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Oct 24, 2019

Introducing the Lamborghini Terzo Millennio

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Introducing the Lamborghini Terzo Millennio.
… Lamborghini’s first rendition at a completely electric hypercar 😱😍.


Lamborghini’s first rendition at a completely electric hypercar 😱 😍

Supercar Blondie

Oct 24, 2019

The Most Powerful Healer Is Within You

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Watch Video

In this lesson, Chris Wark shares a sneak peek into the diet, mind-set, and daily practices that helped him beat stage three-C colon cancer at the age of 26. Through the details of his amazing healing journey, you’ll discover the alternatives to traditional chemotherapy that helped him heal cancer painlessly and while maintaining his vigor and zest for life.

You’ll learn…

Oct 24, 2019

NIH and Gates Foundation lay out ambitious plan to bring gene-based treatments for HIV and sickle cell disease to Africa

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health

Two major U.S. biomedical research funders plan to each put at least $100 million over 4 years toward bringing cutting-edge, gene-based treatments to a part of the world that often struggles to provide access to even basic medicines: sub-Saharan Africa. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced the unusual collaboration to launch clinical trials for gene-based cures for HIV and sickle cell disease within the region in the coming decade.

The ambitious goal is to steer clear of expensive, logistically impractical strategies that require stem cell transplantation, and instead develop simpler, affordable ways of delivering genes or gene-editing drugs that can cure these diseases. “Yes, this is audacious,” NIH Director Francis Collins said during a press teleconference this morning on the project. “But if we don’t put our best minds, resources, and visions together right now, we would not live up to our mandate to bring the best science to those who are suffering.”

After decades of work and setbacks, the traditional gene therapy approach of delivering DNA into the body to replace a defective gene or boost a protein’s production is now reaching the clinic for several diseases, including inherited blindness, neuromuscular disease, and leukemia. Animal studies and some clinical trials have suggested that two diseases prevalent in Africa, HIV and sickle cell disease, can be treated by gene therapies or newer genome-editing tools such as CRISPR.

Oct 24, 2019

U.S. Travel Ban Disrupts The World’s Largest Brain Science Meeting

Posted by in categories: health, neuroscience, science

Society For Neuroscience Assists Scientists Denied U.S. Visas : Shots — Health News Scientists from nations including Iran, Mexico, and India were refused visas to attend this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. Some researchers got stand-ins to present their work.

Oct 24, 2019

Fossil Trove Offers Clues to How Life Found a Way After Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, evolution, existential risks

On the outskirts of Colorado Springs, researchers have uncovered thousands of fossils showing how life on Earth revived in the aftermath of an asteroid impact 66 million years or so ago that killed most dinosaurs and other life on land and sea.

Taken together, the fossil trove documents an era when evolution, in essence, hit the reset button. While countless species vanished forever, some plants and animals rebounded relatively quickly in the first million years after the devastation, including the mammals ancestral to humankind, the scientists said in research published Thursday in Science.

Oct 24, 2019

CRISPR Just Created a Hornless Bull, and It’s a Step Forward for Gene-Edited Food

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics

Gene-Edited Bulls

Although GMO wheat, corn, and other crops are frequently used in the US, scientists and farmers have begun shifting their focus to a far more accurate, cheaper, and potentially acceptable way of tinkering with the genome: genetic editing.

We’ve spilled plenty of ink on the merits of CRISPR and older-generation genetic editors such as TALEN. Rather than blindly sticking additional genes into a genome, these are guided approaches that surgically snip out or insert additional genetic material, and as such, are far more precise and predictable. Rather than inserting alien genes into our foods, scientists can now cut out genes detrimental to crop growth, or mimic mutations that provide advantages—a sort of “gene therapy” for food, but for enhancement rather than treatment.

Oct 24, 2019

Can This Newfound Dark, Massive Galaxy Be Astronomy’s ‘Missing Link’ In The Universe?

Posted by in category: space

If this newfound galaxy is just the tip of the iceberg, the entire Universe may fall into place.

Oct 24, 2019

The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say

Posted by in category: space

‘Spacetime foam’ might just be the wildest thing in the known universe, and we’re just starting to understand it.

Oct 24, 2019

How Fast Is The Universe Expanding? Incompatible Answers Point To New Physics

Posted by in categories: physics, space

As more data comes in, the puzzle gets deeper and deeper.

Oct 24, 2019

Scientists are trying to build a conscious machine — here’s why it will never work

Posted by in categories: neuroscience, robotics/AI, supercomputing

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project to do just that.

So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed. That effort has shifted to look more like a similar but less ambitious project in the U.S., developing new software tools for researchers to study brain data, rather than simulating a brain.

Some researchers continue to insist that simulating neuroscience with computers is the way to go. Others, like me, view these efforts as doomed to failure because we do not believe consciousness is computable. Our basic argument is that brains integrate and compress multiple components of an experience, including sight and smell – which simply can’t be handled in the way today’s computers sense, process and store data.