Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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We have seen befoređŸ€”đŸ€”.

Observations suggest that its home star system could resemble our own. NASA scientists have even suggested that the object may hold water.

Now, a new study by an international team of researchers led by NASA has revealed something highly unusual: gas emanating from the comet contained unusually high amounts of carbon monoxide — up to 26 times higher than that of the average comet.

“This is the first time we’ve ever looked inside a comet from outside our solar system and it is dramatically different from most other comets we’ve seen before,” Martin Cordiner, astrochemist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy said in a statement.

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A marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks is writing and playing its own compositions in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The pieces are generated using artificial intelligence and deep learning.

Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs — from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis — and more than 2 million motifs, riffs and licks of music. Aside from giving the machine a seed, or the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music.

The first two compositions are roughly 30 seconds in length. The robot, named Shimon, can be seen and heard playing them here and here.

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It is now possible to use a cheap, lightweight and smartphone-powered DNA detector to identify DNA in blood, urine and other samples, on the spot.

At the moment, testing to identify DNA is done in laboratories using expensive, specialised equipment. To make this process faster and cheaper, Ming Chen at the Army Medical University in China and his colleagues developed a portable DNA detector made of 3D-printed parts that attach to a standard smartphone.

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Now, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a way to use gene editing system CRISPR-Cas9 to edit a mutation in human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and then turn them into beta cells. When transplanted into mice, the cells reversed preexisting diabetes in a lasting way, according to results published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

While the researchers used cells from patients with Wolfram syndrome—a rare childhood diabetes caused by mutations in the WFS1 gene—they argue that the combination of a gene therapy with stem cells could potentially treat other forms of diabetes as well.

Virtual Event

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As electronic devices become progressively smaller, the technology that powers them needs to get smaller and thinner.

One of the key challenges scientists face in developing this technology is finding materials that can perform well at an ultrathin size. But now, Berkeley researchers think they may have the answer.

Led by Sayeef Salahuddin, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, and graduate student Suraj Cheema, a team of researchers has managed to grow onto silicon an ultrathin material that demonstrates a unique electrical property called ferroelectricity. The duo’s findings were published in the April 22 issue of Nature.

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Capping decades of research, a new study may offer a breakthrough in treating dyskeratosis congenita and other so-called telomere diseases, in which cells age prematurely. Using cells donated by patients with the disease, researchers at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center identified several small molecules that appear to reverse this cellular aging process. Suneet Agarwal, MD, Ph.D., the study’s senior investigator, hopes at least one of these compounds will advance toward clinical trials. Findings were published April 21 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

If so, it could be the first treatment for dyskeratosis congenita, or DC, that could reverse all of the disease’s varying effects on the body. The current treatment, , is high-risk, and only helps restore the blood system, whereas DC affects multiple organs.

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Engineering researchers developed a next-generation miniature lab device that uses magnetic nano-beads to isolate minute bacterial particles that cause diseases. Using this new technology improves how clinicians isolate drug-resistant strains of bacterial infections and difficult-to-detect micro-particles such as those making up Ebola and coronaviruses.

Ke Du and Blanca Lapizco-Encinas, both faculty-researchers in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, worked with an international team to collaborate on the design of the new system — a microfluidic device, essentially a lab-on-a-chip.

Drug-resistant bacterial infections are causing hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world every year, and this number is continuously increasing. Based on a report from the United Nations, the deaths caused by antibiotics resistance could reach to 10 million annually by 2050, Du explained.

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