DNA accumulates mutations. The protective ends of chromosomes erode away. Mitochondria, the cell’s energy factory, falter and break down. The immune system goes haywire. The reserve pool of stem cells dwindles, while some mature cells enter a zombie-like state, spewing toxic chemicals into their environment. The picture sounds dire, but it’s not all bad news. ...
The promise of our urban areas being transformed into fully smart cities, towns or villages has been a long time coming. Many areas still lag behind in providing what many consider the bare basics of digital infrastructure, such as wireless connectivity. Our urban areas, however, needn’t do this blindly. Universities, stadiums and other large public […]
What’s soft, silvery-white and could make it harder for the world to go green? It might sound like the start of a joke, but it’s most certainly not one. The answer to the question is lithium, and the bad news for the world is that it potentially has nowhere near enough of it to power […]
“We are living in hell.” That’s how one person described the recent record-breaking heat wave in Pakistan. Earlier this year, Australia recorded its hottest day with a temperature of 50.7C on its western coast, while Delhi in India registered its highest-ever temperature of 49C in May. Meanwhile, recent days and weeks have seen mercury-busting readings across ...
When CRISPR first burst onto the biotech scene, it rose to fame for its precise cutting prowess—break a target DNA strand, silence a gene. But the tool came with hiccups. While far more efficient than previous tools for tinkering with the genome, CRISPR-Cas9 was at its core a genetic butcher. To edit a gene, the […]
In 2014, genomic sequencing giant, Illumina, announced that their new machine could sequence whole human genomes for $1,000 per genome. It was a significant milestone for a technology that cost some $95 million per genome when it arrived early this century. Illumina now dominates the industry; but this week, we learned it has some serious new competition. Ultima, ...
AI has done it again. After solving one of the grandest mysteries in biology—predicting protein structure—it decoded how proteins link up into complexes, and dreamed up novel protein structures that may ultimately be turned into drugs to control our basic biology, health, and life. Yet when faced with enormous protein complexes, AI faltered. Until now. In a ...
Over the span of a few billion years, diversity of life has flourished on Earth through the process of natural selection. Then, not long ago (relatively), human intelligence evolved. For the first time one species, Homo sapiens, could consciously control its destiny on this planet. Humans have been shaping ourselves, the environment and other species […]
Though he’s not the first to be born with DNA from three people, a special little five-month-old baby is the first to have been conceived and birthed using a new and controversial technique called mitochondrial donation, an improvement of leaps and bounds over those techniques used by doctors as far back as the 1990s to create […]
“Paradigm changes are so hard to come up with because they require thinking outside the box.” If there was ever an industry in need of a paradigm change, it’s healthcare. The World Health Organization estimated total spending on global health in 2012 was $6.5 trillion. And that cost will increase unless pioneers develop new technologies […]
