Lifeboat Foundation

After twenty five years of research, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think that they have finally cracked the code for the commercialization for nuclear fusion reactions.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is the fruit of that research. It’s a startup building on decades of research and development that plans to harness the power of the sun to create a cleaner, stable source of energy for consumers. And the company just raised another $50 million in funding from some of the country’s deepest pocketed private investors to continue on its path to commercialization.

The company unveiled its technology and a first $64 million in financing from investors including the Italian energy company, Eni; Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment consortium established by the world’s richest men and women, and The Engine, MIT’s own investment vehicle for frontier technologies.

In one of the biggest breakthroughs in recent history, scientists have created a synthetic genome that can self-replicate. So what does this mean? Are we about to become gray goo?

Led by Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), the team of scientists combined two existing techniques to transplant synthetic DNA into a bacteria. First they chemically synthesized a bacterial genome, then they used well-known nuclear transfer techniques (used in IVF) to transplant the genome into a bacteria. And apparently the bacteria replicated itself, too, thus creating a second generation of the synthetic DNA. The process is being hailed as revolutionary.

I recently discovered it’s possible for someone in their 20s to feel old—just mention Microsoft’s Clippy to anyone born after the late 90s. Weirdly, there is an entire generation of people who never experienced that dancing wide-eyed paper-clip interrupting a Word doc writing project.

For readers who never knew him, Clippy was an interactive virtual assistant that took the form of an animated paperclip designed to be helpful in guiding users through Microsoft Word. As an iconic symbol of its decade, Clippy was also famously terrible. Worldwide consensus decided that Clippy was annoying, intrusive, and Time magazine even named it among the 50 worst inventions of all time (squeezed between ‘New Coke’ and Agent Orange. Not a fun list).

Though Clippy was intended to help users navigate their software lives, it may have been 20 or so years ahead of its time.

U.S. patent officials reexamining claims about who deserves rights to enormously valuable aspect of the invention.

Biochips are essentially tiny laboratories designed to function inside living organisms, and they are driving next-generation DNA sequencing technologies. This powerful combination is capable of solving unique and important biological problems, such as single-cell, rare-cell or rare-molecule analysis, which next-generation sequencing can’t do on its own.

Now that the scaling and throughput power of biochip technologies has emerged, the next trend in biochips will involve being capable of providing applications across a wide spectrum—from identifying rare bacterium to population-based clinical studies.

In APL Bioengineering a group of researchers from Seoul National University explore the role advancements in biochip technology are playing in driving groundbreaking scientific discoveries and breakthroughs in medicine via next-generation sequencing, aka high-throughput sequencing.

The formation of air bubbles in a liquid appears very similar to its inverse process, the formation of liquid droplets from, say, a dripping water faucet. But the physics involved is actually quite different, and while those water droplets are uniform in their size and spacing, bubble formation is typically a much more random process.

Now, a study by researchers at MIT and Princeton University shows that under certain conditions, bubbles can also be coaxed to form spheres as perfectly matched as droplets.

The new findings could have implications for the development of microfluidic devices for biomedical research and for understanding the way natural gas interacts with petroleum in the tiny pore spaces of underground rock formations, the researchers say. The findings are published today in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT graduate Amir Pahlavan Ph.D. ‘18, Professor Howard Stone of Princeton, MIT School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation Gareth McKinley, and MIT Professor Ruben Juanes.

In a new survey of the sub-seafloor off the U.S. Northeast coast, scientists have made a surprising discovery: a gigantic aquifer of relatively fresh water trapped in porous sediments lying below the salty ocean. It appears to be the largest such formation yet found in the world. The aquifer stretches from the shore at least from Massachusetts to New Jersey, extending more or less continuously out about 50 miles to the edge of the continental shelf. If found on the surface, it would create a lake covering some 15,000 square miles. The study suggests that such aquifers probably lie off many other coasts worldwide, and could provide desperately needed water for arid areas that are now in danger of running out.

The researchers employed innovative measurements of electromagnetic waves to map the water, which remained invisible to other technologies. “We knew there was fresh water down there in isolated places, but we did not know the extent or geometry,” said lead author Chloe Gustafson, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “It could turn out to be an important resource in other parts of the world.” The study appears this week in the journal Scientific Reports.

The first hints of the aquifer came in the 1970s, when companies drilled off the coastline for oil, but sometimes instead hit fresh water. Drill holes are just pinpricks in the seafloor, and scientists debated whether the water deposits were just isolated pockets or something bigger. Starting about 20 years ago, study coauthor Kerry Key, now a Lamont-Doherty geophysicist, helped oil companies develop techniques to use electromagnetic imaging of the sub-seafloor to look for oil. More recently, Key decided to see if some form of the technology could also be used also to find fresh-water deposits. In 2015, he and Rob L. Evans of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution spent 10 days on the Lamont-Doherty research vessel Marcus G. Langseth making measurements off southern New Jersey and the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, where scattered drill holes had hit fresh-water-rich sediments.

Over 30 years ago, a molecule with incredible anti-cancer properties was discovered in sea sponges. However, it was so structurally complex scientists have been unable to synthesize it in large enough quantities to be able to test it in humans. Now a team of scientists has finally made a landmark breakthrough, achieving total synthesis of the molecule in volumes large enough to proceed to clinical trials.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon has made a breakthrough in the field of noninvasive robotic device control. Using a noninvasive brain-computer interface, they have developed the first-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm exhibiting the ability to continuously track and follow a computer cursor.