Anew form of
the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 appears to significantly expand the range
of diseases that could be treated with the technology, by enabling scientists
to precisely change any of DNA’s four “letters” into any other and insert or
delete any stretch of DNA — all more efficiently and precisely than previous
versions of CRISPR. Crucially, scientists reported on Monday, it accomplishes
all that without making genome-scrambling cuts in the double helix, as classic
CRISPR and many of its offshoots do.
News
about this “prime editing” began circulating among CRISPR-ites this month, when
the inventors unveiled it at a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Since
then, “the excitement has been palpable,” said genetic engineer Fyodor Urnov of
the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research.
“I
can’t overstate the significance of this,” he said, likening the creation of
ever-more kinds of genome-editing technologies to the creation of superheroes
with different powers: “This could be quite a useful Avenger for the
genome-editing community, especially in translating basic research to the
clinic” to cure diseases ranging from sickle cell to cystic fibrosis.
Prime
editing’s inventors, led by David Liu of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Andrew Anzalone, say it has the potential to
correct 89% of known disease-causing genetic variations in DNA, from the
single-letter misspelling that causes sickle cell to the superfluous four
letters that cause Tay-Sachs disease. All told, they report making 175 edits in
human and mouse cells.
World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 · A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling. “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,” he said.
Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is flops , or floating point operations per second . In this visualization, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses November 2021 data from TOP500 to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used teraflops as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku was completed in March 202
Beijing Orders Alibaba To Dump Media Assets That Rival China's Propaganda Machine BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, MAR 15, 2021 - 07:30 PM Beijing is reviving its crackdown on the country's biggest tech firms, reminding the world that the CCP is still focused on neutralizing any and all threats to its control of the Chinese economy and its people. Even after amending China's official ideology to include entrepreneurs among the protected classes represented by the CCP (in addition to workers, farmers and soldiers), Beijing, with President Xi at its center, has apparently decided that Chinese tech firms won't follow the American model after all. Instead, their growth and competitive capabilities will be curtailed for the sake of stability at home. After Tencent was censured and strict new requirements were officailly imposed on Alibaba-owned Ant Group that will prevent the company from growing , the Wall Street Journal reports that next up on Beijing's to-do lis
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