In his latest book, Walter Isaacson chronicles the discovery of CRISPR and delves into the ethics of gene editing.
Today on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool and the merit of space exploration to the pros and cons of genetic engineering.
In a new Nature paper, Slonim and colleagues show that across 80 debate topics, Project Debater’s computational argument technology has performed very decently—with a human audience being the judge of that. “However, it is still somewhat inferior on average to the results obtained by expert human debaters,” says Slonim.
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Check out “How Watson Works here.”
Is it possible to live forever by using narrow AI that can perform faster and smarter than humans? Having a doctor give you the correct diagnosis and treatment plan only happens on average, 54% of the time, as the New England Journal of Medicine has pointed out. Having Watson instantly diagnose you with the correct diagnosis and treatment plan 95% of the time will become the new standard. Our crop of new personal medicine products such as continual internal diagnostics, synthetic immune systems, virtual assistants, and regenerative medicine will diagnose and stop sickness from ever occurring while constantly rebuilding and improving body and mind capabilities.
IBM has made a series of Watson computer systems so that any company can raise their industries products and services far beyond our human capability. IBM’s Watson was first featured to the public with its historic Jeopardy win over Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter the best human Jeopardy players. At the time, Watson contained 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content in a ninety server computing system with an analytical software IBM designed called DeepQA. Now, the financial markets, medicine, insurance companies, government, engineering, and customer service call centers are employing (buying) Watson is an artificial intelligence system, that can be specifically tailored to any digitized industry and quickly evolve their industries potential.
Most cancers are driven by continuous cell division, the cause of which is largely a mystery. Scientists at Vanderbilt University have discovered a genetic switch that seems to touch off that abnormal proliferation of cells—and they did it with the gene editing system CRISPR.
Using a genomewide CRISPR screen, the Vanderbilt team discovered that deleting a protein made by the gene TRAF3 causes cells to proliferate without stopping, even after they reach a certain density that would normally signal them to stop dividing. Because TRAF3 has not been linked to cancer before, the finding could offer key insights into the development of some cancers, the researchers reported in the journal eLife.
The team started with 40 million epithelial cells, using CRISPR to select cells that kept dividing uncontrollably. They were surprised to discover that a loss of TRAF3 activates signaling that in turn drives cell proliferation. TRAF3 normally activates immunity and had not been linked to uncontrolled cell growth before, they said.
As the world fights the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, another group of dangerous pathogens looms in the background. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been growing for years and appears to be getting worse. If COVID-19 taught us one thing, it’s that governments should be prepared for more global public health crises, and that includes finding new ways to combat rogue bacteria that are becoming resistant to commonly used drugs.
In contrast to the current pandemic, viruses may be be the heroes of the next epidemic rather than the villains. Scientists have shown that viruses could be great weapons against bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
I am a biotechnology and policy expert focused on understanding how personal genetic and biological information can improve human health. Every person interacts intimately with a unique assortment of viruses and bacteria, and by deciphering these complex relationships we can better treat infectious diseases caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In the new study, researchers instead aimed to reduce the amount of Nav1.7 that cells make in the first place. Bioengineer Ana Moreno and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, modified the “molecular scissors” of the gene editor CRISPR. Changes to the cutting enzyme Cas9 caused it to bind to DNA that makes Nav1.7 without slicing it, effectively preventing the Nav1.7 protein from being made. The researchers enhanced this silencing effect by hitching Cas9 to a repressor, another protein that inhibits gene expression.
The researchers tested the Cas9 approach—and a similar approach using another gene-editing protein known as a zinc finger—in mice given the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel, which can cause chronic nerve pain in cancer patients. The team measured pain by poking the animals’ paws with a thin nylon filament. Paclitaxel prompted mice to withdraw from gentler pokes, indicating that a normally nonpainful stimulus had become painful. But 1 month after an injection of the gene-silencing treatment into their spinal fluid, rodents responded much like mice that had never gotten paclitaxel, whereas untreated rodents remained hypersensitive, the team reports today in.
The approach could also prevent pain when given before paw injections of either the inflammation-causing compound carrageenan or a molecule called BzATP that increases pain sensitivity. And treated mice behaved no differently from untreated ones when their opposite paw—not inflamed by carrageenan—was exposed to a hot surface. That’s an encouraging initial sign that the injection didn’t silence Nav1.7 so completely that it creates a dangerous numbness to all pain, Moreno says. Behavioral tests so far haven’t turned up evidence of potentially concerning side effects; the injections didn’t appear to alter the animals’ movement, cognition, or anxiety levels.
A new book from Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson offers an incisive portrait of the gene editing field that is changing modern medicine.
Materials capable of performing complex functions in response to changes in the environment could form the basis for exciting new technologies. Think of a capsule implanted in your body that automatically releases antibodies in response to a virus, a surface that releases an antibacterial agent when exposed to dangerous bacteria, a material that adapts its shape when it needs to sustain a particular weight, or clothing that senses and captures toxic contaminants from the air.
Scientists and engineers have already taken the first step toward these types of autonomous materials by developing “active” materials that have the ability to move on their own. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago have taken the next step by showing that the movement in one such active material—liquid crystals—can be harnessed and directed.
This proof-of-concept research, published on February 182021, in the journal Nature Materials, is the result of three years of collaborative work by the groups of Juan de Pablo, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering, and Margaret Gardel, Horace B. Horton Professor of Physics and Molecular Engineering, along with Vincenzo Vitelli, professor of physics, and Aaron Dinner, professor of chemistry.
Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) have come up with and patented a new system for manufacturing beams that aims to revolutionize the architecture, construction and civil engineering sectors. They are manufactured with 3D-printed plastic pieces that can be assembled as if they were pieces of Lego adding a high-performance layer of concrete in the most compressed area.
Its advantages, according to its creators, are several: they weigh up to 80% less than concrete or metallic beams, which means that no heavy cranes or lorries are needed to carry and install them; they save time and money on labor and materials; and they can be printed and assembled in situ, which facilitates their installation anywhere, regardless of how difficult it is to reach. In addition to all of this, it uses recycled plastics as the raw material, giving a new life to this product and thus helping move towards more sustainable construction.
The development of these innovative beams is the result of almost three years of research. “Our goal was to propose an alternative to the current reinforced concrete beams. These are made using profiles built for the length of the piece, which requires expensive installation and are hard to transport,” says José Ramón Albiol, lecturer at the Higher Technical School of Construction Engineering (ETSIE) of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Following numerous hours of tests and trials, the combination of 3D printing, plastics and concrete provided optimum results. And last October they patented the system.
Tissue engineering has long-depended on geometrically static scaffolds seeded with cells in the lab to create new tissues and even organs. The scaffolding material—usually a biodegradable polymer structure—is supplied with cells and the cells, if supplied with the right nutrients, then develop into tissue as the underlying scaffold biodegrades. But this model ignores the extraordinarily dynamic morphological processes that underlie the natural development of tissues. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have developed new 4D hydrogels—3D materials that have the ability to change shape over time in response to stimuli—that can morph multiple times in a preprogrammed or on-demand manner in response to external trigger signals. In a new Advanced Science study, the UIC researchers, led by Eben Alsberg, show that these new materials may be used to help develop tissues that more closely resemble their natural counterparts, which are subject to forces that drive movement during their formation.
