Lifeboat Foundation

At Jef Boeke’s lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here.

But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA.

Scientists have long been able to make specific changes in the DNA code. Now, they’re taking the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned life forms from scratch. Boeke, a researcher at New York University, directs an international team of 11 labs on four continents working to “rewrite” the yeast genome, following a detailed plan they published in March.

Google’s DeepMind has revealed a radical new research project designed to give AI’s an imagination.

The breakthrough means that systems will be able to think about their actions, and undertake ‘deliberate reasoning.’

Continue reading “Google’s DeepMind creates AI with an ‘imagination’” »

Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing have now developed a new type of electronic skin, with a colour change easily seen at just 0–10 per cent strain.

The material is made from graphene — a form of pure carbon that is 200 times stronger than steel.

Continue reading “Scientists create colour-changing electronic SKIN” »

Berkeley scientists to develop safer and better CRISPR tools and apply them to medicine and mosquito gene drives.

By Marc Pollefeys, Director of Science, HoloLens

It is not an exaggeration to say that deep learning has taken the world of computer vision, and many other recognition tasks, by storm. Many of the most difficult recognition problems have seen gains over the past few years that are astonishing.

Continue reading “Second version of HoloLens HPU will incorporate AI coprocessor for implementing DNNs” »

Gene editing aims to make precise changes to the target DNA whilst avoiding altering other parts of the DNA. The objective of this is to remove undesirable genetic traits and introduce desirable changes in both plants and animals. For example, it could be used to make crops more drought resistant, prevent or cure inherited genetic disorders or even treat age-related diseases.

As some of you may recall, back in May a study was published which claimed that the groundbreaking gene editing technique CRISPR caused thousands of off target and potentially dangerous mutations[1]. The authors of the paper called for regulators to investigate the safety of the technique, a move that could potentially set back research years if not decades.

This publication has been widely blasted by the research community due to serious questions about the study design being raised. One of the problems with this original paper was that it involved only three mice, this is an extremely poor number to make the kind of conclusions the paper did. There have been calls for the paper to be withdrawn and critical responses to the study.

Growing your own food may soon be as simple as pressing a button.

Boeing’s Starliner and Virgin Galactic don’t just want you to visit space–they want you to do it in style.

When British billionaire Jim Mellon wants to map out an investment strategy, he likes to write a book first. Out of that process came his most recent work — Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity. Now he and some close associates with some of the best connections in biotech are using the book as inspiration to launch a new company — also named Juvenescence — with plans to make a big splash in anti-aging research.