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Mar 15, 2020

Gigantic golden asteroid could make everyone on Earth a billionaire

Posted by in category: space

Circa 2019


An asteroid that’s filled with gold and enough precious metals to turn everyone on Earth into a billionaire is being studied by NASA.

The asteroid – known as 16 Psyche – has a mass of less than 1% of our moon and it contains heaps of platinum, iron and nickel alongside the gold. The combined total value of all those precious metals would equal out at something like $700 quintillion.

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Mar 15, 2020

Grandfather becomes first person to have pioneering heart treatment

Posted by in category: futurism

A British grandfather-of-nine has become the first person in the world to benefit from a pioneering triple-combo heart-failure treatment.

Robert Brind, 63, from Whitstable, Kent, had three new wireless implants fitted over the course of six months to help his heart beat properly again.

One prompts the heart to beat at a normal rate, another makes sure both sides beat in unison, while the third is on standby to shock the heart if it suddenly starts to fail.

Mar 15, 2020

U.S. FDA approves Thermo Fisher’s coronavirus test: official

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday approved Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc’s coronavirus test, which would allow the firm to increase capacity to 1.4 million tests a week, a Trump administration official said.

“This will dramatically increase our ability to test people for the virus,” the official said. It was not immediately clear if capacity referred to test kit production or processing of tests performed on individual patients.

The move comes as the Trump administration struggles to meet demand for testing. The FDA has already approved emergency authorization for a faster coronavirus test made by Swiss diagnostics maker Roche.

Mar 15, 2020

How science is on a mission to extend the human lifespan – to 1,000?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, science

Along with academic research departments around the world, private sector medical technology companies are getting in on the action, seeking ways to increase longevity and health span.

Mar 15, 2020

Phones Could Track the Spread of Covid-19. Is It a Good Idea?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, mobile phones

China and South Korea used smartphone apps to monitor people with the disease. But Americans have different views of privacy and data collection.

Mar 15, 2020

Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, economics, finance, health

Coronavirus’s economic danger is exponentially greater than its health risks to the public. If the virus does directly affect your life, it is most likely to be through stopping you going to work, forcing your employer to make you redundant, or bankrupting your business.

The trillions of dollars wiped from financial markets this week will be just the beginning, if our governments do not step in. And if President Trump continues to stumble in his handling of the situation, it may well affect his chances of re-election. Joe Biden in particular has identified Covid-19 as a weakness for Trump, promising “steady, reassuring” leadership during America’s hour of need.

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Mar 15, 2020

Extracellular nanovesicles for packaging of CRISPR-Cas9 protein and sgRNA to induce therapeutic exon skipping

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Prolonged expression of the CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease and gRNA from viral vectors may cause off-target mutagenesis and immunogenicity. Thus, a transient delivery system is needed for therapeutic genome editing applications. Here, we develop an extracellular nanovesicle-based ribonucleoprotein delivery system named NanoMEDIC by utilizing two distinct homing mechanisms. Chemical induced dimerization recruits Cas9 protein into extracellular nanovesicles, and then a viral RNA packaging signal and two self-cleaving riboswitches tether and release sgRNA into nanovesicles. We demonstrate efficient genome editing in various hard-to-transfect cell types, including human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, neurons, and myoblasts. NanoMEDIC also achieves over 90% exon skipping efficiencies in skeletal muscle cells derived from Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patient iPS cells. Finally, single intramuscular injection of NanoMEDIC induces permanent genomic exon skipping in a luciferase reporter mouse and in mdx mice, indicating its utility for in vivo genome editing therapy of DMD and beyond.

Mar 15, 2020

A single polyploidization event at the origin of the tetraploid genome of Coffea arabica is responsible for the extremely low genetic variation in wild and cultivated germplasm

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 4642 (2020) Cite this article.

Mar 15, 2020

Hydrogen: The Secret To Commercializing Nuclear Fusion

Posted by in categories: innovation, nuclear energy

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There’s a new breakthrough that might just be the secret ingredient to commercialize “the holy grail of energy,” nuclear fusion.

Mar 15, 2020

How China is planning to go to Mars amid the coronavirus outbreak

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, space

Two other international teams are planning Mars launches in July. NASA plans to deploy a rover named Perseverance, and the United Arab Emirates will send a probe called Hope. The European and Russian space agencies were planning to send a probe to Mars this year, but announced on Thursday that the launch will be delayed by two years so they can finish important tests, and partly because of the coronavirus pandemic.


China’s first journey to Mars is one of the most anticipated space missions of the year. But with parts of the country in some form of lockdown because of the coronavirus, the mission teams have had to find creative ways to continue their work.

Researchers involved in the mission remain tight-lipped about its key aspects, but several reports from Chinese state media say that the outbreak will not affect the July launch — the only window for another two years.

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