Lifeboat Foundation

Envisioning an animal-free drug supply, scientists have — for the first time — reprogrammed a common bacterium to make a designer polysaccharide molecule used in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals. Published on March 22021, in Nature Communications, the researchers modified E. coli to produce chondroitin sulfate, a drug best known as a dietary supplement to treat arthritis that is currently sourced from cow trachea.

Genetically engineered E. coli is used to make a long list of medicinal proteins, but it took years to coax the bacteria into producing even the simplest in this class of linked sugar molecules — called sulfated glycosaminoglycans — that are often used as drugs and nutraceuticals…

“It’s a challenge to engineer E. coli to produce these molecules, and we had to make many changes and balance those changes so that the bacteria will grow well,” said Mattheos Koffas, lead researcher and a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “But this work shows that it is possible to produce these polysaccharides using E. coli in animal-free fashion, and the procedure can be extended to produce other sulfated glycosaminoglycans.”

With the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO ’s VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date. The source is a “radio-loud” quasar — a bright object with powerful jets emitting at radio wavelengths — that is so far away its light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early Universe.

Quasars are very bright objects that lie at the center of some galaxies and are powered by supermassive black holes. As the black hole consumes the surrounding gas, energy is released, allowing astronomers to spot them even when they are very far away.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Discovered the Most Distant Source of Radio Emission Ever Known – 13 Billion Light-Years Away” »

Columbia researchers engineer first technique to exploit the tunable symmetry of 2D materials for nonlinear optical applications, including laser, optical spectroscopy, imaging, and metrology systems, as well as next-generation optical quantum information processing and computing.

Nonlinear optics, a study of how light interacts with matter, is critical to many photonic applications, from the green laser pointers we’re all familiar with to intense broadband (white) light sources for quantum photonics that enable optical quantum computing, super-resolution imaging, optical sensing and ranging, and more. Through nonlinear optics, researchers are discovering new ways to use light, from getting a closer look at ultrafast processes in physics, biology, and chemistry to enhancing communication and navigation, solar energy harvesting, medical testing, and cybersecurity.

Columbia Engineering researchers report that they developed a new, efficient way to modulate and enhance an important type of nonlinear optical process: optical second harmonic generation — where two input photons are combined in the material to produce one photon with twice the energy — from hexagonal boron nitride through micromechanical rotation and multilayer stacking. The study was published online on March 32021, by Science Advances.

Human and non-human animal behavior is highly malleable and adapts successfully to internal and external demands. Such behavioral success stands in striking contrast to the apparent instability in neural activity (i.e., variability) from which it arises. Here, we summon the considerable evidence across scales, species, and imaging modalities that neural variability represents a key, undervalued dimension for understanding brain-behavior relationships at inter-and intra-individual levels. We believe that only by incorporating a specific focus on variability will the neural foundation of behavior be comprehensively understood.

In mobile application development, server-side storage of the application’s data remains top priority. In particular, many developers have begun using backend APIs that enable their apps to query a server for information in real time rather than reply upon static data stored in files. However, as many cloud storage services have been found to use unsecured configurations, data on thousands of mobile applications could be at risk.

A main challenge arises when the task of securing the configurations of these services falls upon the app developers rather than the provider, such as Amazon AWS, Google’s Firebase Storage or Azure by Microsoft. When developers use these storage services for the very purpose of having their API security taken care of, they invest the majority of their efforts into building the apps rather than protecting stored information. Such an oversight could threaten many app developers as well as their employers and users.

In 2021, the mobile security company Zimperium found that over 14 percent of mobile apps using cloud storage face risks due to unsecured configurations. This research has revealed that, globally and across all industries, various apps are vulnerable to the exposure of publicly identifiable information (PII), fraud and unregulated internal IP/configuration sharing.

Most of this automation is being done by companies you’ve probably never heard of. UiPath, the largest stand-alone automation firm, is valued at $35 billion — roughly the size of eBay — and is slated to go public later this year. Other companies like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, which have Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Walgreens Boots Alliance as clients, are also enjoying breakneck growth, and tech giants like Microsoft have recently introduced their own automation products to get in on the action.

Workers with college degrees and specialized training once felt relatively safe from automation. They aren’t.

NASA’s Artemis program has teamed up with Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency to create the next generation lunar vehicle — an ‘RV for the moon’.

The future of baby-care? 😃

This smart baby crib sleeps your baby for you.

Laser engraving. 😃

This is the world’s smallest portable laser engraver.