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Feb 29, 2016
These bizarre organisms could represent a new branch on the tree of life
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: biotech/medical, materials
The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.
In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.
Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.
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Feb 29, 2016
Human Babies from CRISPR Pigs
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics, health
New genetic technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and synthetic biology are leading us to entirely new definitions of disease. Now “patients” include people who want children who lack some of their own genes, or have additional ones that they themselves lack. Also among the new patients are people who in the past were too old to have children as well some women who get sick from pregnancy and childbirth, or even the idea of them. Technological advances on the horizon may eventually offer treatment for such conditions.
In February 2015 the British Parliament approved production of “three-parent” children by transferring the nucleus of one woman’s egg into the nucleus-less (“enucleated”) egg of a second woman to avoid the propagation of certain rare “mitochondrial” diseases, Though there were acknowledged risks of the unprecedented procedure (including the possibility of producing novel birth defects), the argument that prevailed was that some mitochondrial diseases are so devastating that it should be tried in the narrowly defined group of prospective mothers carrying defective mitochondria.
Not long afterward, news articles began to appear discussing use of the technique for an entirely different purpose. The procedure’s inventor, the Oregon Health & Science University biologist Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, was now proposing to treat infertility in older women by transferring their egg nuclei into the enucleated eggs of younger women.
Feb 29, 2016
Giant Viruses Feature Their Own Built-In Antivirus Software
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: biotech/medical, computing, particle physics
Computer illustration of the mimivirus particle. Credit Jose Antonio Penas. Mimiviruses are viruses so big they can actually be seen with the naked eye. European.
Feb 29, 2016
Sharing secrets with light
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: finance, quantum physics
More great news on Quantum Networks; some banks in Europe are leveraging the technology to communicate among themselves.
Light is everywhere. Even the darkest of rooms in our homes contain a handful of blinking LEDs. But what is light? Few of us ever stop to think about this question. Around a hundred years ago scientists discovered that light comes in granules, much like the sand on a beach, which we now call photons.
These are truly bizarre objects that obey the rules of the quantum world. The rules allow some pairs of photons to share a property called entanglement. After being entangled, two photons behave as one object. Changing one photon will affect the other at exactly the same time, no matter how far apart they are.
Feb 29, 2016
Quarks To Quasars Photo
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: particle physics, space travel
Feb 29, 2016
Kaspersky Labs rolls out targeted threat detection platform for enterprises
Posted by Karen Hurst in category: cybercrime/malcode
“Kaspersky admits that targeted attacks represent less than one percent of the entire threat landscape”;
Hmmm (wonder how much it cost to develop and deploy?) At least it’s a start.
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This has been around for a really, really long time. I remember many years ago one could go online without too much hassel and locate software code that the hacking network shared to teach folks their trade. I actually tested some of it for a firm to help test their infrastructure security; and it worked really well. However, now days it’s about the trade of id’s, credit card information, etc.
Beyond the regular Web, there is the Dark Web. You’ve probably heard something about it but probably just enough to know you didn’t want to know too much more about it. Well, here are some answers to some common questions about the Dark Web.
Feb 29, 2016
Google opens applications for free DDoS blocker to prevent hackers taking out the Web
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: cybercrime/malcode, internet
The DDoS prevention tool is part of Google Ideas, renamed Jigsaw, whose stated mission is to “build products to help people investigate corruption.”
Feb 29, 2016
Graphene Patterned After Moth Eyes Could Give Us ‘Smart Wallpaper’
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: materials
Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.
Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most efficient light-absorbent material to date, which is capable of generating electricity from both captured light and waste heat. They described their work in a new paper in Science Advances.
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