Lifeboat Foundation

Two active genetics strategies help address concerns about gene-drive releases into the wild.

In the past decade, researchers have engineered an array of new tools that control the balance of genetic inheritance. Based on CRISPR technology, such gene drives are poised to move from the laboratory into the wild where they are being engineered to suppress devastating diseases such as mosquito-borne malaria, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever and West Nile. Gene drives carry the power to immunize mosquitoes against malarial parasites, or act as genetic insecticides that reduce mosquito populations.

Although the newest gene drives have been proven to spread efficiently as designed in laboratory settings, concerns have been raised regarding the safety of releasing such systems into wild populations. Questions have emerged about the predictability and controllability of gene drives and whether, once let loose, they can be recalled in the field if they spread beyond their intended application region.

O,.o.

Dozens of malicious apps, some available in Play, found in the past couple months.

All Hands

The new enzyme can make its way through plastic six times faster than the previous plastic-devouring enzyme developed by members of the same team, according to research published Monday in the journal PNAS.

“We were actually quite surprised it worked so well,” McGeehan told CNN, though he added that the enzyme is “still way too slow” to be helpful at any meaningful scale.

For the first time, Senckenberg scientist Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer, together with lead authors David Peris and Kathrin Janssen of the University of Bonn and additional colleagues from Spain and Norway, successfully extracted genetic material from insects that were embedded in six- and two-year-old resin samples. DNA—in particular, DNA from extinct animals—is an important tool in the identification of species. In the future, the researchers plan to use their new methods on older resin inclusions, as well. The study was published today in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

The idea of extracting DNA from resin-embedded organisms inevitably invokes memories of the blockbuster “Jurassic Park.”

“However, we have no intention of raising dinosaurs,” says Dr. Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum. “Rather, our current study is a structured attempt to determine how long the DNA of insects enclosed in resinous materials can be preserved.”

Quantum computers, which harness the strange probabilities of quantum mechanics, may prove revolutionary. They have the potential to achieve an exponential speedup over their classical counterparts, at least when it comes to solving some problems. But for now, these computers are still in their infancy, useful for only a few applications, just as the first digital computers were in the 1940s. So isn’t a book about the communications network that will link quantum computers — the quantum internet — more than a little ahead of itself?

Surprisingly, no. As theoretical physicist Jonathan Dowling makes clear in Schrödinger’s Web, early versions of the quantum internet are here already — for example, quantum communication has been taking place between Beijing and Shanghai via fiber-optic cables since 2016 — and more are coming fast. So now is the perfect time to read up.

Dowling, who helped found the U.S. government’s quantum computing program in the 1990s, is the perfect guide. Armed with a seemingly endless supply of outrageous anecdotes, memorable analogies, puns and quips, he makes the thorny theoretical details of the quantum internet both entertaining and accessible.

Continue reading “‘Schrödinger’s Web’ offers a sneak peek at the quantum internet” »

A candid photograph posted on Chinese social media sheds light on a Chinese project to develop a drone-ship similar to the U.S. Navy’s Sea Hunter. The trimaran is remarkably similar to the Sea Hunter in almost every respect.

Although the designation of the project is unknown, based on imagery analysis the builder and and dimensions have been established.

MOSCOW (Reuters) — The International Space Station is leaking air in above-normal volumes, but the leak presents no danger to the Russian-American crew, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday.

The leak has been localised to one section of a service module and the crew, made up of U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, plan to eliminate it in the coming days, Russia’s RIA news agency quoted Roscosmos executive director Sergei Krikalev as saying.

Roscosmos said additional air may be delivered to the station.

A team of researchers at MIT and other institutions say their “SPARC” compact fusion reactor should actually work — at least in theory, as they argue in a series of recently released research papers.

In a total of seven papers penned by 47 researchers from 12 institutions, the team argues that no unexpected impediments or surprises have shown up during the planning stages.

In other words, the research “confirms that the design we’re working on is very likely to work,” Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and project lead, told The New York Times.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=62gDQ14pjwM

D-Wave today launched its next-generation quantum computing platform available via its Leap quantum cloud service. The company calls Advantage “the first quantum computer built for business.” In that vein, D-Wave today also debuted Launch, a jump-start program for businesses that want to begin building hybrid quantum applications.

“The Advantage quantum computer is the first quantum computer designed and developed from the ground up to support business applications,” D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told VentureBeat. “We engineered it to be able to deal with large, complex commercial applications and to be able to support the running of those applications in production environments. There is no other quantum computer anywhere in the world that can solve problems at the scale and complexity that this quantum computer can solve problems. It really is the only one that you can run real business applications on. The other quantum computers are primarily prototypes. You can do experimentation, run small proofs of concept, but none of them can support applications at the scale that we can.”

Continue reading “D-Wave announces Leap 2, its cloud service for quantum computing applications” »