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The researchers are hoping the extremely light material could be used to construct lightweight exoskeletons and shape-shifting “Terminator 2”-style robots, New Scientist reports.

Glass Beads

The researchers created a mixture of the soft metals gallium and indium, which had a melting point of just 15.7 Celsius (60.3 Fahrenheit). To make it float, the team gently stirred microscopic beads of glass, filled with air, into the liquid.

Should we be forced to die? Live? We’re going to dig into some deep questions about health and longevity in our discussion this week with the CEO of BioViva Sciences, Elizabeth Parrish. BioViva is dedicated to improving healthy human longevity through bioinformatics used in health predictions and recommendations, precision medicine, and the discovery of novel biomarkers by applying state of the art computational methods on vast collections of biological data.

For the first time, doctors have attempted to cure blindness by gene-hacking a patient with CRISPR technology.

A team from Oregon Health & Science Institute injected three droplets of fluid that delivered the CRISPR DNA fragments directly into a patient’s eyeball, The Associated Press reports, in hopes that it will reverse a rare genetic condition called Leber congenital amaurosis, which causes blindness early in childhood.

“We literally have the potential to take people who are essentially blind and make them see,” Charles Albright, chief scientific officer of Editas Medicine, told the AP.

The coronavirus outbreak in China has had a foreseeable but unintended consequence. Truck drivers have refused to make deliveries into areas either identified as or suspected of harboring the disease.

This has interrupted not only the flow of minerals out of the affected areas but also the refining and manufacturing of metals, food, and fuel. Among the under-reported deficiencies thereby caused the most important ones for the global rare earths production and utilization industries is the interruption in the flow of chemical reagents necessary for refining rare earths and for producing metals, alloys, and magnets.


Critical materials-based supply chains may be hanging by a thread, the thread of the size of existing Chinese inventories. The coronavirus outbreak in China has had a foreseeable but unintended consequence.

Scientists say they have used the gene editing tool CRISPR inside someone’s body for the first time — offering a new frontier for efforts to operate on DNA, the chemical code of life, to treat diseases.

A patient recently had it done at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland for an inherited form of blindness, according to the companies that make the treatment. The company would not give details on the patient or when the surgery occurred.

It may take up to a month to see if it worked to restore the patient’s vision. If the first few attempts seem safe, doctors plan to test it on 18 children and adults.

We would like to thank the many people who provided comments to our last coronavirus update at https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation/permalink/10158676889983455/.

You can comment on this update at https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation/permalink/10158683233098455/.

Here’s a lot of new information:

WATCH THE CORONAVIRUS EVOLVE!

Hit play at https://nextstrain.org/ncov to watch the coronavirus evolve in near realtime. (The play button is on the geography part.)

A team of scientists in China has linked quantum memories over more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) of fiber optic cable, beating the previous record by more than 40 times over. This feat is an important step toward a hack-proof internet, scientists said.

The internet we use today was truly a revolutionary invention. It connected the world with information and allowed us to share millions of photos of cute and cuddly cats. But the internet is also filled with hackers trying to intercept important or sensitive information. To fight back, physicists have come up with a solution, with a little help from Schrödinger’s cat, the famous, hypothetical dead-and-alive feline meant to expose the weird nature of subatomic particles.