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Circa 2019.

Gain of function research was heavily debated amidst many CDC mishaps. It was stopped, and then outsourced to China due to lax regulations. Now we have an outbreak that no one can confirm it’s origin, but the epicenter is in close proximity to a Wuhan lab working on the same pathogen, with direct bat to human transmission.

Knowing this, this story disturbs me, as we have no international protocols and regulations to prevent mishaps. The last thing we need is a lab mishap, and monkeys riding on horses with guns, all pissed off at humans. We are already experiencing the Contagion movie, and biblical plagues like locusts, the last we need is planet of the apes.


In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey, reports the Spanish daily El País.

Since the ancient times, humans have been observant and curious to know why everything around us exists. Looking up into the sky, we see many celestial objects such as stars and planets. In the past few centuries, we have made many jumps in the field of space exploration. Telescopes have been created, the stars have been mapped, people have flown in space and even lived there for over six months. These activities have played a major role in the development of our knowledge about space, yet there is so much more we need to discover.

One thing we need to find is how to make space travel quicker and more efficient. Why making space travel better, out of all the problems mankind faces? Currently, our global population is about 7.6 billion and is exponentially rising. By 2025, in just seven years, the global population will be roughly 8.1 billion. Since our resource availability is going down and our population is rising, the Earth can not sustain such an imbalance. This why we must start looking to live on other planets and in order to do this, shortening the time it takes to reach such planets is a necessity.

As a society, when we think of space in general, we just think “oh yeah, that’s cool” but there are multiple problems with space travel. One major issue is the lack of experience. The last Moon landing was in 1972 and space shuttles have been out of use 2011. We can’t just get up and say “you know what, let’s go to space” as it takes many years of preparation and training. This ties to two other major problems:

The Czinger 21C is a 1,233bhp 3D printed hypercar complete with a turbo V8 revving to 11,000rpm, a 1+1 layout and $1.7m price tag. Oh, and the big news is it’s 3D printed. Well, large sections of the chassis are, paving the way for a revolutionary new car manufacturing process that could change… everything. It’s mind-blowing stuff, so let Jack Rix be your guide around California’s Koenigsegg rival.

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Plants can produce energy-rich biomass with the help of light, water and carbon dioxide. This is why they are at the beginning of the food chains. But the carnivorous plants have turned the tables and hunt animals. Insects are their main food source.

A publication in the journal Current Biology now sheds light on the secret life of the green carnivores. The plant scientist Rainer Hedrich and the evolutionary bioinformatician Jörg Schultz, both from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, and their colleague Mitsujasu Hasebe from the University of Okazaki (Japan) have deciphered and analyzed the genomes of three carnivorous plant species.

They studied the Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula, which originates from North America, the globally occurring waterwheel plant Aldrovanda vesiculosa and the spoon-leaved sundew Drosera spatulata, which is widely distributed in Asia.

CrumplePop RustleRemover AI and Levelmatic Audio Plugins, two plugins for audio cleanup we have a look at how they can clean up audio from anything to unwanted mic noises, to fixing levels in podcasts and interview audio.

CrumplePop makes some very clever and useful plugins for Mac-based editors. These include audio tools to fix and enhance sound and video tools for grading and stabilizing. The company has now announced two new audio plugins, RustleRemover AI and Levelmatic the former aimed at fixing a specific issue, and the latter leveling audio.