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A hacker managed to develop a new key cloning relay attack for Tesla vehicles and demonstrated it on a Tesla Model X.

Tesla was informed of the new attack and it is reportedly pushing a new patch for it.

Thefts of Tesla vehicles are quite rare in North America, but in Europe, they have some more sophisticated thieves that managed a string of Tesla vehicle thefts through relay attacks, and most vehicles haven’t been recovered.

Public health officials and drugmakers must be transparent about the side effects people may experience after getting their first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, doctors urged during a meeting Monday with CDC advisors as states prepare to distribute doses as early as next month.

Dr. Sandra Fryhofer of the American Medical Association noted that both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines require two doses at varying intervals. As a practicing physician, she said she worries whether her patients will come back for a second dose because of the potentially unpleasant side effects they may experience after the first shot.

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) include more than 600 types of nervous system disorders in humans that impact tens of millions of people worldwide. Estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest NDDs will increase by nearly 50% by 2030. Hence, development of advanced models for research on NDDs is needed to explore new therapeutic strategies and explore the pathogenesis of these disorders. Different approaches have been deployed in order to investigate nervous system disorders, including two-and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) cell cultures and animal models. However, these models have limitations, such as lacking cellular tension, fluid shear stress, and compression analysis; thus, studying the biochemical effects of therapeutic molecules on the biophysiological interactions of cells, tissues, and organs is problematic. The microfluidic “organ-on-a-chip” is an inexpensive and rapid analytical technology to create an effective tool for manipulation, monitoring, and assessment of cells, and investigating drug discovery, which enables the culture of various cells in a small amount of fluid (10−9 to 10−18 L). Thus, these chips have the ability to overcome the mentioned restrictions of 2D and 3D cell cultures, as well as animal models. Stem cells (SCs), particularly neural stem cells (NSCs), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have the capability to give rise to various neural system cells. Hence, microfluidic organ-on-a-chip and SCs can be used as potential research tools to study the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) and peripheral nervous system (PNS) disorders. Accordingly, in the present review, we discuss the latest progress in microfluidic brain-on-a-chip as a powerful and advanced technology that can be used in basic studies to investigate normal and abnormal functions of the nervous system.

Although Drosophila is an insect whose genome has only about 14,000 genes, roughly half the human count, a remarkable number of these have very close counterparts in humans; some even occur in the same order in the fly’s DNA as in our own. This, plus the organism’s more than 100-year history in the lab, makes it one of the most important models for studying basic biology and disease.

To take full advantage of the opportunities offered by Drosophila, researchers need improved tools to manipulate the fly’s genes with precision, allowing them to introduce mutations to break genes, control their activity, label their protein products, or introduce other inherited genetic changes.

“We now have the genome sequences of lots of different animals — worms, flies, fish, mice, chimps, humans,” says Roger Hoskins of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “Now we want improved technologies for introducing precise changes into the genomes of lab animals; we want efficient genome engineering. Methods for doing this are very advanced in bacteria and yeast. Good methods for worms, flies, and mice have also been around for a long time, and improvements have come along fairly regularly. But with whole genome sequences in hand, the goals are becoming more ambitious.”

Circa 2018

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE


A new 3D-printing technique can create tissues as soft as a human’s squishy brain or spongy lungs — something that has not been possible before.

“Additive manufacturing,” or 3D printing, promises to allow doctors to produce tailored organs for patients using the patients’ own cells, which could help bring down the severe shortage of organs available for people who need transplants.

O,.o Circa 2019


CRISPR/Cas9 is now a household name associated with genetic engineering studies. Through cutting-edge research described in their paper published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Tokyo University of Science, Meiji University, and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, led by Dr Takayuki Arazoe and Prof Shigeru Kuwata, has recently established a series of novel strategies to increase the efficiency of targeted gene disruption and new gene “introduction” using the CRISPR/Cas9 system in the rice blast fungus Pyricularia (Magnaporthe) oryzae. These strategies include quicker (single-step) gene introduction, use of small homologous sequences, and bypassing of certain prerequisite host DNA “patterns” and host component modification.

The team led by Dr Arazoe and Prof Kuwata has devised simple and quick techniques for gene editing (target gene disruption, sequence substitution, and re-introduction of desired genes) using CRISPR/Cas9 in the rice blast fungus Pyricularia (Magnaporthe) oryzae, a type of filamentous fungus. Spurred on by encouraging results, the researchers surmise, “Plants and their pathogens are still coevolving in nature. Exploiting the mutation mechanisms of model pathogenic fungi as a genome editing technique might lead to the development of further novel techniques in genetic engineering.”

The working component of the CRISPR/Cas9 system binds to the target gene region (DNA) and causes a site-specific double-stranded break (DSB) in the DNA. Effective binding of this component requires a certain “motif” or “pattern” called the protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM), which follows downstream of the target gene region.