a more sustainable solution, researchers have designed a method to make starches from carbon dioxide more efficiently than plants do (Science 2,021 DOI: 10.1126/science.abh4049).

The new technique, which relies on chemical catalysts and a curated combination of natural and engineered enzymes, converts CO2 to starch 8.5 times as efficiently as corn plants can.

The advance hints at sustainable, efficient factory production of food and industrial chemicals by.

Prachi Patel, special to C&EN.

Continue reading “New method makes starch from CO₂ faster than plants can” | >

Last year, computer engineers from Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play.

The same team now introduces a new platform that enables makers, hobbyists and novice programmers to build their own battery-free electronic devices that run with intermittent, harvested energy.

Called BFree, the system includes energy-harvesting hardware (the BFree Shield) and a power-failure-resistant version of Python, one of the most accessible and most used programming languages. All the user needs is a basic understanding of Python in order to quickly and easily turn any do-it-yourself (DIY) into a battery-free version. With this technology, novice programmers can now turn their DIY battery-powered motion sensor, for example, into a solar-powered sensor with an infinite lifetime.

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