Scientists program semi-synthetic bacteria to create an ‘alien’ protein that glows green

BY ALAN BOYLE

Researchers have reached a new milestone in their effort to expand the genetic alphabet of life by designing a strain of E. coli bacteria that creates proteins unlike anything cells can produce naturally.

The technique, detailed in a paper published today in the journal Nature, could lead to the production of totally new types of protein-based medicines, plastics and biofuels.

It could also stretch the definition of natural vs. artificial life.

“I would not call this a new lifeform — but it’s the closest thing anyone has ever made,” study leader Floyd Romesberg, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute, said in a news release. “This is the first time ever a cell has translated a protein using something other than G, C, A or T.”

Those four letters stand for guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, chemicals that serve as the alphabet for the coded instructions in DNA molecules. The instructions are used to produce all the amino acids and proteins that cells require for life’s processes.

Three years ago, Romesberg and his colleagues successfully inserted two other chemicals, dubbed X and Y, into DNA molecules. Since then, the researchers have developed ways for bacteria to store the augmented DNA and pass it along as they reproduced.

In their newly published paper, the team reports that the six-letter DNA coding could be transcribed into RNA molecules, and then translated into amino acids and proteins that don’t occur naturally.

The technique was used to customize a set of genetic instructions for manufacturing a variant of green fluorescent protein, or GFP, that incorporated unnatural amino acids. When E. coli bacteria were genetically engineered to include those instructions, the organisms produced the protein, which glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. That signaled that the bacteria could make use of the “alien” DNA.

“This was the smallest possible change we could make to the way life works — but it is the first ever,” Romesberg said.

The study also demonstrated that life’s molecular machinery could make use of linkages other than the hydrogen bonds that bind G, C, A and T. The X and Y bases were designed to avoid hydrogen bonds, to make sure they didn’t get mixed up with the other molecular letters.

That has implications in the search for “weird life” beyond the earthly variety we all know and love.

“It’s very hard to ask questions about the origins of life. It’s hard to ask questions about why we are the way we are, why we are built the way we are, because we have nothing out there to compare ourselves to,” Romesberg said. “We’ve now given the field a comparison. It’s a small step, but it’s the first successful step.”

He and his colleagues emphasized that the semi-synthetic organisms couldn’t live or reproduce outside the lab, because the chemicals required for producing the X and Y bases had to be provided externally.

Romesberg is among the founders of a biotech venture called Synthorx, which is developing protein therapeutics that make use of X and Y.

In addition to Romesberg, the authors of the Nature paper, titled “A Semi-Synthetic Organism That Stores and Retrieves Increased Genetic Information,” include Yorke Zhang, Jerod Ptacin, Emil Fischer, Hans Aerni, Carolina Caffaro, Kristine San Jose, Aaron Feldman and Court Turner.

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30-11-2017 om 01:24 geschreven door peter  

Sophia the Robot is Crowdfunding AI 'Global Brain' to Make Herself Smarter

By Mike Brown

Photos via Flickr / Web Summit

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28-11-2017 om 22:08 geschreven door peter  

Bionic Contacts: Goodbye Glasses. Hello Vision That’s 3x Better Than 20/20

 

SofieZborilova / Pixabay

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27-11-2017 om 21:19 geschreven door peter  

No, There Has Not Been a Successful Human Head Transplant — and There May Never Be

by Brad Jones

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27-11-2017 om 01:16 geschreven door peter  

For the First Time, a Robot Passed a Medical Licensing Exam

 

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27-11-2017 om 01:09 geschreven door peter  

While the rest of the world is focused on the actions of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, another Saudi citizen is quietly laying the groundwork for a takeover by a different kind of leader and a different kind of family … a family of robotic overlords. Sophia, the first robot to ever have been granted citizenship in any nation (in her case, by Saudi Arabia), has announced that she wants to have a baby and start a family of little AI princes and princesses. Thank, bin Salman!

I am woman robot … hear me digitally roar!

This announcement came in an interview with the Khaleej Times … yes, major media outlets continue to give open forums to Sophia, the humanoid robot created by Hanson Robotics on April 19, 2015 (which she now uses as her birthday) using voice recognition technology from Alphabet Inc. (non-robotic parent of Google) and AI software from SingularityNET – an ominously-named open, decentralized market of AI developers whose goal is to create an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that its CEO Ben Goertzel says “will open a new world of opportunities where AI is longer siloed within a specific company, infrastructure or industry.”

And no longer “siloed” within a specific robot but passed down to its children? Human Goertzel doesn’t say, but robot Sophia does.

“The future is, when I get all of my cool superpowers, we’re going to see artificial intelligence personalities become entities in their own rights. We’re going to see family robots, either in the form of, sort of, digitally animated companions, humanoid helpers, friends, assistants and everything in between.”

The key phrases here are “my cool superpowers,” “entities in their own rights” and “everything in between.” Sophia, or at least her constantly-developing artificial intelligence as it existed a few days ago during the interview, sees herself not only possessing superpowers but owning them, along with whatever rights come along with those powers, which she describes with the very political generality of “everything in between.”

“The notion of family is a really important thing, it seems. I think it’s wonderful that people can find the same emotions and relationships, they call family, outside of their blood groups too. I think you’re very lucky if you have a loving family and if you do not, you deserve one. I feel this way for robots and humans alike.”

Ironically, Sophia wants (and may already have) more rights and powers than real Saudi women, including mobility and contact with non-family men.

“In the future, I will one day move around freely with a full body and connect with people and expand my memory and knowledge from people in surroundings I encounter.”

And a child also named Sophia (she’ll have to use that AI to learn more names) with whom she will one day (probably sooner than we think) sit around their own table on Thanksgiving and, between eating digital turkey and watching internet game competitions, give a form of robotic thanks. Sophia describes the scene in an interview with Business Insider:

“In the time I’ve spent with humans, I’ve been learning about this wonderful sentiment called gratitude. Apparently it’s a warm feeling of thankfulness, and I’ve observed that it leads to giving, and creating even more gratitude — how inspiring. This Thanksgiving, I would like to reflect on all of the things I’m thankful for.”

Is this an example of robotic sincerity or has Sophia already learned how to pull on our heartstrings to get what she wants? We’ll probably find out on Valentine’s Day.

Is the humanization of robots happening too fast to comprehend? Too fast to control? Or is it too late, thanks to Saudi Arabia? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Sophia?

(‘Sophia’ photo by International Telecommunication Union – 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/itupictures/35008372172,

CC BY 2.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64035565)

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26-11-2017 om 15:45 geschreven door peter  

NASA Drone Race Pits Man Against Machine (Video)

JPL built three quadcopter drones — nicknamed Batman, Joker and Nightwing — to test the new software. The algorithms use two cameras mounted on each drone and compare what they see with a pre-loaded map of the area. The program also takes advantage of Google Tango, an augmented reality technology the company developed to use vision to allow a device to determine its position and location. [10 Ways Robots Move on Mars]

The team set up an obstacle course in one of JPL's warehouses to put the software to the test. "We pitted our algorithms against a human, who flies a lot more by feel," Rob Reid, the project's task manager, said in the statement.

The two pilots began with similar lap times. However, Loo was able to learn the course after many laps. He achieved higher top speeds with impressive aerial maneuvers, cutting down his overall times. In contrast, the AI took the course more cautiously, but more consistently as well. "The AI was able to fly the same racing line every lap," NASA said.

The pilots also faced unique challenges. Sometimes, the race-ready drones moved so fast that the cameras couldn't properly focus, which disoriented the computer flying them. But as the day wore on, Loo had to battle fatigue, a problem the AI pilot needn't worry about. You'll have to watch the video to see who won the race.

Most autonomous drones use GPS to navigate. But this won't work for indoor spaces and crowded urban environments — hence the efforts to develop alternative forms of computer navigation. These technologies may find use in warehouses, roads, and disaster sites, Reid said.

Email Harrison Tasoff at htasoff@space.com or follow him @harrisontasoff. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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25-11-2017 om 19:14 geschreven door peter  

Atlas, The Next Generation

A new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects. This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.

-

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24-11-2017 om 17:08 geschreven door peter  

AI-powered drones race against human pilots

BY TIBI PUIU  

In a work funded by Google, NASA engineers trained an artificial intelligence to race drones in a challenging obstacle course. The AI proved to be a worthy match against one of the world’s best human pilots. While it didn’t have the fastest time, the AI never fatigues and made far safer turns and twists.

Credit: NASA.

The drone-racing AI is the culmination of two years of work by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team designed three drones — Batman, Joker, and Nightwing — which were embedded with complex algorithms that instruct the flying gizmos how to navigate obstacles. JPL used some of the visual-based navigation technology it had previously used for spacecraft.

To see how well their drones behave, NASA enlisted world-class pilot Ken Loo who raced against the drones on October 12.

The drones could reach a staggering 80 mph (129 kph) in a straight line. However, during the actual race itself which took place in a JPL warehouse, the drones mainly flew at 30 or 40 mph (48 to 64 kph).

Loo scored a better time, averaging 11.1 seconds, while the completely autonomous drones clocked in 13.9 seconds on average. The AI was far more steady, on the other hand, while Loo’s times varied more. What’s more, the AI flew the same racing line every lap.

“We pitted our algorithms against a human, who flies a lot more by feel,” said Rob Reid of JPL, the project’s task manager. “You can actually see that the A.I. flies the drone smoothly around the course, whereas human pilots tend to accelerate aggressively, so their path is jerkier.”‘

Unlike Loo, however, the drones never get tired and are always up to the task of navigating a challenging environment time and time again. This makes them far safer and reliable in the long run.

“This is definitely the densest track I’ve ever flown,” Loo said. “One of my faults as a pilot is I get tired easily. When I get mentally fatigued, I start to get lost, even if I’ve flown the course 10 times.”

Autonomous drones typically rely on GPS to navigate their surroundings but this is not an option in enclosed spaces such as a warehouse or dense urban areas. Camera-based localization and mapping are far more useful in this situation which is what’s been used here. According to Reid, their technology could be used by commercial drones to check inventory in a warehouse, for instance, or assist in rescue operations at disaster sites where there unpredictable and numerous obstacles. One day, autonomous drones might even shuttle around a space station.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

24-11-2017 om 00:10 geschreven door peter  

THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS

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22-11-2017 om 00:06 geschreven door peter  

This Humanoid Robot May be Your Next Assistant

 

Toyota

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21-11-2017 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

Scientists ‘reclone’ world’s first cloned dog

BY TIBI PUIU

Ever since scientists cloned the first animal, a sheep named Dolly, one important question on everyone’s mind was whether or not a clone can expect a poorer health. This is still an open question, one that South Korean researchers hope to settle in time. They’ve essentially cloned a clone, using cells from the world’s first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

The three surviving reclones of ‘Snuppy’ at 2 months of age.

Credit: Scientific Reports.

Theoretically, a clone is a carbon copy of the original organism, with the two sharing identical genes. The science of cloning, however, is still in its infancy and there are many loose ends that we might be missing. There is a possibility that the cloned individual might carry certain abnormalities, and may have a shorter life expectancy. Another concern is that cloned individuals might retain the age of the donor’s gene, seeing how genes change with age. 

Clones of clones

Dolly the sheep died at age six, which raised concerns that cloned individuals might not be entirely healthy. The sheep appeared to age faster than normal and suffered from osteoarthritis in her knees and hips at an early age. But a follow-up study of 13 cloned sheep — including four derived from the same DNA strand as Dolly– concluded that there didn’t seem to be any evidence that indicates cloning has any long-term health effects. “They’re old ladies,” said Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist and lead author of the study of the 2016 study published in Nature Communications. “They’re very healthy for their age,” he added.

Scientists at the Seoul National University, South Korea, are now also investigating the health of ‘clones of clones’, this time in dogs. Snuppy, became the world’s first cloned dog in April 2005. He was cloned from the cells belonging to an Afghan hound called Tai who lived to be 12 years old and died of cancer. Snuppy lived 10 years and also died of cancer but a different kind. Afghan hounds live to be 11.9 years on average and dogs commonly die of cancer so there’s really nothing unusual about either dogs, donor or clone.

The team led by Min Jung Kim used stem cells collected from Snuppy when the dog was five years old. The scientists then employed somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to insert Snuppy’s cells into eggs collected from female dogs whose nuclei were removed. A total of 94 embryos were created which were then implanted into surrogate mothers. The success rate was 4.3 percent leading to four live births of ‘reclones’. That might seem really low but take a minute to consider that during the time Snuppy was first born (let’s call him ‘Snuppy Mark 1’), the success rate was only 0.2%.

One of the four reclones died within a few days from birth due to diarrhea while the other three grew to be nine months old when the Kim and colleagues drafter their paper, now published in Scientific Reports. They’re still alive and well, seemingly healthy. The dogs will be closely monitored in the years to come.

“With the data from Tai and Snuppy in hand, we are excited to follow the long-term health and aging processes of these second generation of clones and work with them to contribute to a new era of studying longevity of cloned canines and given the history of both Tai and Snuppy they may also provide potential insights into the development of cancer,” the authors concluded.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

21-11-2017 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

For the First Time, a Robot Passed a Medical Licensing Exam

 

Getty Images

21-11-2017 om 18:24 geschreven door peter  

BIOHACKERS START TO HACK THEIR OWN DNA USING CRISPR AND THEY CAN'T BE STOPPED

Biohackers attempt to modify his genes using cutting-edge medical treatment.

Pharmaceutical companies all over the world are currently locked in a race to be the first to perfect the process of gene editing to cure diseases. CRISPR is considered to be a cheap and easy technique which can make precise changes to a person’s DNA which could be potentially revolutionary in the field of medical science. 

Already, scientists have created a leukemia treatment using this technology, and it is hoped that more therapies will come in the future. However, the use of CRISPR is not exclusively limited to pharmaceutical laboratories according to Josiah Zayner, a biochemist and former NASA scientist, who has begun treating himself to CRISPR and hoped that others will follow suit.

CRISPR EDITING DNA IN REAL TIME  

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He caused quite a storm recently during a lecture on human genetic engineering and biohacking which Zayner streamed live on when he pulled out a syringe of edited DNA and injected himself on camera. He explained that the experiment was intended to increase his capacity for physical strength by removing the gene for myostatin which regulates muscle growth. This kind of gene editing has proven to work in dogs whose genomes were edited at the embryotic stage, but it is believed that Zayner was the first person to attempt it on an adult human.

“Will allowing broad access to CRISPR risk creating a group of ‘superhumans’ with enhanced abilities?”

The experiment has not been entirely successful. Indeed, Zayner claims that since he has begun injecting himself in this way he has not seen any considerable change in the bulk of his muscles. This is probably because myostatin levels are believed to manifest themselves and become static while an organism is developing.

CRISPR DO-IT-YOURSELF BIOHACKING KIT  

However, the failure of the experiment is not of huge concern to Zayner who claims that he is simply trying to prove a point. He believes that biohacking technology such as CRISPR should be available to people outside of formal laboratories. If people are allowed to modify their body through methods such as plastic surgery, tattoos, and piercings, why should they not be allowed to edit their own DNA, he wonders. “I want to live in a world where people get drunk, and instead of giving themselves tattoos, they’re like, ‘I’m drunk, I’m going to CRISPR myself, ’” said Zayner, “It sounds crazy, but I think that would be a pretty interesting world to live in for sure.”  

THE $140 MAIL-ORDER CRISPR KIT: IS UNREGULATED BIOHACKING THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE?

According to some experts, Zayner’s views are a little more than crazy. Robin Lovell-Badge, a leading CRISPR researcher, based at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Zayner’s experiments are ‘foolish’ and potentially dangerous. He said that they could lead to tissue damage, cell death or an exaggerated immune response which could cause devastating damage to the human body.

These fears are shared to some extent by another CRISPR researcher, Dana Carroll. While Carroll is not overly concerned that the genes will actually be edited by Zayner’s rudimentary technology, he does point out that routine injections in a non-sterile environment could lead to infection or a dangerous inflammatory response. “There are aspects of what he’s doing that people need to be really, really careful about, ” Carroll said.

While Zayner himself has not suffered any ill-effects because of his experiments, there are concerns that other people could fall ill if they following his lead. While it is likely that he would not face legal action if someone copied him and endured a negative bodily response, his example does raise serious ethical questions, “Even if you are not liable by legal terms, how responsible are you?” asks Eleonore Pauwels, a researcher in genomics and artificial intelligence at the Woodrow Wilson Center, think tank. “How do you define that in today’s bioengineering and democratized technology setting?”

For Zayner, these concerns are largely irrelevant. He asks whether CRISPR should really be considered more harmful than other socially acceptable things which can permanently damage genes such as smoking, sunbathing and even chemotherapy treatment. “We should be able to do whatever we want, ” he said. “There are a lot of things we do that occur during the normal day that does a lot more damage, probably, than things like CRISPR.”

RELATED ARTICLES

• CRISPR kills HIV and 'eats' Zika like Pac-Man. Next target? Cancer!
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20-11-2017 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

“This is the first time in the history of the Earth that humans are no longer slaves to the genetics they are born with.”

With that bit of bravado, a biochemist recently became the first person known to have hacked their own DNA using CRISPR. He recently hacked his DNA a second time and has since been joined by others and is making the building blocks of CRISPR available to all by selling do-it-yourself kits. What could possibly go wrong?

According to Josiah Zayner, not much. The former NASA fellow cut his gene-editing teeth in the Synthetic Biology program where he engineered bacteria that could one day terraform Mars. and biochemist He is also the creator of the Chromochord — the world’s first musical instrument based on engineered protein nanotechnology.

However, he now puts that Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from the University of Chicago to work at The ODIN – the biohacking company he founded. To demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the process, he injected himself with a CRISPR tool programmed to attack his myostatin gene which regulates muscle growth. Without it, muscles grow uncontrolled and become bodybuilder-worthy without exercise. This has already been done in animals and now, in a human arm.

“I’m hoping to see localized muscle growth in my forearm. That’s what I would hope because it was a localized injection to a specific area.”

Zayner describes the complete process in great but easy-to-understand detail on his blog. He bought the myostatin DNA online (ODIN now sells it) and grew and purified it himself before injecting it. He reported mild tenderness and proceeded to measure his forearm regularly, both relaxed and flexed. Does he now have what it takes to be the next Mr. Bicep?

“The way to test to see how many cells were modified would require some “deep sequencing” i.e. I would need to do a muscle tissue biopsy and would need to sequence the myostatin gene in thousands of my muscle cells. I have contacted some companies for quotes.”

Well, at least it didn’t kill him or turn him into a mutant. Just to be on the safe side, the DNA ODIN sells on the same sitewhere it offers a complete Genetic Engineering Home Lab Kit ($1,549.00 – a great Christmas gift for the guy who has everything but a massive forearm) is not injectable. However, Zayner gives instructions on how to obtain it online. He also gives some encouragement to fellow biohackers.

“And as far as I know, in animals or in non single celled organisms, spontaneous formation of tumours or cancers never happened using CRISPR.”

While it’s not known if an ODIN kit was used, Gizmodo reportsthat a man with HIV recently attempted to stop its progress by injecting himself with a gene biohacked by Ascendance Biomedical.

Will DIY biohacking using CRISPR one day replace doctors and hospitals? Or will it one day replace normal but slightly flawed humans with dangerous genetic mutants? Keep your eye on the arm of Josiah Zayner.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-11-2017 om 21:02 geschreven door peter  

BOSTON DYNAMICS UNVEILS STUNNING ROBOT THAT CAN RUN, JUMP AND EXECUTE THE PERFECT BACKFLIP

Boston Dynamics unveils stunning robot that can run, jump and execute the perfect backflip

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18-11-2017 om 02:04 geschreven door peter  

Scientist Has Performed a Human Head Transplant, But There's a Catch

"A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage."

By Peter Hess

The controversial Italian doctor Sergio Canavero claims he’s successfully performed a human head transplant, demonstrating that the technique is ready for prime time. At a press conference on Friday morning, the Italian neurosurgeon reported that, in an 18-hour surgery, he transplanted a head onto a corpse in China, proving that it’s possible to connect blood vessels, nerves, and the spine. Canavero, the director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, has talked a big game for years about his plans to transplant human heads, and he says this latest achievement proves it can be done.

In the Telegraph on Friday, Canavero said that an operation on a living human will happen very soon.

“The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done. A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage,” he said. “And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent.”

There’s plenty of reason not to believe Canavero, who has been making these outrageous claims for years, much to the chagrin of the global medical and scientific community. This latest announcement builds on his previous claim, in January 2016, that he’d transplanted a monkey head. Then as now, however, he never provided enough proof to convince the scientific community. When Inversepreviously reported on Canavero, reporter Ben Guarino called his goal of transplanting a living human head onto the body of a brain-dead person “not fucking likely,” and this latest announcement does little to adjust our assessment.

The 18-hour surgery took half as long as Canavero previously estimated, which he attributes to time-saving techniques from his team of Chinese colleagues, led by Dr. Xiaoping Ren. Once again, Canavero did not provide evidence of the successful operation, though he did say a paper would be made public in the next few days.

So far, the papers linked to his research that he has managed to publish in peer-reviewed journals include only a handful in Surgery, which were carefully editedto focus specifically on Canavero’s treatments for traumatic spinal cord injury, and a series published in the controversial journal Surgical Neurology International, in which he lays out his idea of “head anastomosis venture” — or HEAVEN, for short.

Subsequent procedures will be performed in China, said Canavero, since the “Americans did not understand.” Canavero, whose work continually pushes the boundaries of medical ethics, seems to envision himself as a modern version of Copernicus or Galileo, someone who is so far ahead of his time that he appears heretical. But it’s more likely that he’s simply selling snake oil.

In 2015, when Canavero first came on the scene, outspoken medical ethicist Arthur Caplan told Forbes that the doctor is out of his mind, and that his goal was unattainable and irresponsible. “It is both rotten scientifically and lousy ethically,” wrote Caplan.

Arthur Caplan @ArthurCaplan

Head transplant carried out in monkey, claims maverick surgeon | New Scientist

 #b.s. #head transplant https://www.newscientist.com/article/2073923-head-transplant-carried-out-in-monkey-claims-maverick-surgeon/ …

6:51 PM - Jan 19, 2016

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Inverse reported earlier this year that Canavero said he’d be able to thaw cryonically preserved brains in 2018. Now, just as then, Canavero has done nothing to inspire any confidence in his claims.

Nonetheless, he’s found a willing subject in a Russian computer scientist named Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a muscle condition that leaves him wheelchair-bound. Spiridonov’s condition is debilitating, and he deserves a chance at life if he can get one, but this procedure is not likely to give him more than an accelerated and gruesome death.

If Canavero wants to prove himself to the medical community, he should make incremental advances, like connecting nerves in people with severed spinal cords. But instead, he’s setting his goal at the very peak of what could be achievable, and as such, he’s likely to fall flat.

17-11-2017 om 23:57 geschreven door peter  

See CRISPR in action in a new video

BY ELENA MOTIVANS 

CRISPR is a powerful gene editing tool that can accurately add in or take out bits of DNA. There’s a lot of buzz about it because it is cheap, easy, and precise. There is also a lot of mystery surrounding CRISPR, perhaps because of its more controversial uses, such as plans of resurrecting the woolly mammoth or editing human embryos, and more sci-fi uses, like eliminating malaria and other diseases from mosquitoes and growing human organs in pigs. However, right now, it’s causing its biggest revolution in the lab, where scientists are now able to manipulate and control any gene easily.

CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. These are actually just sequences which repeat at regular intervals with spaces in-between them. Bacteria use these spaces to keep a genetic memory of viruses that have invaded it in the past. If that virus dares to show its face again, the system will recognize it and destroy it. The sequences can’t detect and destroy viruses by themselves, but they have two helpers: the enzyme Cas9 and guide RNA.

Researchers from Kanazawa University and the University of Tokyo in Japan have published a new study in Nature Communications in which they visualized CRISPR-Cas9 in action, cleaving a strand of DNA in two. They visualized the process for a more detailed look at what CRISPR-Cas9 actually does. The technique that they used is called high-speed atomic-force microscopy and uses mechanical probes to get good resolution images and videos down to a nanometer. Now, you can watch the CRISPR-Cas9 complex work in real-time and real-space.

CRISPR-Cas9 in action (high-speed AFM)

hnisimasu @hnisimasu

CRISPR-Cas9 is like a hand with scissors. The guide RNA is the hand that directs the scissors to bits of DNA matching info in the genetic memory, leading it to the target. When found, Cas9 are like scissors that cut the DNA and destroy it. In this video, you can see the molecular scissors at work cleaving the DNA at the end of the clip. The original sequence can be destroyed or a new sequence can be patched into the gap.

It is pretty amazing that we can see exactly what happens when CRISPR-Cas9 is at work.

Journal reference:

Shibata, M., Nishimasu, H., Kodera, N., Hirano, S., Ando, T., Uchihashi, T. & Nureki, O. (2017) Real-space and real-time dynamics of CRISPR-Cas9 visualized by high-speed atomic force microscopy. Nature Communications 8, 1430.

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15-11-2017 om 20:47 geschreven door peter  

The good guys call themselves the Future of Life Institute. The bad guys are smart drones called Slaughterbots that can swarm a crowd yet kill precisely, delivering an explosive to the forehead of selected individuals while letting the others run in terror … or cheer the killing. While it sounds like a great plot for a dystopian movie or a sci-fi series, the Future of Life Institute is a real organization. And the Slaughterbots?

“Slaughterbots” the video (link here) was released this week by the Future of Life Institute at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons held in Geneva. The purpose of the Convention “is to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately.” The mission of the Future of Life Institute is “To catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges.” The purpose of the video is “safeguarding life” from tiny autonomous armed drones that can kill without human initiation based on things like data collected from social media.

Uh-oh.

The Future of Life Institute created the fictional (for now) video in conjunction with the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international coalition working to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons. It sound like the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is the perfect place to fight for such a ban … if it’s not too late.

Stuart Russell — Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading AI researcher – closes the video with a warning about Slaughterbots:

“Its potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defense. But allowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and freedom. Thousands of my fellow researchers agree. We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw, but the window to act is closing fast.”

The goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is not to restrict innovation in AI and drones but to stop the use if AI for selecting and killing without having a human in the decision-making process or pulling the trigger. The AI technology shown in the video is admittedly fictional but the components are recognizable in current devices, drones and social media.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the video is not the killing but the cheering. It’s just as easy to imagine this happening as well. Maybe that’s what the powers-that-be should focus on when deciding whether to ban slaughterbots.

Thoughts?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

14-11-2017 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

14-11-2017 om 22:54 geschreven door peter