Lifeboat Foundation

If you’re a fan of life on the high seas, this new project will let you travel them year-round in luxe accommodations.

On Tuesday, private residential ship maker Storylines and Croatian shipyard Brodosplit announced they have signed a ship building contract to create what they’re calling the world’s first environmentally conscious residential ship. The 753-foot vessel, dubbed MV Narrative, has begun its engineering phase. The development’s retail value is estimated at $1.5 billion.

The Singularity is a technological event horizon beyond which we cannot see – a moment in future history when exponential progress makes the impossible possible. This video discusses the concept of the Singularity, related technologies including AI, synthetic biology, cybernetics and quantum computing, and their potential implications.

My previous video “AI, Robots & the Future” is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaGIo_Viazs.

Continue reading “Explaining the Singularity” »

Michael Levin’s 2019 paper “The Computational Boundary of a Self” is discussed. The main topics of conversation include Scale-Free Cognition, Surprise & Stress, and the Morphogenetic Field. Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. He works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.

🚩The Computational Boundary of a Self: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition (can read in browser or download as pdf)
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688/full.

Continue reading “What are Cognitive Light Cones? (Michael Levin Interview)” »

The gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9 which has revolutionized genetic engineering over the past decade involves cutting DNA strands which is a process that can be quite hard to control and can result in unwanted genetic changes. Now, thanks to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a new gene-editing technology called CRISPRoff can change that, according to a press release.

“Fast forward four years [from the initial grant], and CRISPRoff finally works as envisioned in a science fiction way,” says co-senior author Luke Gilbert. “It’s exciting to see it work so well in practice.”

Pictured: Illustration of CRISPR-Cas9 editing DNA / iStock, Artur Plawgo

Currently, there are no gene editing–based treatments on the market, but the technology continues its march toward potential FDA approval, with several products in mid-and late-stage trials. As these programs mature, 2023 could be a pivotal year for companies in the space. Here are some highlights to look forward to as the year progresses.

CRISPR Therapeutics/Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

In the last decade, we have witnessed biology bring us some incredible products and technologies: from mushroom-based packaging to animal-free hotdogs and mRNA vaccines that helped curb a global pandemic. The power of synthetic biology to transform our world cannot be overstated: this industry is projected to contribute to as much as a third of the global economic output by 2030, or nearly $30 trillion, and could impact almost every area of our lives, from the food we eat to the medicine we put in our bodies.

The leaders of this unstoppable bio revolution – many of whom you can meet at the SynBioBeta conference in Oakland, CA, on May 23–25 – are bringing the future closer every day through their ambitious vision, long-range strategy, and proactive oversight. These ten powerful women are shaping our world as company leaders, biosecurity experts, policymakers, and philanthropists focused on charting a new course to a more sustainable, equitable, clean, and safe future.

As an early pioneer in the high-throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA, Emily Leproust has dedicated her life to democratizing gene synthesis to catapult the growth of synthetic biology applications from medicine, food, agriculture, and industrial chemicals to DNA data storage. She was one of the co-founders of Twist Bioscience in 2013 and is still leading the expanding company as CEO. To say that Twist’s silicon platform was a game-changer for the industry is an understatement. And it is no surprise that Leproust was recently honored with the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award for her work in the biobased economy and biotech innovation.

The remarkable physicochemical properties of the natural nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, define modern biology at the molecular level and are widely believed to have been central to life’s origins. However, their ability to form repositories of information as well as functional structures such as ligands (aptamers) and catalysts (ribozymes/DNAzymes) is not unique. A range of nonnatural alternatives, collectively termed xeno nucleic acids (XNAs), are also capable of supporting genetic information storage and propagation as well as evolution. This gives rise to a new field of “synthetic genetics,” which seeks to expand the nucleic acid chemical toolbox for applications in both biotechnology and molecular medicine. In this review, we outline XNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase engineering as a key enabling technology and summarize the application of “synthetic genetics” to the development of aptamers, enzymes, and nanostructures.

Copyright © 2019 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; all rights reserved.

Individual RNA remains a challenging signal to synthetically transduce into different types of cellular information. Here, we describe Ribozyme-ENabled Detection of RNA (RENDR), a plug-and-play strategy that uses cellular transcripts to template the assembly of split ribozymes, triggering splicing reactions that generate orthogonal protein outputs. To identify split ribozymes that require templating for splicing, we use laboratory evolution to evaluate the activities of different split variants of the Tetrahymena thermophila ribozyme. The best design delivers a 93-fold dynamic range of splicing with RENDR controlling fluorescent protein production in response to an RNA input. We further resolve a thermodynamic model to guide RENDR design, show how input signals can be transduced into diverse outputs, demonstrate portability across different bacteria, and use RENDR to detect antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This work shows how transcriptional signals can be monitored in situ and converted into different types of biochemical information using RNA synthetic biology.

© 2023. The Author(s).

Conflict of interest statement.

Bioethicist Nita Farahany says privacy law hasn’t kept up with science as employers increasingly use neurotechnology in the workplace.