Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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First discovered in 1984, retrons are floating ribbons of DNA in some bacteria cells that can be converted into a specific type of DNA—a single chain of DNA bases dubbed ssDNAs (yup, it’s weird). But that’s fantastic news for gene editing, because our cells’ double-stranded DNA sequences become impressionable single chains when they divide. Perfect timing for a retron bait-and-switch.

Normally, our DNA exists in double helices that are tightly wrapped into 23 bundles, called chromosomes. Each chromosome bundle comes in two copies, and when a cell divides, the copies separate to duplicate themselves. During this time, the two copies sometimes swap genes in a process called recombination. This is when retrons can sneak in, inserting their ssDNA progeny into the dividing cell instead. If they carry new tricks—say, allowing a bacteria cell to become resistant against drugs—and successfully insert themselves, then the cell’s progeny will inherit that trait.

Because of the cell’s natural machinery, retrons can infiltrate a genome without cutting it. And they can do it in millions of dividing cells at the same time.

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They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University’s holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.

Inspired by the displays of science fiction, the researchers have also engineered battles between equally small versions of the Starship Enterprise and a Klingon Battle Cruiser that incorporate photon torpedoes launching and striking the enemy vessel that you can see with the naked eye.

“What you’re seeing in the scenes we create is real; there is nothing computer generated about them,” said lead researcher Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at BYU. “This is not like the movies, where the lightsabers or the photon torpedoes never really existed in physical . These are real, and if you look at them from any angle, you will see them existing in that space.”

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Widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases, implantable medical devices are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people. Researchers are increasingly interested in designing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices for in vivo and in situ physiological monitoring. These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

To date, conventional implanted electronics have been highly volume-inefficient—they generally require multiple chips, packaging, wires, and external transducers, and batteries are often needed for . A constant trend in electronics has been tighter integration of electronic components, often moving more and more functions onto the integrated circuit itself.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world’s smallest single– system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm3. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope. In order to achieve this, the team used ultrasound to both power and communicate with the device wirelessly. The study was published online May 7 in Science Advances.

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The findings could lead to faster, more secure memory storage, in the form of antiferromagnetic bits.

When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip.

But growing demand for data, and the means to store them, is driving scientists to search beyond silicon for materials that can push memory devices to higher densities, speeds, and security.

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Not sure how novel.

People who live beyond 105 years are more efficient at repairing DNA, according to a study published today in eLife.

Paolo Garagnani and colleagues, in collaboration with several research groups in Italy and a research team led by Patrick Descombes at Nestlé Research in Lausanne, Switzerland, recruited 81 semi-supercentenarians (those aged 105 years or older) and supercentenarians (those aged 110 years or older) from across the Italian peninsula. They compared these with 36 healthy people matched from the same region who were an average age of 68 years old.

They took blood samples from all the participants and conducted whole-genome sequencing to look for differences in the genes between the older and younger group. They then cross-checked their new results with genetic data from another previously published study which analyzed 333 Italian people aged over 100 years old and 358 people aged around 60 years old.

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A gene therapy that makes use of an unlikely helper, the AIDS virus, gave a working immune system to 48 babies and toddlers who were born without one, doctors reported Tuesday.

Results show that all but two of the 50 children who were given the experimental therapy in a study now have healthy germ-fighting abilities.

“We’re taking what otherwise would have been a fatal disease” and healing most of these children with a single treatment, said study leader Dr. Donald Kohn of UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital.

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New observations and simulations show that jets of high-energy particles emitted from the central massive black hole in the brightest galaxy in galaxy clusters can be used to map the structure of invisible inter-cluster magnetic fields. These findings provide astronomers with a new tool for investigating previously unexplored aspects of clusters of galaxies.

As clusters of galaxies grow through collisions with surrounding matter, they create bow shocks and wakes in their dilute plasma. The plasma motion induced by these activities can drape intra-cluster magnetic layers, forming virtual walls of magnetic force. These magnetic layers, however, can only be observed indirectly when something interacts with them. Because it is simply difficult to identify such interactions, the nature of intra-cluster magnetic fields remains poorly understood. A new approach to map/characterize magnetic layers is highly desired.

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