Lifeboat Foundation

Luv the Kuo.

This interview was previously published on the Young China Watchers’ blog and is reprinted here with kind permission. Young China Watchers is a global network of China-focused young professionals across nine chapter cities, engaging with the most pressing issues emerging from China today.

Kaiser Kuo is the co-host of the Sinica Podcast and the former director of international communications for Baidu. He was previously a technology reporter in China and Oglivy & Mather’s director of digital strategy in Beijing. Kaiser is also considered the godfather of heavy metal music in China and founded the rock band Tang Dynasty. Recently, he spoke with Young China Watchers’ Jordyn Dahl about China’s tech scene and bridging the gap between China and the West.

Continue reading “The West and the New, Tech-Savvy China” »

Painful.

Stricter standards could wipe out as many as 90% of the industry’s 200-plus fledgling manufacturers.

That strange music/ noise that NASA thought they heard may have originated from earth according to Russian Scientists.

For anyone excited by recent reports of a mysterious radio signal possibly sent from extra-terrestrial life forms in deep space, Russian scientists have some sobering news.

It probably came from Earth, according to a group of researchers who detected the signal in May 2015.

Continue reading “Mysterious signal from space likely came from Earth: Russian scientists” »

Hmmm; I believe that I predicted that Russia would do a military build up near the artic sea and use the Siberian land give away as part of their justification. Also, I projected that Russia main goal is to take over the oil in the artic sea bed and 2 weeks ago Russia became aggressive and began claiming large sections of the artic sea infringing on both Canada and the US. Well, they seem to be following the outline that I shared several months ago. We should keep an eye on this situation.

At a recent event, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that a division of troops would be stationed in Chukotka, Russia’s far-east region, just slightly more than 50 miles from Alaska.

“There are plans to form a coastal defense division in 2018 on the Chukotka operational direction,” said Shoigu.

Continue reading “Russia will deploy a division of troops about 50 miles from the US” »

When it comes to the billions of neurons in your brain, what you see at birth is what get—except in the hippocampus. Buried deep underneath the folds of the cerebral cortex, neural stem cells in the hippocampus continue to generate new neurons, inciting a struggle between new and old as the new attempts to gain a foothold in memory-forming center of the brain.

In a study published online in Neuron, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in collaboration with an international team of scientists found they could bias the competition in favor of the newly generated neurons.

“The hippocampus allows us to form new memories of ‘what, when and where’ that help us navigate our lives,” said HSCI Principal Faculty member and the study’s corresponding author, Amar Sahay, PhD, “and neurogenesis—the generation of new neurons from stem cells—is critical for keeping similar memories separate.”

Continue reading “Researchers identify new mechanisms by which new neurons sharpen memories” »

Amazing research on how PTSD can be pass down to the survivor’s offspring due to trauma altering the traumatic victim’s DNA Sequence.

Philadelphia, PA, September 1, 2016 – The children of traumatized people have long been known to be at increased risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and mood and anxiety disorders. However, according to Rachel Yehuda from the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who led a new study in Biological Psychiatry, there are very few opportunities to examine biologic alterations in the context of a watershed trauma in exposed people and their adult children born after the event.

One of the most intensively studied groups in this regard are the children of survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. From the work of Yehuda and others, there has been growing evidence that concentration camp survivors and their children might show changes in the epigenetic regulation of genes.

Epigenetic processes alter the expression of a gene without producing changes in the DNA sequence. DNA methylation is one of these epigenetic modifications, which regulates genome function through processes that add or remove a methyl group to a specific site in DNA, potentially affecting gene transcription.

Continue reading “Trauma’s epigenetic fingerprint observed in children of Holocaust survivors” »

I remember 4 years ago at a CIO Life Sciences Conference in AZ when one of the leaders over a research lab mention the desire to finally enable patients to share their entire DNA sequence on a thumb drive with their doctor in order to be treated properly as well as have insights on the patient’s future risks. However, limitations such as HIPAA was brought up in the discussion. Personally, with how we’re advancing things like synthetic biology which includes DNA data storage, cell circuitry, electronic tattoos, etc. thumb drive maybe too outdated.

The circle that is personalized medicine consists of more than just doctor, patient, and patient data. Other elements are in the loop, such as EHR systems that incorporate gene-drug information and updated clinical guidelines.

Very interesting and extremely interesting as we do more work on synthetic DNA as well.

Epigenetics isn’t limited to studying marks on chromatin; it can also put chromatin on a hair trigger, bringing spring-loaded action to its bead-on-a-string structures, exposing disease processes to transcriptional crossfire.

Abstract: Columbia Engineers discover that samarium nickelate shows promise for active photonic devices — SmNiO3 could potentially transform optoelectronic technologies, including smart windows, infrared camouflage, and optical communications.

A team led by Nanfang Yu, assistant professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, has discovered a new phase-transition optical material and demonstrated novel devices that dynamically control light over a much broader wavelength range and with larger modulation amplitude than what has currently been possible. The team, including researchers from Purdue, Harvard, Drexel, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, found that samarium nickelate (SmNiO3) can be electrically tuned continuously between a transparent and an opaque state over an unprecedented broad range of spectrum from the blue in the visible (wavelength of 400 nm) to the thermal radiation spectrum in the mid-infrared (wavelength of a few tens of micrometers). The study, which is the first investigation of the optical properties of SmNiO3 and the first demonstration of the material in photonic device applications, is published online today in Advanced Materials.

“The performance of SmNiO3 is record-breaking in terms of the magnitude and wavelength range of optical tuning,” Yu says. “There is hardly any other material that offers such a combination of properties that are highly desirable for optoelectronic devices. The reversible tuning between the transparent and opaque states is based on electron doping at room temperature, and potentially very fast, which opens up a wide range of exciting applications, such as ‘smart windows’ for dynamic and complete control of sunlight, variable thermal emissivity coatings for infrared camouflage and radiative temperature control, optical modulators, and optical memory devices.”