Three studies showing large DNA deletions and reshuffling heighten safety concerns about heritable genome editing.
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#MoonExploration
#SpaceExploration
Continue reading “If the moon were replaced with some of our planets(at night)” »
While there are ways to alleviate some symptoms, there is currently no way to prevent or cure Parkinson’s disease, so the prospect of a one-off treatment that completely eliminates it is certainly an exciting one. While such a therapy remains a while off, scientists have demonstrated an exciting proof of concept in mice, whereby inhibiting a single gene as a one-time treatment eradicated the disease entirely, and kept it at bay for the remainder of their lives.
The research was carried out at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and centers on a protein called PTB, which plays a role in which genes are switch on and off in a cell. The team was experimenting with techniques whereby the gene that encodes for PTB is switched off so researchers can determine the flow-on effects of a reduction in the that protein on other cell types, and found peculiar results when working with connective tissue cells called fibroblasts.
In one experiment, the team created a cell line that was permanently lacking PTB, and after a couple of weeks found that there was only a small amount of fibroblasts remaining in the dish, which was brimming with neurons instead. Building on this, the team was able to use a single treatment to inhibit the activity of PTB in mice, which reprogrammed support cells in the brain called astrocytes into neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Certain galaxy patterns might encode whether the Universe’s primordial density fluctuations were quantum or classical in nature.
Leading futurist Tracey Follows has written an article at Forbes on #transhumanism documentary IMMORTALITY OR BUST. Check it out!
Zoltan has a more radical idea of change than almost anything else you are seeing on your TV screens today but the mainstream media continue to miss him. That’s why it’s good to see he has made his own documentary film explaining to a broader audience what he’s doing, how it all works, and why they should be interested in transhumanism at all.
Continue reading “Immortality Or Bust: Transhumanism In The White House” »
The audio of the fascinating talks & panel at the Future Day Melbourne 2020 / Machine Understanding event:
Kevin Korb — https://archive.org/searchresults.php Wilkins — https://archive.org/details/john-wilkins-humans-as-machines (John, sorry about the audio — also do you have the slides for this?) Hugo de Garis — https://archive.org/details/hugo-de-garis-future-day-2020 Panel — https://archive.org/…/future-day-panel-kevin-korb-hugo-de-g…
Are you for Ethical Ai Eric Klien?
Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing that if artificial intelligence is going to help in a crisis, we need a new, faster way of doing AI ethics, which they call ethics for urgency.
For Whittlestone, this means anticipating problems before they happen, finding better ways to build safety and reliability into AI systems, and emphasizing technical expertise at all levels of the technology’s development and use. At the core of these recommendations is the idea that ethics needs to become simply a part of how AI is made and used, rather than an add-on or afterthought.
Continue reading “If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics” »
New Delhi, June 23
China has occupied a village of Nepal and allegedly removed the boundary pillars to legitimise its annexation, top government sources said on Tuesday.
It has also been learnt that China has gradually made inroads into several Nepalese territories with an ulterior aim to seize complete control.
The star may be extremely young, but its ring of rock and dust is enormous. The size of just the shadow alone would be hundreds of times the size our entire solar system, according to NASA. Light would take more than a month to travel that distance.
By taking additional pictures using filters, the team was able to create a gorgeous, colored image of the star and its “bat shadow.”
Continue reading “NASA Says Hubble Observed a ‘Flapping Shadow’ in Distant Space” »
Tweaking an immune protein called interleukin-18 can overcome tumors that lure it into binding with a decoy receptor protein and render it harmless to cancer cells, new research in mice shows. In conjunction with the paper, published Wednesday in Nature, a company founded by senior author Aaron Ring announced $25 million in initial financing to create and commercialize a drug based on the discovery.
The approach adds another weapon to an immunotherapy arsenal that activates immune responses hijacked by cancer. Checkpoint inhibitors, for example, take the brakes off immune cells that should battle invaders. IL-18 is a cytokine that normally activates T cells and natural killer cells, two immune forces that fight infection, but it’s disarmed by the decoy wielded by tumors.
