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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Virgin Galactic’s spaceship VSS Unity, tucked under the wing of its special carrier aircraft, took a long-awaited ferry flight Thursday from Southern California to its new home in the New Mexico desert, where it will undergo final testing in preparation for commercial operations that will carry tourists on hops into space.

The mothership, named Eve, took off from Mojave Air & Space Port and circled over the Mojave Desert before turning east toward Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. The flight lasted more than three hours, giving pilots a chance to evaluate the spaceship at high altitude and cold temperatures for a prolonged period of time.

The move to New Mexico marks a significant milestone toward commercial flights, which the company anticipates this year.

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The generation of a chemical system capable of replication and evolution is a key objective of synthetic biology. This could be achieved by in vitro reconstitution of a minimal self-sustaining central dogma consisting of DNA replication, transcription and translation. Here, we present an in vitro translation system, which enables self-encoded replication and expression of large DNA genomes under well-defined, cell-free conditions. In particular, we demonstrate self-replication of a multipartite genome of more than 116 kb encompassing the full set of Escherichia coli translation factors, all three ribosomal RNAs, an energy regeneration system, as well as RNA and DNA polymerases. Parallel to DNA replication, our system enables synthesis of at least 30 encoded translation factors, half of which are expressed in amounts equal to or greater than their respective input levels. Our optimized cell-free expression platform could provide a chassis for the generation of a partially self-replicating in vitro translation system.

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BF16, the new number format optimized for deep learning, promises power and compute savings with a minimal reduction in prediction accuracy.

BF16, sometimes called BFloat16 or Brain Float 16, is a new number format optimised for AI/deep learning applications. Invented at Google Brain, it has gained wide adoption in AI accelerators from Google, Intel, Arm and many others.

The idea behind BF16 is to reduce the compute power and energy consumption needed to multiply tensors together by reducing the precision of the numbers. A tensor is a three-dimensional matrix of numbers; multiplication of tensors is the key mathematical operation required for AI calculations.

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Wall Street’s Biotech Investment Wizard — On this most recent ideaXme (http://radioideaxme.com/) episode, I was honored to be joined by my friend, and biotech / pharma / healthcare investment banker extraordinaire, Frederick Frank, to talk about his 50-year career history behind the industry’s mega-deals — #Ideaxme #Biopharma #Biotech #WallStreet #Mergers #Acquisitions #VentureCapital #Genentech #Roche #BristolMyersSquibb #PrivateEquity #Health #Wellness #Longevity #Regeneration #LifeExtension #Aging #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador, interviews Fred Frank, Founder and Chair of Evolution Life Science Partners, an investment bank focused on the needs of life sciences and healthcare companies.

Ira Pastor Comments:

On several recent shows we’ve been discussing some of the novel, alternative funding pools that have been emerging in and around the biotech space, specifically related to some of the unmet medical needs of which we have been focusing on, on the ideaXme show, particularly related to the age-tech and longevity biotech fronts.

We have had guests join us from both the $125 Million Healthy Ageing Challenge program of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation)and the US$30 Million Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. We’ve have also talked to folks at the XPrize Foundation, specifically related to their upcoming inducement prize contest for therapeutics for the diseases of aging.

Continue reading “Biotech’s Wizard Of Wall Street : Fred Frank At The Forefront of Investment” | >

Cities change as they grow — not only by adding area or population but also in a variety of other ways, from the length and width of their roads to economic growth to the distribution of elementary schools. Social scientists often clash over the best way to measure change as a city swells. Traditionally, they’ve taken a cross-sectional approach, which means collecting data on a large number of cities of diverse sizes at the same moment in time. More recently, some researcher…

New work reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.

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A region beneath the rough waters of the North Sea, known as Doggerland, holds archaeological clues to the past. Watch how researchers are using advances in mapping and leads from dredging sites to piece together the history of this vanished landscape.

Read the story: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/relics-washed-beache…-north-sea

Europe’s Lost Frontiers Research:
The study was supported by European Research Council funding through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 re-search and innovation programme (project no. 670518 LOST FRONTIERS, https://erc.europa.eu/ https://lostfrontiers.teamapp.com/) and the Estonian Research Council grant (https://www.etag.ee/, project no. PUTJD829). We acknowledge PGS (https://www.pgs.com/) through provision of data under license CA-BRAD-001‑2017. The Brown Bank expeditions were supported through the Flanders Marine institute (VLIZ, http://www.vliz.be/en) and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (https://odnature.naturalsciences.be/belgica/en/)

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Still, the fact that many labs worldwide are capable of printing viruses is worrisome.

A few years ago, for instance, Canadian researchers alarmed the scientific community when they assembled synthetic horsepox in a lab — a virus closely related to smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions before researchers developed a vaccine.

The same technique, the researchers said at the time, could be be used to bring back smallpox, giving terrorists tools to set off a deadly pandemic.

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