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Early mammalian development is a highly complex process involving elaborate and highly coordinated biological processes. One such process is zygotic genome activation (ZGA) which occurs following the union of the sperm and egg, marking the beginning of life. The resultant early embryos, termed ‘zygotes’ are capable of generating the entire organism, a property known as totipotency.

Totipotent sit atop the developmental hierarchy and have the greatest potency of all cell types, giving it limitless therapeutic potential. Surpassing pluripotent embryonic stem cells, which are only able to differentiate into all within the embryo, the totipotent zygote loses its totipotency as it matures into pluripotency.

Scientists at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine have now found a way to manipulate pluripotent cells into acquiring the totipotent capacity previously thought to exist only in the zygote. This not only provides key insights into how totipotency is formed and the earliest events in mammalian development, but opens new doors for potential cell therapies that were previously unexplored.

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About 50 years ago, scientists believed magic mushrooms and LSD held a lot of medicinal promise. So then, how did they become such a taboo to even discuss? Government officials thought that if young men were on LSD, they wouldn’t want to fight in wars.

In this video, author Michael Pollan describes the little known history of psychedelic drugs in America.

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A theoretical physicist in England has won a prestigious award for her work on the theory of massive gravity, which could explain why gravity hasn’t constrained the rapid expansion of the universe. The $100,000 award honors the work of Claudia de Rham, who has worked for 10 years on a way to turn massive gravity theory into something measurable.

Cosmologists have puzzled for decades about how to marry gravity with the speed at which the universe is expanding. Gravity as we understand it would work to hold the universe together, not let it race apart from itself into eventual oblivion. Enter the counterpart to dark matter, dark energy, which is what scientists call whatever is pulling the universe apart.

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Circa 2018

It may look like just another giant smokestack, but a 200-foot tower in the central Chinese city of Xi’an was built to pull deadly pollutants from the air rather than add more. And preliminary research shows the tower — which some are calling the world’s largest air purifier — has cut air pollution significantly across a broad swath of the surrounding area.

Given those findings, the researchers behind the project say they hope to build an even taller air-purifying tower in Xi’an, and possibly in other cities around China.

“I like to tell my students that we don’t need to be medical doctors to save lives,” said Dr. David Pui, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and one of the researchers. “If we can just reduce the air pollution in major metropolitan areas by 20 percent, for example, we can save tens of thousands of lives each year.”

Continue reading “This skyscraper-sized air purifier is the world’s tallest” | >

How many credit cards do you have? If you’re like the average American, you carry four in your wallet.

Chances are your credit cards are from different banks. But if you dumped out your wallet on the table and laid all your cards side by side, you’d notice something odd.

While all the cards are from different banks—and they all have their own special privileges, prestigious names, and color schemes—most have one thing in common:

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San Francisco startup RealityEngines. AI has turned off stealth mode and today launched its completely autonomous cloud AI service. It’s all very tedious to the common reader IMO — enterprise-level business stuff — but the technology itself and how it could shape our future in both data and perceived reality should be at least mildly considered.

Here’s how RealityEngines. AI works: using a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique called BANANAS, when a user points their data (through an API) to RealityEngines. AI and selects a use case (churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection, cloud spend optimization, et al.), the data is attacked by the NAS to create cutting-edge models then refined by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in order to augment sparse or noisy data with synthetic data to further enhance the data modeling. Now that, is bananas.

It’s a democratization of AI that will not only create a service that allows anyone to create AI models without having to hire a team of developers, but it makes that service accessible to any business that feels it needs it and might not even have enough data. The synthetic data technology can help companies create AI models with a moderate amount of data.

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Every year, Americans spend something like $35 billion on vitamins, minerals, botanicals and various other substances that are touted as health-giving but mostly do nothing at all. Nothing at all!

Could the entire category really just be a rip-off? I turned to the National Institutes of Health. I spoke with Carol Haggans, a scientific and health communications consultant with the Office of Dietary Supplements, about vitamins and minerals, and to Craig Hopp, deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, about botanical and other kinds of supplements.

UNEARTHED | The list of those that have well-established benefits is short.

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Industrial designer Vladimir Pirojkov was called upon to work on the interior design for a new spacecraft for the Russian Space Agency. Here he talks about the experience.

Can you tell us a little about your background?

My roots are in the transportation industry. I graduated from Art Center College of Design in Switzerland. My first job was as a Citroen interior designer in Paris. After six years I moved to Nice in the south of France to join the Toyota Europe Design Development Centre as senior interior designer. It was a great experience, where many countries and cultures met and learned from each other. We worked on projects for show cars and some for on-the-road production vehicles. In 2007, I returned to Russia to work on the future of the world.

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