Lifeboat Foundation

To put it mildly, sequencing and building a genome from scratch isn’t cheap. It’s sometimes affordable for human genomes, but it’s often prohibitively expensive (hundreds of thousands of dollars) whenever you’re charting new territory — say, a specific person or an unfamiliar species. A chromosome can have hundreds of millions of genetic base pairs, after all. Scientists may have a way to make it affordable across the board, however. They’ve developed a new method, 3D genome assembly, that can sequence and build genomes from the ground up for less than $10,000.

Where earlier approaches saw researchers using computers to stick small pieces of genetic code together, the new technique takes advantages of folding maps (which show how a 6.5ft long genome can cram into a cell’s nucleus) to quickly build out a sequence. As you only need short reads of DNA to make this happen, the cost is much lower. You also don’t need to know much about your sample organism going in.

As an example of what’s possible, the team completely assembled the three chromosomes for the Aedes aegypti mosquito for the first time. More complex organisms would require more work, of course, but the dramatically lower cost makes that more practical than ever. Provided the approach finds widespread use, it could be incredibly valuable for both biology and medicine.

Continue reading “Scientists find a low-cost way to build genomes from scratch” »

How small is the world’s smallest hard drive? Smaller than you’d believe.

A new computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials. “Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “The relatively recent discovery of supermassive black holes in the early development of the universe raised a fundamental question, how did they get so big so fast?”

Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s stockpile stewardship mission, Smidt and colleagues created a simulation of collapsing stars that resulted in supermassive black holes forming in less time than expected, cosmologically speaking, in the first billion years of the universe. “It turns out that while supermassive black holes have a growth speed limit, certain types of massive stars do not,” said Smidt. “We asked, what if we could find a place where stars could grow much faster, perhaps to the size of many thousands of suns; could they form supermassive black holes in less time?” A video about the discovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD4xECbHx_I&feature=youtu.be

Electronic computers are extremely powerful at performing a high number of operations at very high speeds, sequentially. However, they struggle with combinatorial tasks that can be solved faster if many operations are performed in parallel.

The EU Horizon 2020 has launched Bio4Comp, a five-year €6.1M project to build more powerful and safer biocomputers that could outperform quantum computing.

The Bio4Comp project has the ambitious goal of building a computer with greater processing speed and lower energy consumption than any of the most advanced computers existing today. Ultimately, this could translate into enabling large, error-free security software to be fast enough for practical use, potentially wiping out all current security concerns.

Continue reading “Europe has a five year project to scale up molecular biocomputers which could outperform quantum computers” »

The cloud is becoming a bigger part of IBM’s business, and the technology giant is expanding its data center offerings.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced at the company’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas Tuesday a new data center in China, its 51st overall in 20 nations.

JUDY WOODRUFF: For decades, researchers have worked to create a better and more direct connection between a human brain and a computer to improve the lives of people who are paralyzed or have severe limb weakness from diseases like ALS.

Those advances have been notable, but now the work is yielding groundbreaking results.

Special correspondent Cat Wise has the story.

Continue reading “Typing sentences by simply thinking is possible with new technology” »

(Phys.org)—Scientists have built tiny logic machines out of single atoms that operate completely differently than conventional logic devices do. Instead of relying on the binary switching paradigm like that used by transistors in today’s computers, the new nanoscale logic machines physically simulate the problems and take advantage of the inherent randomness that governs the behavior of physical systems at the nanoscale—randomness that is usually considered a drawback.

The team of researchers, Barbara Fresch et al., from universities in Belgium, Italy, Australia, Israel, and the US, have published a paper on the new nanoscale logic machines in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

“Our approach shows the possibility of a new class of tiny analog computers that can solve computationally difficult problems by simple statistical algorithms running in nanoscale solid-state physical devices,” coauthor Francoise Remacle at the University of Liege told Phys.org.

Efforts to invent more practical superconductors and better batteries could be the first areas of business to get a quantum speed boost.

Scientists found out that the ‘light barrier’ may be broken. This leads us closer to creating light-based computers and achieve computer speeds a million times faster than its speed today.