Two biotechs in San Diego, California, are teaming up to develop a nasal spray using designer antibodies cloned from COVID-19 survivors.
Category: biotech/medical
For college students studying science, doing labwork as part of their classes is a vital way to learn research skills and better understand concepts from lectures.
That presents a challenge for schools that are operating remotely during the coronavirus pandemic — so some biology programs are mailing brains, eyeballs, and even entire fetal pigs to their students so they can dissect them at home.
At Lafayette College, neuroscience students enrolled in a physiology course recently received packages in the mail that contained preserved sheep brains, which are commonly chosen by schools due to their close resemblance to human brains. Then, neuroscientist and psychologist Luis Schettino — who, in the interest of transparency, was one of my professors when I attended Lafayette — guided his students over a video call as they dissected the brains.
Special delivery!
Recently, San Diego Zoo partnered up with the wildlife preservation group Revive and Restore and a pet cloning company ViaGen Equine to create an exact copy of Kuporovic. The embryo was planted in a surrogate mother, a common horse.
Shawn Walker, the chief science officer at ViaGen Equine reports “This new Przewalski’s colt was born fully healthy and reproductively normal. He is head butting and kicking when his space is challenged, and he is demanding milk supply from his surrogate mother.”
This whole deal is not only good news for Przewalski’s horses, because this project demonstrates that we can keep genetic material viable for many years. Thus principles we see in action see here can potentially be applied to other endangered, even extinct species. Yes, you’ve read that right, Revive and Restore hopes to revive a wooly mammoth one day.
When the COVID-19 shutdown began in March throughout the United States, my team at Adobe had to face a stark reality: Business as usual was no longer an option. Suddenly, over just a single weekend, we had to shift our global workforce of over 22,000 people to working remotely. Not surprisingly, our existing processes and workflows weren’t equipped for this abrupt change. Customers, employees, and partners — many also working at home — couldn’t wait days to receive answers to urgent questions.
We realized pretty quickly that the only way to meet their needs was to completely rethink our support infrastructure.
Our first step was to launch an organization-wide open Slack channel that would tie together the IT organization and the entire Adobe employee community. Our 24×7 global IT help desk would front the support on that channel, while the rest of IT was made available for rapid event escalation.
This video explain the details of mitochondrial DNA structure, the difference between nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, mitochondrial DNA replication or D loop replication.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Dr. Rachel Ramoni, Chief Research and Development Officer at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
Ira Pastor Comments:
The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) @U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs is a federal Cabinet-level agency that provides comprehensive healthcare services to military veterans at over 1,000 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics located throughout the US. It also provides several non-healthcare benefits including disability compensation, vocational rehabilitation, education assistance, home loans, and life insurance; and provides burial and memorial benefits to eligible veterans and family members.
The VA serves over 9 million enrolled Veterans each year, employs over 377,000 people and has an annual budget of $200 billion.
Within the VA structure, the Office of Research & Development is focused on improving the lives of Veterans, and all Americans, through health care discovery and innovation including: basic, translational, clinical, health services, and rehabilitative research, and applies scientific knowledge to develop effective individualized care solutions.
Dr. Rachel Ramoni
Teeny-tiny living robots made their world debut earlier this year. These microscopic organisms are composed entirely of frog stem cells, and, thanks to a special computer algorithm, they can take on different shapes and perform simple functions: crawling, traveling in circles, moving small objects — or even joining with other organic bots to collectively perform tasks.
The world’s first living robots may one day clean up our oceans.
Baker won one of the six $3 million Breakthrough Prizes this year, which were awarded to eight different scientists in Mathematics, Fundamental Physics and Life Sciences.
David Baker, whose protein design technology is being used to develop therapies for Covid-19 and cancer, received one of several awards to scientists from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation that add up to a combined total of $21.75 million.
Mid-infrared lasers have been widely used in imaging, detection, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, medicine, industry, defense and others. For mid-infrared laser systems, low phonon energy gain materials are key factors.
Among these mid-infrared materials, Er3+-doped CaF2 transparent ceramics are promising candidate materials because of their ultra-low phonon energy as well as excellent physical, chemical, and optical properties, which quickly attract the attention of researchers. However, traditional preparation methods can’t obtain high-quality Er3+-doped CaF2 transparent ceramics.
Recently, a research team led by Prof. Zhang Long from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a high quality Er3+-doped CaF2 transparent ceramics by single crystal ceramization. Their study was published in Journal of the European Ceramic Society.
Circa 2018 o,.o!
Dental fillings may soon be left in the ash heap of history, thanks to a recent discovery about a drug called Tideglusib.
Developed for and trialled to treat Alzheimer’s disease, last year scientists found the drug also happens to promote the natural tooth regrowth mechanism in mice, allowing the tooth to repair cavities.
Tideglusib works by stimulating stem cells in the pulp of teeth, the source of new dentine. Dentine is the mineralised substance beneath tooth enamel that gets eaten away by tooth decay.