Lifeboat Foundation

Cyrus Biotechnology has teamed up with the Broad Institute to optimize CRISPR for use in humans. Feng Zhang, who had a hand in developing CRISPR, will serve as the Broad’s principal investigator for the collaboration.

One concern with using CRISPR-Cas9 to perform in vivo genome editing stems from the risk that the body will mount an immune response against the system. Those concerns have grown as researchers have shown that many people have antibodies against Cas9, reflecting the fact that the homologs of the protein used in genome editing systems are derived from bacteria that commonly infect people.

Cyrus, which lists Johnson & Johnson among its customers, thinks its technology can mitigate the risk of an immune reaction. That confidence reflects Cyrus’ experience of using software to identify and work around the epitopes in protein therapeutics that cause immunogenicity.

An open-source stack is helping create practical drones for life-saving missions.

The goal is to change the trajectory of a city-killer asteroid.

NASA and the ESA are going to try to reroute an asteroid.

An intelligence startup warns that China is exploiting Western quantum scientists for military ends. The evidence is thin, but tensions are rising.

A decades-old idea is finally getting a chance to shine—that is, a chance to send sunshine harvested by a satellite down to Earth.

Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our Galaxy.

The black hole dubbed LB-1 is 15,000 light years from Earth.

How do human beings perceive their environment and take their decisions? To successfully interact with the immediate environment, for human beings it is not enough to have basic evidence of the world around them. This information by itself is insufficient because it is inherently ambiguous and requires integrating into a particular context to minimize the uncertainty of sensory perception. But, at the same time, the context is ambiguous. For example, am I in a safe or a dange…

According to a study published on Nov. 28 in Nature Communications by Philipp Schustek, Alexandre Hyafil and Rubén Moreno-Bote, researchers at the Center for Brain and Cognition of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra — Barcelona

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