SCIENTISTS CREATE ARTIFICIAL GENOME THAT CAN REPRODUCE

German scientists say that for the first time ever, they’ve created a lab-grown artificial genome that can reproduce itself like a natural one.

It’s not quite one of those replicants from “Blade Runner,” but it’s a step toward the holy grail of synthetic biology: fully artificial organisms that can survive and reproduce like the real thing.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications this week, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry describe how they assembled genomes made up of blueprints for proteins — and demonstrated that it was capable of replicating 116 kilobytes worth of its own RNA and DNA.

Next up, according to a press release, the team plans to build an “enveloped system” that can reproduce like this last one — but also consume nutrition and dispose of waste, like a living cell.

READ MORE: Reproductive genome from the laboratory [Max Planck Society]

THESE ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF CORONAVIRUS

As the deadly coronavirus 2019-nCoV spreads throughout the world, doctors are getting a better understanding of what symptoms and warning signs to keep an eye out for.

Some extreme cases involve patients coughing up blood or going into septic shock.  More typically, however, symptoms remain milder — potentially letting some cases slip under the radar and worsening the outbreak.

Like other coronaviruses, 2019-nCoV can cause pneumonia and other respiratory and cardiovascular conditions: coughing, fever, fatigue, and soreness. Because the outbreak is in the middle of flu season, that can make distinguishing between the two difficult.

As the disease progresses, it can cause more severe symptoms including difficulty breathing, kidney injury, and heart damage.

The virus is most dangerous for the elderly or people who are already sick — the mortality rate is substantially higher within those particular groups than the general population.

Screening for new cases is also difficult because 2019-nCoV patients can spread the disease while they remain asymptomatic for as long as two weeks — compared to most viral infections which cause symptoms within the first few days.

As 2019-nCoV, the coronavirus that emerged in China last month, continues to spread to over a dozen countries, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the elderly and chronically ill are at a greater risk than the general population.

The coronavirus can cause symptoms ranging in severity from fever and fatigue to pneumonia and septic shock. But older people, and people who were already sick before contracting 2019-nCoV, seem to be getting hit harder,

The Play Theory of Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism.

Play counters the tendency to dominate, in humans and in other mammals.

Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies—whether in Africa, Asia, South America or elsewhere—have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies (e.g. Ingold, 1999). The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people per band. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.

Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies—whether in Africa, Asia, South America or elsewhere—have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies (e.g. Ingold, 1999). The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people per band. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.

Wherever else we look in the human world, outside of band hunter-gatherers, we see hierarchical structures, in which some people dominate others. Pre-state agrarian tribes are headed by chiefs; modern governments are headed by leaders, elected or not, that have the power to dominate.  We see hierarchy in the workplace, where bosses tell employees what to do. We see it in gangs and in all sorts of formal or informal gatherings, especially of boys and men, who jockey, sometimes violently, for dominance. We see it in schools, where principals tell teachers what to do and teachers tell students what to do. We see it in families where parents dominate children. We also see dominance hierarchies almost everywhere we look in other primates, with alpha individuals (generally males) on top and frequent fighting for status.

It would seem from all this that we humans, or more generally all of us primates, are predisposed genetically to live in dominance hierarchies in which individuals, especially males, more or less continuously strive to move up in the hierarchy. But if that is so, then how do hunter-gatherers manage to live in their egalitarian way? Genes can’t account for that difference. Indeed, people just a generation or so away from being hunter-gatherers, who now live in agricultural societies, often quickly lose their egalitarian tendencies and fall into dominance patterns.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201908/the-play-theory-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER IMMUNE CELL THAT KILLS MOST CANCERS

A newly discovered immune cell could lead to the creation of a universal oncology treatment — a system that would work for all cancers, in all people.

The treatment leverages T-cells, a type of white blood cell that helps our bodies’ immune systems by scanning for and killing abnormal cells. For background, scientists have recently started harnessing that ability in the fight against cancer through CAR-T, which involves removing T-cells from a patient’s blood and genetically engineering them to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

While promising, CAR-T has limitations. It’s patient-specific, works against only a small number of cancers, and isn’t effective against solid tumors, which comprise the majority of cancers.

On Monday, researchers from Cardiff University published a new study in the journal Nature Immunology detailing their discovery of a T-Cell equipped with a new type of T-cell receptor (TCR) that recognizes a molecule called MR1.

This molecule appears on the surface of many types of cancer cells as well as healthy cells, but T-cells equipped with this TCR know to kill only cancer cells.

And not just the kind linked to a single type of cancer, either. When the Cardiff researchers equipped T-cells in lab tests with this new TCR, the cells killed lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells — all while ignoring healthy cells.

In another lab test, the team modified the T-cells of melanoma patients to express the newly discovered TCR and found that the cells could then target and destroy both that patient’s own cancer cells and the cancer cells of other patients.

The team has yet to test the modified T-cells in actual cancer patients, but when tested in mice injected with human cancers, the cells recognized the MR1 molecule and exhibited “encouraging” cancer-killing abilities, according to a Cardiff press release.

The Cardiff scientists now plan to conduct additional tests. If those goes as hoped, the treatment could be ready for patients within a few years, researcher Andrew Sewell said in the press release.

“Cancer-targeting via MR1-restricted T-cells is an exciting new frontier,” he added. “It raises the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ cancer treatment; a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population. Previously nobody believed this could be possible.”

Police have caught yet another driver abusing Tesla’s Autopilot system — but this time, he was cleaning his tooth

On Wednesday 9th January, Sergeant Kerry Schmidt of Ontario Provincial Police tweeted that an officer had charged a 58-year-old man with careless driving. The explanation? He was flossing his teeth using both hands while his Autopilot-enabled Model S was driving 135 kilometers per hour (84 mile per hour).

In its current form, Tesla’s Autopilot system can only assist drivers, not free them from the task of driving altogether — a distinction the company makes clear on its website.

“Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate, and brake automatically within its lane,” Tesla writes. “Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

However, that hasn’t stopped countless Tesla owners from letting Autopilot take over while they sleep, drive drunk, and even having sex.

After a video of yet another sleeping Tesla owner made the rounds online in September, Tesla released a statement clarifying that its driver-monitoring system issues warnings designed to prevent drivers from relying on Autopilot.

Clearly, those warnings didn’t stop the flossing Tesla owner, demonstrating once again that the company should probably be doing more to keep its drivers’ attention on the road.

READ MORE: Tesla driver charged with careless driving for flossing his teeth on Autopilot at 84 mph [Electrek]

Time Travel and Time Machine is a reality

Astrophysicist Ron Mallett believes he’s found a way to travel back in time — theoretically.

The tenured University of Connecticut physics professor recently told CNN that he’s written a scientific equation that could serve as the foundation for an actual time machine. He’s even built a prototype device to illustrate a key component of his theory — though Mallett’s peers remain unconvinced that his time machine will ever come to fruition.

To understand Mallett’s machine, you need to know the basics of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which states that time accelerates or decelerates depending on the speed at which an object is moving.

Based on that theory, if a person was in a spaceship traveling near the speed of light, time would pass more slowly for them than it would for someone who remained on Earth. Essentially, the astronaut could zip around space for less than a week, and when they returned to Earth, 10 years would have passed for the people they’d left behind, making it seem to the astronaut like they’d time traveled to the future.

But while most physicists accept that skipping forward in time in that way is probably possible, time traveling to the past is a whole other issue — and one Mallett thinks he could solve using lasers.

Scientists have finally decoded the bizarre behaviors of brain cells — and recreated them in tiny computer chips.

The tiny neurons could change the way we build medical devices because they replicate healthy biological activity but require only a billionth of the energy needed by microprocessors, according to a University of Bath press release.

Neurons behave similar to electrical circuits within the body, but their behavior is less predictable — especially when it comes to parsing the relationship between their input and output electrical impulses. But these new artificial brain cells successfully mimic the behavior of rat neurons from two specific regions of the brain, according to research published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

“Until now neurons have been like black boxes, but we have managed to open the black box and peer inside,” University of Bath physicist Alain Nogaret said in the release. “Our work is paradigm changing because it provides a robust method to reproduce the electrical properties of real neurons in minute detail.”

The ultimate goal is to use these neurons to build medical devices that can better cater to patients’ needs, like a smarter pacemaker that can respond to new stressors and demands on a person’s heart — essentially upgrading devices to be more in tune with the body.

Julian Paton, a physiologist at the universities of Auckland and Bristol, said in the release that recreating biological activity was exciting because it “opens up enormous opportunities for smarter medical devices that drive towards personalized medicine approaches to a range of diseases and disabilities.”

India’s Nuclear Power plants hacked !

After denying reports of a system malware infection Tuesday, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) admitted yesterday that it had indeed been hacked.

“Identification of malware in NPCIL system is correct,” read a Wednesday statement. “The matter was conveyed by CERT-In [India’s national computer emergency response team] when it was noticed by them on September 4, 2019.”

Big Hack

The hack represents yet another example of broad infosec vulnerabilities in critical power systems. Hacker groups have previously infiltrated power grids in Europe and North America in the past. In 2017, hackers targeted nuclear facilities in the U.S. as well.

“The investigation revealed that the infected PC belonged to a user who was connected in the internet connected network for administrative purposes,” the statement read. It also claimed the hack was “isolated from the critical internal network,” and that plant systems were not affected.

North Korean Malware

The malware identified as a version of “Dtrack,” which is backdoor trojan software reportadly developed by the Lazarus Group, North Korea’s state-owned hacking unit. It was first discovered by the Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team in September and can be used to upload and download files to target systems.

And there may other targets as well. Threat analyst Pukhraj Singh, who reported the breach to India’s National Cyber Security Coordinator, called the malware attack a “casus belli” — an act of war — in an interview with Ars Technica thanks to a still unknown “second target, which I can’t disclose as of now.”

READ MORE: Indian nuclear power plant’s network was hacked, officials confirm [Ars Technica]

5G makes your internet fast but may double the chance of getting cancer!!

As 5G cellular network tech looms, conventional wisdom dictates that cell phone radiation is more or less safe or less safe for humans.

But writing for the widely respected magazine Scientific American, University of California, Berkeley, public health researcher Joel Moskowitz argues that we don’t yet understand the risks — and that more study is necessary before we roll out 5G infrastructure.

Moskowitz’s main concern: there just isn’t any research on the health effects of 5G. But he also points to a swathe of studies a swathe of studies that suggest that the existing standards 2G and 3G are more dangerous than generally believed.

“Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation,” he wrote in SciAm. “These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.”

It’s hard enough to quantify the health effects of things that have already been deployed, nevermind an upcoming technology. But in SciAm, Moskowitz argues that regulators should listen to the 250 doctors and scientists who recently signed the 5G appeal, a petition for a moratorium on public rollout of the tech until the health implications are better understood.

“As a society, should we invest hundreds of billions of dollars deploying 5G, a cellular technology that requires the installation of 800,000 or more new cell antenna sites in the U.S. close to where we live, work and play?” he asked. “Instead, we should support the recommendations of the 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G and demand that our government fund the research needed to adopt biologically based exposure limits that protect our health and safety.”

Definition of God

This is perhaps the best definition of God that I have come across. It’s so true......Read on........👇🏻

*”Did you know that when Einstein attended some conferences in the numerous universities of the USA, the recurring question that the students asked him was:*

*Do you believe in God?*

*And he always answered: I believe in the God of Spinoza.*

*For the ones who haven't read Spinoza, I hope this will give them an idea.*

*Baruch De Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher, of Portuguese Jewish origin, considered one of the great rationalists of his time along with the French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in the 17th century of a businessman father who was successful but not wealthy.*

*This is the nature of the God of Spinoza:*

*God would have said:*

*"Stop praying and giving yourselves blows on your chests, what I want you to do is to go out into the world to enjoy your life.*

*I want you to enjoy, to sing, to have fun and enjoy everything I've done for you.*

*Stop going to those gloomy, dark and cold temples that you built yourself and that you call my house.*

*My home is in the mountains, in the forests, the rivers, the lakes, the beaches. That's where I live and express all my love for you.*

*Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you that you were a sinner.*

*Stop being so scared. I do not judge you, nor criticize you, nor am I ever angry with you, nothing bothers me, nor do I devise punishment. I am pure love.*

*Stop asking me forgiveness, there's nothing to forgive. If I made you... I filled you with passions, pleasures, feelings, needs, limitations, inconsistencies... of free will, how can I blame you if you do or say something out of that what I put in you? How can I punish you for being as you are, if I'm the one who made you? Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who misbehave, for the rest of eternity?*

*What kind of God can do that?*

*Forget about any kind of commandments, of any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you and only to create guilt in you.*

*Respect your peers and don't do to others what you don't want for you. The only thing I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert status is your guide. This life is the only thing there is, here and now, and the only thing you need.*

*I have made you absolutely free, there are no prizes or punishments, there are no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one carries a record.*

*You are absolutely free to create in your life a heaven or hell.*

*I couldn't tell you if there's anything after this life, but I can give you a tip. Live as if there wasn't.*

*As if this was your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.*

*So, if there is nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, be sure that I will not ask you if you behaved well or not. I will ask you - Did you like it?... Did you have fun?... What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?...*

*Stop believing in me; believe is to assume, guess, imagine. I don't want you to believe in me; I want you to feel me when you kiss your beloved, when you play with your little girl, when you love your dog, when you bathe in the sea.*

*Stop praising me. What kind of egotistical God do you think I am?*

*I'm bored of your praise, I'm fed up with thanks. Do you feel grateful? Prove it by taking care of yourself, your health, your relationships, the world around you. Do you feel  overwhelmed?... Express your joy! That's the way to praise me.*

*The only thing sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.*

*What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?*

*Don't look for me outside, you won't find me. Find me inside... I'm beating in there for you."*

*Baruch De Spinoza.”*