Lifeboat Foundation

Hundreds of CRISPR patents have been granted around the world, and the number of applications continues to grow at a rapid pace.

Researchers at Tufts University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a new lipid nanoparticle which can deliver CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tools into organs with high efficiency, suggesting that the system is promising for clinical applications.

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is currently being investigated as a way to treat a variety of diseases with a genetic basis, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s, and sickle cell disease. While the system has significant promise, there are some issues that need to be resolved before it can be used clinically. CRISPR/Cas9 is a large complex, and it is difficult to get it inside cell nuclei where it is needed for gene editing.

Scientists have tried a variety of delivery vehicles for CRISPR/Cas, which are intended to carry the gene editing tools to their location and help them enter the cell and nucleus. These have included viruses and various types of nanoparticle. However, to date, these have suffered from low efficiency, whereby very little of the delivered agent reaches the cells or organs where it is needed.

Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, has “aspirational” plans to launch people to Mars in 2024 and ultimately colonize the red planet.

To make the roughly six-month one-way journey, Musk and his engineers have dreamed up a 347-foot-tall launch system called the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The spacecraft is designed to have two fully reusable stages: a 19-story booster and a 16-story spaceship, which would fly on top of the booster and into into space.

SpaceX employees are now building a prototype of the Big Falcon Spaceship at the Port of Los Angeles. Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and COO, reportedly said Thursday that the spaceship may start small test-launches in late 2019.

Decades after his chemical castration by the British government and subsequent suicide, Alan Turing, the wartime codebreaker, pioneering computer scientist, and founder of artificial intelligence, will appear on the nation’s 50 pound note.

Rather than waiting around for serendipity, materials scientists would like to dream up a wonder material and then figure out how to make it. It’s this “inverse” approach to designing materials—working backward from the desired properties—that the team is calling “digital alchemy.”

“It really allows us to focus on the outcome and leverage what we know to find a starting point to building that material,” says Greg van Anders, a corresponding author of the paper and now an assistant professor of physics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Evidence connecting the condition to the human microbiome is growing stronger. Could swallowing tapeworms really help?

Who knows what could happen out there?

Real-time data from the Apollo 11 astronauts, carefully monitored by Mission Control, capture the frenzied maneuvers that put men on the moon.

Growing up.

📕