Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have developed extremely powerful microscopic lasers that are even smaller than the wavelength of the light they produce. So called ‘nanolasers’ have a huge variety of medical, surgical, industrial and military uses, covering everything from hair removal to laser printers and night-time surveillance. According to lead researcher Professor Yuri Kivshar, the nanolasers developed by his team promise to be even more powerful than existing lasers, allowing them to be useful in smaller-scale devices. “They can also be integrated on a chip,” he said.

California-based startup Relativity Space is manufacturing rockets using giant Westworld-esque 3D printers, a process they say could drastically shorten the rocket-making process from years to weeks. Tim Ellis, the company’s 30-year-old CEO, explains how the high degree of automation in Relativity’s factory has enabled them to build rockets remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

#Coronavirus #Space #HelloWorld.
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Continue reading “The SpaceX Competitor is Printing Its Rockets” »

Severe coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) can progress to an acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which involves alveolar infiltration by activated neutrophils. The beta-blocker metoprolol has been shown to ameliorate exacerbated inflammation in the myocardial infarction setting.

Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC), Madrid, Spain Drs Clemente-Moragón and Martínez-Milla contributed equally to this work.

“The agency continues to monitor the rise of COVID cases in the Kennedy area, which combined with other factors such as weather and first-time operations, is impacting our schedule of operations,” NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton told Ars. “Moving step by step, we are progressing toward launch while keeping our team as safe as possible.”

However, the SLS has already been delayed for years and surpassed budget expectations by billions of dollars. So while the pandemic has certainly thrown another wrench into the works, it’s not like things were progressing smoothly before the coronavirus struck. Regardless, Hambleton says that NASA should offer a revised schedule soon.

“As always, we will fly only when we are ready,” she told Ars Technica.

“The dream of predicting a protein shape just from its gene sequence is now a reality,” said Paul Adams, Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences at Berkeley Lab. For Adams and other structural biologists who study proteins, predicting their shape offers a key to understanding their function and accelerating treatments for diseases like cancer and COVID-19.

The current approaches to accurately mapping that shape, however, usually rely on complex experiments at synchrotrons. But even these sophisticated processes have their limitations—the data and quality aren’t always sufficient to understand a protein at an atomic level. By applying powerful machine learning methods to the large library of protein structures it is now possible to predict a protein’s shape from its gene sequence.

Researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division joined an international effort led by the University of Washington to produce a computer software tool called RoseTTAFold. The algorithm simultaneously takes into account patterns, distances, and coordinates of amino acids. As these data inputs flow in, the tool assesses relationships within and between structures, eventually helping to build a very detailed picture of a protein’s shape.

In humans, as well as all vertebrate animals, turning a fertilized egg into an embryo with a little beating heart requires that stem cells differentiate, specialize, and generate specific tissues, such as bones, blood vessels and a nervous system. This process is kickstarted and regulated by retinal. Animals can’t produce their own retinal, though, they must ingest it from plants, or from animals that eat plants.

Plant roots and animal embryos rely on the same chemical for successful development.

What do frog eggs have in common with anti-aging creams? Their success depends on a group of chemical compounds called retinoids, which are capable of generating and re-generating tissues.

Continue reading “Growth-Promoting, Anti-Aging Chemical Compound at the Root of Plant Growth and Animal Embryos” »

More treatments are available for Covid-19 as hospitalizations spike, but some drugs are sitting on the shelves unused.

As record daily Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths this month in the US have pushed the pandemic to new crisis levels, senior government health officials have lamented that many patients are not getting the drugs — including monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, and corticosteroids — available to treat the disease, leaving many doses unused.

“Even with a vaccine, we know we will not prevent every infection,” said US Surgeon General Jerome Adams on January 14 during a press conference. “So today we want to remind everyone that for those of you who do contract Covid, we have excellent treatments to keep you out of the hospital, to keep you out of the ICU, to help you recover quickly.”

Sept 9 (Reuters) — Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) said on Thursday it is developing a single vaccine that combines a booster dose against COVID-19 with its experimental flu shot.

The company hopes to eventually add vaccines it is working on for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and other respiratory diseases as an annual shot.

“We believe this is a very large opportunity that is ahead of us, if we could bring to market a high efficacy pan-respiratory annual booster,” Moderna Chief Executive Officer Stéphane Bancel said during a presentation to update investors on its drugs in development.

Within the last decade, scientists have adapted CRISPR systems from microbes into gene editing technology, a precise and programmable system for modifying DNA. Now, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have discovered a new class of programmable DNA modifying systems called OMEGAs (Obligate Mobile Element Guided Activity), which may naturally be involved in shuffling small bits of DNA throughout bacterial genomes.

These ancient DNA-cutting enzymes are guided to their targets by small pieces of RNA. While they originated in bacteria, they have now been engineered to work in human cells, suggesting they could be useful in the development of gene editing therapies, particularly as they are small (~30% the size of Cas9), making them easier to deliver to cells than bulkier enzymes. The discovery, reported in the journal Science, provides evidence that natural RNA-guided enzymes are among the most abundant proteins on earth, pointing toward a vast new area of biology that is poised to drive the next revolution in genome editing technology.

The research was led by McGovern investigator Feng Zhang, who is James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and a core institute member of the Broad Institute. Zhang’s team has been exploring natural diversity in search of new molecular systems that can be rationally programmed.