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Novel study designed to correct genetic abnormalities of red blood cells.

Cleveland Clinic researchers are enrolling patients in a clinical trial that aims to work toward a cure for sickle cell disease, by changing the patient’s genetics. Sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder, is a painful and debilitating condition for which there are few approved therapies.

The multicenter study will evaluate the safety and effectiveness of a single dose of EDIT-301, an experimental one-time gene editing cell therapy that modifies a patient’s own blood-forming stem cells to correct the mutation responsible for sickle cell disease.

During the study patients’ stem cells are collected for gene editing in a laboratory. Patients then are treated with chemotherapy to destroy remaining bone marrow to make room for the repaired cells which are infused back into the body. The study will initially enroll 40 adult patients ages 18 to 50 with severe sickle cell disease, with the possibility of expansion to include adolescents. Patients will be monitored closely after treatment for up to two years.

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The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 mission scheduled to launch June 25.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 rideshare mission scheduled to launch June 25.

“There’s nothing in the space business that gets your blood pumping like the idea of a launch, especially if you’ve got multiple satellites,” a senior Space Development Agency (SDA) official told reporters June 22. “We’re really excited about what’s going to happen.”

Transporter-2 is expected to carry as many as 88 small satellites from commercial and government customers to a sun synchronous polar orbit. SDA’s five payloads include two pairs of satellites to demonstrate laser communications links, and one to demonstrate how data can be processed and analyzed autonomously aboard a satellite.

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It is hard for humans to wrap their heads around the fact that there are galaxies so far away that the light coming from them can be warped in a way that they actually experience a type of time delay. But that is exactly what is happening with extreme forms of gravitational lensing, such as those that give us the beautiful images of Einstein rings. In fact, the time dilation around some of these galaxies can be so extreme that the light from a single event, such as a supernova, can actually show up on Earth at dramatically different times. That is exactly what a team led by Dr. Steven Rodney at the University of South Carolina and Dr. Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen has found. Except three copies of this supernova have already appeared – and the team thinks it will show up again one more time, 20 years from now.

Finding such a supernova is important not just for its mind bending qualities – it also helps to settle an important debate in the cosmological community. The rate of expansion of the universe has outpaced the rate expected when calculated from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Most commonly, this cosmological conundrum is solved by invoking “dark energy” – a shadowy force that is supposedly responsible for increasing the acceleration rate. But scientists don’t actually know what dark energy is, and to figure it out they need a better model of the physics of the early universe.

One way to get that better model is to find an event that is actively being distorted through a gravitational lens. Importantly – the same event must show up at two separate, distinct times in order to provide input to a calculation about the ratio of the distance between the galaxy doing the lensing and the background galaxy that was the source of the event.

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According to a new study1, an anti-inflammatory protein called interleukin-38, or IL-38, is decreased in the brains of people with autism.

To help protect the brain from injury and infection, the immune cells in the brain, called microglia, usually produce inflammatory molecules2. But it is a tough balance – an inappropriate, or too large, inflammatory response can harm the health of the brain.

Research has shown that there may be changes in the structure and function of microglia in the brains of people with autism. This suggests that atypical inflammatory responses may play a role in autism3, 4, 5.

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Smart strategies like this can help workers learn to embrace technological change. If the government helps people plan their next move if and when they’re no longer needed in their current job, workers will be able to roll with the economy’s punches more easily. Combined with national health insurance, education and retraining assistance — and a robust unemployment insurance system — it could make terror of job loss a thing of the past.

The U.S. government must assuage people’s anxiety about technology upending their working lives, in part by helping them forge new career paths.

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REDMOND, Wash.—()—Helion Energy (Helion), a clean electricity company committed to creating a new era of clean energy through fusion, today became the first private company to announce exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius in their 6th fusion generator prototype, Trenta. Reaching this temperature is a critical engineering milestone as it is considered the ideal fuel temperature at which a commercial power plant would need to operate. Helion will be presenting these operational results at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. See abstract below.

“These achievements represent breakthroughs with major implications for how the world meets its expanding future electricity needs while dramatically reducing climate impact on a relevant timescale” Tweet this

Helion also announced their Trenta prototype recently completed a 16-month testing campaign, which pushed fusion fuel performance to unprecedented levels and performed lifetime and reliability testing on key components of the fusion system. Helion will be presenting these results at the 2021 IEEE Pulsed Power Conference & Symposium on Fusion Engineering. See abstract below.

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