Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk helped achieve the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital fundraising goal of the Inspiration4 spaceflight, just hours after his company returned the crew from orbit.

The main goal of the Inspiration4 mission, which launched on Wednesday and splashed down on Saturday, was to raise $200 million for St. Jude.

Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who purchased the flight from SpaceX, donated $100 million personally to St. Jude. The Inspiration4 mission had raised another $60.2 million in donations, before Musk pledged to contribute $50 million himself – pushing the campaign’s total raised to more than $210 million.

Applying Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning In Drug Discovery & Design — Dr. Ola Engkvist Ph.D., Head, Molecular AI, Discovery Sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca

Dr. Ola Engkvist is Head of Molecular AI in Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca R&D (https://www.astrazeneca.com/).

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Thanks to CRISPR, gene therapy and “designer babies” are now a reality. The gene editing Swiss army knife is one of the most impactful biomedical discoveries of the last decade. Now a new study suggests we’ve just begun dipping our toes into the CRISPR pond.

CRISPR-Cas9 comes from lowly origins. It was first discovered as a natural mechanism in bacteria and yeast cells to help fight off invading viruses. This led Dr. Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of the technology, to ask: where did this system evolve from? Are there any other branches of the CRISPR family tree that we can also harness for gene editing?

In a new paper published last week in Science, Zhang’s team traced the origins of CRISPR to unveil a vast universe of potential gene editing tools. As “cousins” of CRISPR, these new proteins can readily snip targeted genes inside Petri dishes, similar to their famous relative.

Have to admit this nurse has Kahunas. Not sure I would have the guts to put my arm in that hole.

Shanghai’s first intelligent blood collection robot has started operations at Zhongshan Hospital.

The robot can take the place of a nurse to handle blood sample collection, the hospital said.

Continue reading “Blood collection by robot a Shanghai first” »

Circa 2012.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1 A and C = 0).

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It is quickly becoming a hot topic among machine learning experts and those concerned with AI safety.

One of us (Anders) has a background in computational neuroscience, and now works with groups such as the AI Objectives Institute, where we discuss how to avoid such problems with AI; the other (Thomas) studies history, and the various ways people have thought about both the future and the fate of civilization throughout the past. After striking up a conversation on the topic of wireheading, we both realized just how rich and interesting the history behind this topic is.

Continue reading “Drugs, Robots, and the Pursuit of Pleasure: Why Experts Are Worried About AIs Becoming Addicts” »

Cancer cell death is triggered within three days when X-rays are shone onto tumor tissue containing iodine-carrying nanoparticles. The iodine releases electrons that break the tumor’s DNA, leading to cell death. The findings, by scientists at Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) and colleagues in Japan and the US, were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Exposing a metal to light leads to the release of electrons, a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect. An explanation of this phenomenon by Albert Einstein in 1905 heralded the birth of quantum physics,” says iCeMS molecular biologist Fuyuhiko Tamanoi, who led the study. “Our research provides evidence that suggests it is possible to reproduce this effect inside cancer cells.”

A long-standing problem with cancer radiation therapy is that it is not effective at the center of tumors where oxygen levels are low due to the lack of blood vessels penetrating deeply into the tissue. X-ray irradiation needs oxygen to generate DNA-damaging reactive oxygen when the rays hit molecules inside the cell.

This is for all who like coffee:

“To our knowledge, this is the largest study to systematically assess the cardiovascular effects of regular coffee consumption in a population without diagnosed heart disease,” said study author Dr. Judit Simon, of the Heart and Vascular Centre, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary.

Our results suggest that regular coffee consumption is safe, as even high daily intake was not associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes and all-cause… See More.

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Our daily estimate of excess deaths around the world | Graphic detail.