Lifeboat Foundation

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced today that 26 of the nation’s top biomedical researchers will become HHMI investigators and will receive the flexible support necessary to move their research in creative new directions. The initiative represents an investment in basic biomedical research of $153 million over the next five years.”

Read more

ARTICLE: “My own contribution has been to take the avant-garde ideas of architecture into a laboratory space.”

Bütschli Dynamic Droplet System in Summer/Fall 2013 issue of Artificial Life

“The point being, science needs room to figure out exactly what this technology is capable of doing. Right now, researchers have a ton of potential on their hands, but not a lot of agreement about how far that potential reaches.” Read more

David Cyranosk & Sara Reardon  - Nature.com

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published¹ in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted — rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month^{2, 3} about the ethical implications of such work. Read more

By David Cyranoski — Scientific American

Kurzweil AI

Bacteria within you — which outnumber your own cells about 100 times — may be affecting both your cravings and moods to get you to eat what they want, and may be driving you toward obesity.

That’s the conclusion of an article published this week in the journal BioEssays by researchers from UC San Francisco, Arizona State University and University of New Mexico from a review of the recent scientific literature.

Read more

By Zak Cheney-Rice — News.Mic

The news: Russian cosmonauts have discovered something remarkable clinging to the outside of the International Space Station: living organisms.

The microscopic creatures appeared during a space walk intended to clean the vessel’s surface, and were allegedly identified — incredibly — as a type of sea plankton. This is big: According to Sploid, Russian scientists are both “shocked by [the] discovery and can’t really explain how [it] is possible.”

Continue reading “Astronauts Just Found Life In Outer Space — And Scientists Aren't Sure How It Got There” »

Written By: David J. Hill — Singularity Hub

While computers scientists find new ways to supercharge computers, a team of plant scientists have demonstrated that they can supercharge a plant.

Hoping to speed up plant photosynthesis, researchers from the US and UK have successfully upgraded a carbon-fixing enzyme vital to photosynthesis in a tobacco plant with two enzymes from cyanobacteria, which function at a faster rate. If photosynthesis can be performed more efficiently, plants would grow larger and crops could have higher yields, possibly as high as 60% according to computer models.

Continue reading “Plant Engineered to Supercharge Photosynthesis with Hopes of Increasing Crop Yields” »