Think that robots need to be the size of a dog or even a full-grown person to be exciting? Not so, as the fast-developing field of micro-robotics demonstrates. As it turns out, in some cases the world’s most innovative robots may even be too small for many of us to see.
Category: innovation – Page 186
Podcast #33: The Disruptors with Matt Ward
“This is the age of disruption.”–Sebastian Thrun “Innovations can only be disruptive in relation to something else.”–Clayton M. Christensen Disruption. I…
We are happy to announce our support for Turn Biotechnologies. Turn.bio is based on the scientific breakthrough work at Stanford of Vittorio Sebastiano, Jay Sarkar, and Marco Quarta. They are now leading the team to develop therapies that return mature differentiated cells to a dramatically younger state leaving their differentiated identity unaltered. Congrats! More info on kizoo.com/en
Turn.bio is based on the scientific breakthrough work at Stanford of Vittorio Sebastiano, Jay Sarkar, and Marco Quarta. They are now leading the team to develop therapies that return mature differentiated cells to a dramatically younger state leaving their differentiated identity unaltered. Congrats!
More info on kizoo.com/en
Crispr Innovators Make It Easier to Use Their Gene-Editing Technology
Two important developers of the celebrated Crispr gene-editing technology said they will make it easier for researchers to license their intellectual property, a move aimed at hastening innovation in the burgeoning field.
MilliporeSigma, the life-sciences tools division of German pharmaceutical giant Merck KGaA, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said researchers will be able to get nonexclusive rights to patents held by both organizations for research purposes with a single license.
Companies will have to pay a licensing fee. Nonprofit and academic institutions will be permitted to license the patents for free, the organizations said in a news release on Thursday.
CRISPR breakthrough treats diseases like diabetes without cutting DNA
CRISPR-Cas9 shows incredible promise, but the long term effects of cutting DNA in living organisms isn’t known. Now scientists from the Salk Institute have modified it to work without cutting, switching targeted genes on and off instead, and used it to treat diabetes and muscular dystrophy in mice.
Study gives insight into sun-induced DNA damage and cell repair
A team led by a Baylor University researcher has published a breakthrough article that provides a better understanding of the dynamic process by which sunlight-induced DNA damage is recognized by the molecular repair machinery in cells as needing repair.
Ultraviolet light from the sun is a ubiquitous carcinogen that can inflict structural damage to the cellular DNAs DNA carries important blueprints for cellular functions, failure in removing and restoring damaged parts of DNA in a timely fashion can have detrimental outcomes and lead to skin cancers in humans, said lead author Jung-Hyun Min, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Min and her team showed how the repair protein Rad4/XPC would bind to one such UV-induced DNA damage—6–4 photoproduct—to mark the damaged site along the DNA in preparation for the rest of the nucleotide excision repair (NER) process in cells.
Google DeepMind publishes breakthrough Artificial General Intelligence architecture
On January 20th Google’s DeepMind division, the division behind a myriad of artificial intelligence (AI) firsts, quietly submitted a paper on Arxiv entitled “PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks” that mostly went unnoticed.
Invention: Plasma-powered flying saucer
By Justin MullinsPass a current or magnetic field through a conducting fluid and it will generate a force. Numerous aerospace engineers have tried and failed to exploit this phenomenon, known as magnetohydrodynamics, as an exotic form of propulsion for aircraft. But perhaps attempts so far have all been too big.
A very small design could have a better chance of taking off, says Subrata Roy, an aerospace engineer at the University of Florida, Gainesville, US.
With a span of less than 15 centimetres, his aircraft qualifies as a micro air vehicle (MAV), but it has an unconventional design to say the least. It is a saucer shape covered with electrodes that ionise air to create a plasma. This plasma is then accelerated by an electric field to push air around and generate lift.