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Axiom Space will now let you book a unique all-inclusive vacation to the Internation Space Station for a casual US$55 million per seat.

Having signed a contract with SpaceX – because who else? – the company has effectively secured permission for a fully-trained commander and three “private astronauts” (read: bored & wealthy operators) to travel via one of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules.

“This history-making flight will represent a watershed moment in the march toward universal and routine access to space,” says Axiom CEO, Michael Suffredini.

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Genetic perturbations that affect bacterial resistance to antibiotics have been characterized genome-wide, but how do such perturbations interact with subsequent evolutionary adaptation to the drug? Here, we show that strong epistasis between resistance mutations and systematically identified genes can be exploited to control spontaneous resistance evolution. We evolved hundreds of Escherichia coli K-12 mutant populations in parallel, using a robotic platform that tightly controls population size and selection pressure. We find a global diminishing-returns epistasis pattern: strains that are initially more sensitive generally undergo larger resistance gains. However, some gene deletion strains deviate from this general trend and curtail the evolvability of resistance, including deletions of genes for membrane transport, LPS biosynthesis, and chaperones. Deletions of efflux pump genes force evolution on inferior mutational paths, not explored in the wild type, and some of these essentially block resistance evolution. This effect is due to strong negative epistasis with resistance mutations. The identified genes and cellular functions provide potential targets for development of adjuvants that may block spontaneous resistance evolution when combined with antibiotics.

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The current pandemic isn’t just affecting humans, it’s also impacting wildlife. As the world locks down to avoid further spread of the devastating coronavirus, there are suddenly far fewer cars on the road, planes in the sky and ships in the water. And nature has surely noticed.

Recently, pumas have been spotted ambling down the streets of Santiago, Chile and coyotes have been combing through San Francisco, while rats have grown increasingly aggressive in their hunt for ever-dwindling scraps, and starving urban monkey gangs brawl over diminishing resources.

Some people started calling it the ‘Great Pause’. Now, scientists have come up with a more precise and technical way to describe these exceptional circumstances, outlining what we might learn from their effects.

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ebiol, Inc. has invented a film called “Imec” made of hydrogel for growing vegetables with less water. Using this method, agriculture can be done virtually anywhere — even on desert land or concrete. The film prevents harmful viruses and germs from getting in, rendering pesticides unnecessary. The film also creates a “water stress” that helps crops such as tomatoes synthesize large amounts of sugar, amino acids, and other nutrients. This, in turn, leads to more natural sweetness and higher nutritional value. In addition, Imec eliminates soil contamination that can negatively impact crop productivity and quality.

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“Despite their abundance, astrocytes have been relatively overlooked by neuroscientists,” says Mirko Santello, last author of the study. Yet these cells are extremely important to clear transmitters released by neurons. In their study the researchers were able to show that in familial migraine the astrocytes cannot remove excessive transmitters released by neurons. “The impairment in astrocytic glutamate uptake in the cingulate cortex strongly enhances cortical dendritic excitability and thus enhances firing of the neurons,” Santello says…

Migraine is a complicated disorder that affects part of the nervous system. “Our results provide a clear example of how astrocyte dysfunction produced by a genetic defect affects neuronal activity and sensitivity to head pain triggers,” explains Mirko Santello. The findings help to better understand migraine pathophysiology and suggest that the cingulate cortex may represent a critical hub in the disease. The demonstration of the link between dysfunction of astrocytes in the cingulate cortex and familial migraine could help in devising new migraine treatment strategies.

Neuroscientists of the University of Zurich shed a new light on the mechanisms responsible for familial migraine: They show that a genetic dysfunction in specific brain cells of the cingulate cortex area strongly influences head pain occurrence.

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To the general public, lasers heat objects. And generally, that would be correct.

But lasers also show promise to do quite the opposite — to cool materials. Lasers that can cool materials could revolutionize fields ranging from bio-imaging to quantum communication.

In 2015, University of Washington researchers announced that they can use a laser to cool water and other liquids below room temperature. Now that same team has used a similar approach to refrigerate something quite different: a solid semiconductor. As the team shows in a paper published today (June 23, 2020) in Nature Communications, they could use an infrared laser to cool the solid semiconductor by at least 20 degrees C, or 36 F, below room temperature.

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Fantastic article on Dr Yuancheng Ryan Lu’s age reversal experiment.

“ It suggests that it is entirely possible to reverse aging in cells with the use of a molecular mechanism already present in the cells. And so, scientists are now off to the races in the hopes of finding this cellular mechanism, and ways to activate this correction system in living beings…”

In 2006, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese stem cell researcher, published his paper on induced pluripotent stem cells, and it changed the medical world. Dr. Yamanaka had found a way to convert a mature skin cell into a stem cell by injecting just a few genes. And for this, Dr. Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, sharing it with another Sir John B. Gurdon, who found another method of inducing pluripotency.

Thirteen years after this paper was published (in 2019), Dr. Yuancheng Lu from the Sinclair Lab at Harvard University authored another paper (still being peer-reviewed) where he had used Dr. Yamanaka’s breakthrough to reverse aging.

Continue reading “Stem Cells: The Key to Reversing Biological Age” | >

Not even the lawyers will be spared.

In the summer of 2015, Stanford-bound high school grad Josh Browder spent his nights coding and developing an automated program that would help people contest parking tickets. The native Londoner had recently gotten his driver’s license, and had himself assembled a respectable collection of fines, some of which he felt were unjustly rewarded.

About three weeks later, Browder already had a product called DoNotPay which he shared with his friends. A blogger from Reddit picked up on it, and almost overnight, DoNotPay went from 10 people using it to 50,000 users.

Today, the company announced it closed a $12 million Series A at an $80 million valuation. Coatue led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures. All had previously invested in the company’s $4.6 million seed round.

Continue reading “Stanford Grad Who Created The World’s First ‘Robot Lawyer’ Raises Million In Series A” | >