Lifeboat Foundation

Bay Area-based Rapid Robotics today announced a $12 million Series A. The new round, led by NEA, brings the company’s total funding up to $17.5 million. It joins a recently closed seed round, announced way back in November of last year. Existing investors Greycroft, Bee Partners and 468 Capital also took part in the round.

We noted at that stage that COVID-19 had a sizable impact on robotics investment. At the very least, the pandemic has served to accelerate interest in automation, as many “non-essential” workers have been unable to travel to their jobs. At present, manufacturing jobs often lack the ability to perform remotely.

Rapid notes that the company’s tech has been involved with the production of some 50 million parts over the past year, over a wide variety of different manufacturing verticals. And, like his predecessor, President Biden has already begun talking up strategies to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Of course, ambitious as it might be, any plan is going to have to be a balancing act between human jobs and automation.

Summary: Combining artificial intelligence technology with brain scan data, researchers have identified three novel subtypes of multiple sclerosis.

Source: UCL

Scientists at UCL have used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify three new multiple sclerosis (MS) subtypes. Researchers say the groundbreaking findings will help identify those people more likely to have disease progression and help target treatments more effectively.

Delaying, Detecting, Preventing and Treating Aging And Associated Diseases — Dr. Brian Kennedy, Ph.D., National University of Singapore.

Dr. Brian Kennedy is Distinguished Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Physiology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS), Director of National University Health System (NUHS) Centre for Healthy Ageing, Singapore, Professor, Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, Adjunct Professor, Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, USC, and Affiliate Faculty, Department of Biochemistry, University of Washington.

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In a recent study led by the University of Bristol, scientists have shown how to simultaneously harness multiple forms of regulation in living cells to strictly control gene expression and open new avenues for improved biotechnologies.

Engineered microbes are increasingly being used to enable the sustainable and clean production of chemicals, medicines and much more. To make this possible, bioengineers must control when specific sets of genes are turned on and off to allow for careful regulation of the biochemical processes involved.

Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Using Artificial Intelligence And Plant Biology, To Re-Connect People and Plants, For Health & Wellness — Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CTO, Brightseed.

Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Brightseed, a novel life sciences company, merging the tools of plant biology and artificial intelligence, with a goal of enabling a healthier future by re-illuminating and re-activating the connections between people and plants.

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Research led by UC Riverside is making it easier to detect and capture DNA from fluid samples such as blood using a tiny glass tube and electric current. The technique, described in the journal Nanoscale, can also improve cancer diagnosis in the future.

DNA, a double-stranded, electrically charged molecule that contains all the information an organism needs to create and organize the building blocks of life, is tightly folded within the cell nucleus. Extracting the DNA from a single cell is time consuming and impractical for many medical and scientific purposes. Fortunately, as cells die naturally, their membranes burst, releasing the contents, including DNA. This means that a blood sample, for example, contains many strands of free-floating DNA that should, in theory, be easier to identify and extract in quantity.

Brazil daily Covid deaths top 4000 for first time.

Hospitals are overcrowded, with people dying as they wait for treatment, as cases continue to surge.

Circa 2017

When surgeons complete a successful lung operation, everyone should breathe a sigh of relief. But real relief may not come until weeks or even months later, when doctors remove the patient’s lingering sutures or staples. And that’s assuming there were no leakages, which can send a patient right back to the hospital.

Nasim Annabi, assistant professor of chemical engineering, has a better solution: a new type of surgical glue that could replace the need for staples and sutures altogether. Annabi is leading the research, which she and her colleagues from the University of Sydney and Harvard Medical School described in a paper published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine.

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O,.o.

The largest-ever study of almost 2000 DNA samples carried out by researchers at Pompeu Fabra university (UPF) in Barcelona has confirmed the “genetic singularity” of the Basques in Europe. The investigation, however, found that this difference only began to emerge 2500 years ago in the Iron Age. “Our analyses confirm that Basques were influenced by the major migration waves in Europe until the Iron Age, in a similar pattern as their surrounding populations,” the authors explain in the study published in the journal Current Biology.

The origin of the Basques has fascinated the scientific community since the 19th century. The French anthropologist Paul Broca snuck into a Basque cemetery one night in 1862 to steal skulls he wanted to study for their supposed genetic differences. Juan José Ibarretxe, premier of the Basque regional government until 2009, proclaimed that the Basque people “have existed for 7000 years” to promote his vision of an independent Basque state. And the then-president of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), Xabier Arzalluz, claimed in 2000 that the Basques were “the oldest inhabitants of Europe,” with “their own roots” since prehistoric times.

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