Lifeboat Foundation

Call it an abundance of caution. A Microsoft research project has upgraded the encryption protocol that secures the Web to resist attacks from quantum computers—machines that are expected to have stupendous power but have never been built.

Governments and computing giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Google are working on quantum computers because tapping subtle effects of quantum physics should let them solve in seconds some problems that a conventional machine couldn’t solve in billions of years (see “Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics”). That might allow breakthroughs in areas such as medicine or energy. But such machines would also be able to easily break the encryption used to secure information online.

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WISH COME TRUE: 8-year-old Zion receives the world’s first pediatric double hand transplant at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. http://nbcnews.to/1SLmf5m.

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Synthetic biology programming microorganisms to perform some new functions. Genes are made out of DNA; synthetic biology involves inserting synthetic genes that might not have existed before into yeast and reprogramming them to make a new chemistry or things not made naturally by biology. Each gene codes for an enzyme. One can program a new set of enzymes and convert them to intermediate products. If you go through five or even 15 steps, you can get a final product – a polymer, a new drug – creating a chemical factory inside a cell. This is much better than nanotechnology, because in synthetic biology, we get down to molecular size…

Prof. Joseph Jacobson, a leading physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not only the inventor of e-ink but also a mover in creating artificial DNA to eventually cure diseases.

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Professor Hyun-Gyu Park of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a technique to analyze various target DNAs using an aptamer, a DNA fragment that can recognize and bind to a specific protein or enzyme. This technique will allow the development of affordable genetic diagnosis for new bacteria or virus, such as Middle Ease Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The research findings were published in the June issue of Chemical Communications, issued by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The paper was selected as a lead article of the journal.

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A $4,000 iPhone gadget replaces a 30-pound, $20,000 machine, allowing eye doctors to visit patients they couldn’t reach before.

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Bioviva a Seattle, WA, based biotech is ambitiously moving forward with gene therapy in people to mitigate the consequences of aging. They have not gone for the low hanging fruit either, they are being supported by Maximum Life Foundation to raise enough to run a clinical trial to try to cure Alzheimer’s! They are targeting the supporting Microglia cells in the brain to help regenerate them and hopefully reverse the effects of the disease. A worthy cause if ever I saw one and if it works could translate to other similar conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS. Lets hope they can get this vital work underway. This will then be the first example of regenerative medicine in a person that treats the dysfunction of aging.

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A newly developed vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus being trialled in Guinea is “highly effective,” the World Health Organization said Friday.

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“Furthermore, the chromatophore project marks a shift in computational biophysics from analyzing the individual cell parts (e.g., a single protein) to analyzing the specialized systems of the cell (e.g., hundreds of proteins working together to carry out an autonomous function). This is a significant step toward the long-term goal of simulating an entire living organism.”

Nearly all life on Earth depends on photosynthesis, the conversion of light energy into chemical energy. Oxygen-producing plants and cyanobacteria perfected this process 2.7 billion years ago. But the first photosynthetic organisms were likely single-celled purple bacteria that began absorbing near-infrared light and converting it to sulfur or sulfates about 3.4 billion years ago.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component, or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell. The engineered ribosome may enable the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes function.

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