A California startup made the first cross-country trip completed by an autonomous truck, delivering 40,000 pounds of butter in under three days. The self-driving truck drove from the west coast to Pennsylvania.
Today, Amazon has more than 200,000 mobile robots working inside its warehouse network, alongside hundreds of thousands of human workers. This robot army has helped the company fulfill its ever-increasing promises of speedy deliveries to Amazon Prime customers.
“They defined the expectations for the modern consumer,” said Scott Gravelle, the founder and CEO of Attabotics, a warehouse automation startup.
And those expectations of fast, free delivery driven by Amazon have led to a boom in the retail warehouse industry, with entrepreneurs like Gravelle and startups like Attabotics attempting to build smarter and cheaper robotic solutions to help both traditional retailers and younger e-commerce operations keep up with a behemoth like Amazon.
DNA damage, which results in genomic instability, is one of the primary hallmarks of aging. Today, we want to highlight an recent open access review that explores the DNA damage response during aging.
The role of DNA damage
Some researchers have long suggested that damage to our DNA is a major reason why we age and a strong determinant of species longevity; indeed, many-long lived species have extremely stable genomes, such as bristlecone pines, which have lifespans of over 5000 years.
A new open access paper takes a look at tryptophan and the role that it plays in the dysfunction of the immune system in the context of the age-related changes that occur in the microbiome [1].
The microbiome
The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem of bacteria, archaea, eukarya, and viruses that live inside of us, some beneficial and some harmful, the balance of which keeps us alive. Four microbial phyla, Firmicutes, Bacteroides, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria, make up 98% of the total population of the intestinal microbiome.
Recently, the first attempt in the United States to use the gene editing tool CRISPR to combat cancer appears to have gone well, according to the initial results of a small human trial to determine safety for the approach.
Gene editing is a way to permanently change DNA in order to potentially cure a disease by attacking the root causes. CRISPR is a tool that can cut DNA at a specific spot, allowing genes to be removed or replaced or new genes to be inserted. CRISPR and other similar gene editing tools have long been used in the lab and are finally, after many years, starting to reach human trials for cancer and other diseases.
The approach involved doctors harvesting immune T cells from three cancer patients’ bloodstreams and modifying those cells with CRISPR to make them better able to detect and destroy cancer. Two of the patients have multiple myeloma, and the third has a sarcoma. Essentially, this therapy uses the body’s own immune cells to fight the disease rather than going with the traditional route of using drugs to disrupt the growth and spread of cancer.
Opaque solar panels could be turned into window glass for tall buildings by punching hundreds of tiny holes in them so our eyes perceive them as transparent.
