Lifeboat Foundation

Gene editing is advancing at a faster pace than most of us can keep up with. One significant recent announcement was gene editing tool CRISPR’s application to non-genetic diseases thanks to a new ability to edit single letters in RNA.

Even as CRISPR reaches milestones like this, scientists continue to find new uses for it to treat genetic conditions. The next one that will hit clinics is a CRISPR treatment for a form of blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA).

Having been approved by the FDA in December, the treatment will be the first of its kind to be trialed in the US.

Think that robots need to be the size of a dog or even a full-grown person to be exciting? Not so, as the fast-developing field of micro-robotics demonstrates. As it turns out, in some cases the world’s most innovative robots may even be too small for many of us to see.

Scientists at work in laboratory. Photo: Public domain via Wikicommons.

CTech – When chemistry Nobel laureate Michael Levitt met his wife two years ago, he didn’t know it would lead to a wonderful friendship with a young Israeli scientist. When Israeli scientist Shahar Barbash decided to found a startup with the aim of cutting down the time needed to develop new medicine, he didn’t know that a friend’s wedding would help him score a meeting with a man many want to meet but few do. But Levitt’s wife is an old friend of Barbash’s parents, and the rest, as they say, is history.

One of the joys of being an old scientist is to encourage extraordinary young ones, Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and a professor at Stanford University since 1987, said in a recent interview with Calcalist. He might have met Barbash because his wife knew his family, but that is not enough to make him go into business with someone, Levitt said. “I got on board because his vision excited me, even though I thought it would be very hard to realize.”

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Want to live a healthier, longer life? Try taking more prebiotics — also, don’t eat sometimes.

In this video, bestselling author Dave Asprey explains.

I am aware of many “Small Studies” that produced undeniable results.

Tucked away in 7,000 acres of beautiful Wiltshire countryside lies one of Britain’s most infamous scientific establishments. Porton Down, founded in 1916, is the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world. The tight secrecy which has surrounded the establishment for decades has fed the growth of all sorts of myths and rumours about its experiments. One Whitehall official once remarked that Porton had an image of “a sinister and nefarious establishment”.

The Porton experiments on humans have attracted a good deal of criticism. It is, for example, alleged that the human “guinea pigs’ — drawn from the armed forces and supposedly all volunteers — were duped into taking part in the tests. There are still concerns that the tests have damaged the long-term health of the human subjects.

Continue reading “The past Porton Down can’t hide” »

In a milestone for forensic criminal investigators, a convicted killer received two life sentences on Wednesday for a 1987 double slaying after becoming the first person arrested through genetic genealogy to be found guilty at trial.

“The conviction and sentencing of William Earl Talbott II marks a new era for the use genetic genealogy for identifying violent criminals since it has now been tested and tried in a court of law,” geneology expert CeCe Moore told ABC News.

William Earl Talbott II was arrested in May 2018 and charged with aggravated murder for the Washington state cold case killings of 20-year-old Jay Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg, authorities said. A jury found Talbott guilty last month.

The financial-technology boom that turned China into the world’s biggest market for electronic payments is now changing how banks interact with companies that drive most of the nation’s economic growth. As MYbank and its peers crunch reams of new data from payment systems, social media and other sources, they’re growing more comfortable with smaller borrowers that they previously shunned in favor of state-owned giants.

Jack Ma’s online bank is leading a quiet revolution in the way China lends to small businesses, taking aim at a credit bottleneck that has held back Asia’s largest economy for decades.

Using real-time payments data and a risk-management system that analyzes more than 3,000 variables, Ma’s four-year-old MYbank has lent 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) to nearly 16 million small companies. Borrowers apply with a few taps on a smartphone and receive cash almost instantly if they’re approved. The whole process takes three minutes and involves zero human bankers. The default rate so far: about 1%.

Continue reading “Jack Ma’s $290 Billion Loan Machine Is Changing Chinese Banking” »

ESPAÑOLA, N.M. (AP) — It’ll be one giant leap for chile-kind.

A hybrid version of a New Mexico chile plant has been selected to be grown in space as part of a NASA experiment.

The chile, from Española, New Mexico, is tentatively scheduled to be launched to the International Space Station for testing in March 2020, the Albuquerque Journal reports.

An international team of researchers has found that the gut microbiota in mice play an influential role in skeletal muscle mass maintenance and function. In their paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the group describes their experiments with wild and lab-raised mice, and what they found.

Over the past several years, scientists have found that gut microbiota in humans and other animals play a far bigger role in maintaining health than previously thought. In addition to processing food, the gut microbiome plays an important role in immunity and in regulating cholesterol and triglycerides. And imbalances in the gut microbiota have been associated with conditions such as Crohn’s disease, IBS and other inflammatory diseases. Now, the researchers with this new effort have found evidence that suggests the gut microbiome also plays a role in maintaining the right amount of skeletal muscle mass and its function—at least in mice.

Skeletal muscle is one of the three main types of muscle—the other two are cardiac and smooth. Skeletal muscle is very much what it sounds like—the collection of muscles that are connected to bones in the skeleton that control movement, most specifically, the limbs.