Tag: technology

Humanized Yeast: Scientists Create Yeast With Important Human Genes

Delft University of Technology scientists have created baker’s yeast with human muscle genes.

Human muscle genes were successfully inserted into the DNA of baker’s yeast by biotechnologist Pascale Daran-Lapujade and her team at Delft University of Technology. For the first time, scientists have effectively inserted a crucial human characteristic into a yeast cell. Their research was recently published in the journal Cell Reports.

Daran-Lapujade’s lab introduced a characteristic to yeast cells that is regulated by a collection of 10 genes that humans cannot live without; they carry the blueprint for a process known as a metabolic pathway, which breaks down sugar to gather energy and produce cellular building blocks within muscle cells. Because this mechanism is involved in many disorders, including cancer, the modified yeast could be used in medical studies.

“Now that we understand the full process, medical scientists can use this humanized yeast model as a tool for drug screening and cancer research,” Daran-Lapujade says.

Humans and yeast are similar

According to Daran-Lapujade, there are a lot of similarities between yeast and a human being: “It seems weird since yeast lives as single cells and humans consist of a substantially more complex system, but the cells operate in a very similar way.”

As a result, scientists often transfer human genes into yeast. Because yeast removes all other interactions that may exist in the human body, it creates a clean environment in which researchers can analyze a single process.

“As compared to human cells or tissues, yeast is a fantastic organism for its simplicity to grow and its genetic accessibility: its DNA can be easily modified to address fundamental questions,” Daran-Lapujade explains. “Many pivotal discoveries such as the cell division cycle, were elucidated thanks to yeast.”

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The U.S. Army, not Meta, is building the metaverse

In terms of industry progress towards the cloud-supported, scalable metaverse, no organization has come further than the U.S. Army. Their Synthetic Training Environment (STE) has been in development since 2017. The STE aims to replace all legacy simulation programs and integrate different systems into a single, connected system for combined arms and joint training. 

The STE fundamentally differs from traditional, server-based approaches. For example, it will host a 1:1 digital twin of the Earth on a cloud architecture that will stream high fidelity (photo-realistic) terrain data to connected simulations. New terrain management platforms such as Mantle ETM will ensure that all connected systems operate on exactly the same terrain data. For example, trainees in a tank simulator will see the same trees, bushes and buildings as the pilot in a connected flight simulator, facilitating combined arms operations.

Cloud scalability (that is, scaling with available computational power) will allow for a better real-world representation of essential details such as population density and terrain complexity that traditional servers could not support. The ambition of STE is to automatically pull from available data resources to render millions of simulated entities, such as AI-based vehicles or pedestrians, all at once.

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This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting

In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments.

The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Earlier this week, Hanna showed that starting with mouse stem cells, his lab could form highly realistic-looking mouse embryos and keep them growing in a mechanical womb for several days until they developed beating hearts, flowing blood, and cranial folds. 

It’s the first time such an advanced embryo has been mimicked without sperm, eggs, or even a uterus. Hanna’s report was published in the journal Cell on Monday.

“This experiment has huge implications,” says Bernard Siegel, a patient advocate and founder of the World Stem Cell Summit. “One wonders what mammal could be next in line.”  

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1st synthetic mouse embryos — complete with beating hearts and brains — created with no sperm, eggs or womb

For the first time, scientists have created mouse embryos in the lab without using any eggs or sperm and watched them grow outside the womb. To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells and a spinning device filled with shiny glass vials. 

The experiment is a “game changer,” Alfonso Martinez Arias, a developmental biologist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who was not involved in the research, told The Washington Post(opens in new tab). 

“This is an important landmark in our understanding of how embryos build themselves,” he said.

The breakthrough experiment, described in a report published Monday (Aug. 1) in the journal Cell(opens in new tab), took place in a specially designed bioreactor that serves as an artificial womb for developing embryos. Within the device, embryos float in small beakers of nutrient-filled solution, and the beakers are all locked into a spinning cylinder that keeps them in constant motion. This movement simulates how blood and nutrients flow to the placenta. The device also replicates the atmospheric pressure of a mouse uterus, according to a statement(opens in new tab) from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where the research was conducted.    

In a previous experiment, described in the journal Nature(opens in new tab) in 2021, the team used this bioreactor to grow natural mouse embryos, which reached day 11 of development in the device. “That really showed that mammalian embryos can grow outside the uterus — it’s not really patterning or sending signals to the embryo so much as providing nutritional support,” Jacob Hanna, an embryonic stem cell biologist at the Weizmann and senior author of both studies, told STAT News

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The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China

When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work.

They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.

“It was beyond promise,” said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. “We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected.”

But that’s not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.

The Chinese company didn’t steal this technology. It was given to them — by the U.S. Department of Energy. First in 2017, as part of a sublicense, and later, in 2021, as part of a license transfer. An investigation by NPR and the Northwest News Network found the federal agency allowed the technology and jobs to move overseas, violating its own licensing rules while failing to intervene on behalf of U.S. workers in multiple instances.

Now, China has forged ahead, investing millions into the cutting-edge green technology that was supposed to help keep the U.S. and its economy out front.

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Researchers ‘revive’ organs in dead pigs, raising questions about life and death

Scientists have rebooted vital organs of dead pigs in an experiment bioethicists say may force a rethink of how the body dies, and that further blurs the boundaries between life and death.

Using a system dubbed “OrganEx” that uses special pumps and a cocktail of chemicals to restore oxygen and prevent cell death throughout the body, the Yale University team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in multiple porcine organs an hour after the pigs’ deaths from cardiac arrest.

Electrical activity was restored in the heart, for instance. The muscle was contracting.

The study “reveals the underappreciated capacity for cellular recovery after prolonged whole-body warm ischemia (loss of blood circulation, and thus oxygen) in a large mammal,” the team r eports in the journal Nature .

The experiments also bolster findings from another Yale-led project three years ago that involved disembodied pigs’ brains. Using a similar perfusion system called BrainEx, researchers restored some functions in brains taken from pigs four hours after they were killed in a meatpacking plant.

That was an isolated organ. The team wondered, could they apply a similar approach on a whole-body scale?

Together, the research challenges old thinking that the body’s cells and organs begin to be irreversibly destroyed within minutes of the heart stopping. Instead, “cellular demise can be halted, and their state (can) be shifted towards recovery at molecular and cellular levels,” the Yale team writes in Nature.

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A transhuman biohacker implanted over 50 chips and magnets in her body

Though Anonym has described herself as genderless, she prefers the pronouns she or they.]

At the Grinderfest in 2019, Anonym inserted a little “pirate box” device in her upper right arm.

The “Grindfest”, according to cyborg Rich Lee, “is the kind of event where you can really put things in perspective.” As per Anonym, the event involves watching interesting films, putting together biohacking experiments, and discussing their results.

The “pirate box” was a file-sharing device –  a hard drive and WiFi router that creates a local wireless network.

It comprised a facility for USB storage and a WiFi antenna – users could connect to it via their phone or PC, wherein they could download and upload files. “…It was immediately clear this might make an interesting subdermal device,” Anonym wrote on her blog.

Over the next few days, the experimental device was readied to be inserted under human skin – extraneous components were taken out, the battery was replaced with a wireless charging coil, the USB storage was soldered down, and the box was coated with many layers of resin-type stuff to bio proof the device.

According to the blog, after a horizontal incision was carved in her arm, retractors held it open while a ‘pocket big enough to hold the device’ was made. The operation was a success, having used “shitloads of lidocaine”.

Eight months later, in 2020, Anonym revealed that the experiment had failed. She had accidentally whacked her arm on the door of a taxi, which in turn disrupted the area and irritated her skin – Lehpt was admitted to the hospital, where doctors insisted the device be removed.  

Despite some lingering nerve damage, the incident did not lower her morale. Her blog cites that she learned a few lessons that included – it was possible to share WiFi from inside yourself, it could be a great way to smuggle data, and its function as a cool way to transfer data has led various people to upload and download content, induction coils can work through the skin to power a device, and that miniaturization is extremely important. 

“The coolest implant I’ve had on would be the pirate box,” a self-assured Anonym tells IE.

In all, Anonym has more than 50 chips, magnets, and antennae implanted in her body, bestowing her with powers beyond the usual limit of a human.

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Digital Authoritarianism: AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy

“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick

Nothing is private.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.

Nothing that was once private is protected.

We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.

AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.

Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.

As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.

It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.

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DARPA To Create New Technology Powerful Enough To See Through Concrete Walls

U.S. Military officials announced Friday a new program of teams from various sectors plan to create a subatomic particle compact source powerful enough to see through thick concrete walls, underground tunnels, and chambers hundreds of meters below the Earth’s surface.

In a press release, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said the personnel would make deeply penetrating terrestrial muons, subatomic particles about 200 times heavier than electrons. Such particles could create energy beams up to hundreds of giga-electronvolts to scan or characterize materials for scientific discovery and national security.

Mark Wrobel, the program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said the ever-advancing high-peak-power laser technology could produce terrestrial muons that “can travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil’ if the energy was high enough.

“MuS2 will lay the groundwork needed to examine the feasibility of developing compact and transportable muon sources,” Wrobel said.

Although officials called the process of harnessing the primary sources used to create such muons for advanced surveillance “tedious and not very practical,” they have proven themselves effective. In the late 1960s, scientists used muons to examine about 20 percent of the interior chambers within the walls of great pyramids in Egypt. To this day, scientists still are using are using cosmic radiation to see inside the pyramids.

The Defense Department and other federal agencies have used advanced sources to generate subatomic particles that enabled officials to scan cargo containers with dangerous materials or test an aircraft for internal defects. Still not strong enough, however, to “map the core of a volcano from the outside, or peer deep underground to locate chambers and tunnels.”

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Scientists Hijack Fruit Fly Brains to Remote Control Their Wings

Are we one step closer to remote controlling human brains?

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Materials, we just might. A team of researchers at Rice University have officially been able to hack into the brains of fruit flies and successfully command them to make a specific movement — with just a click of a wireless remote control.

The team — an assemblage of experts in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and electrical engineering — first created genetically modified flies bred to express a specific heat-sensitive ion channel which, when activated, caused the insects to spread their wings.

They then injected the gene-hacked buggos’ brains with a heat trigger: magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, which quickly heat up in the presence of a magnetic charge.

Then, by switching on a magnetic field, the scientists were able to warm those iron oxide nanoparticles — and in turn, those heat-sensitive, wing-specific ions.

In other words, the study showed that within half a second of a human clicking a button, the bugs would spread their wings. It’s a crude hack, but an intriguing proof of concept for altered animals controlled by technology.

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