Archive for the 'Biotechnology' Category
Soybean Oil Linked to Metabolic and Neurological Changes in Mice
January 26th, 2020Via: UC Riverside: New UC Riverside research shows soybean oil not only leads to obesity and diabetes, but could also affect neurological conditions like autism, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, and depression. Used for fast food frying, added to packaged foods, and fed to livestock, soybean oil is by far the most widely produced and consumed edible […]
Newly Discovered Immune Cell Points to Universal Cancer Treatment
January 26th, 2020Via: New Atlas: Breakthrough research from an international team of scientists has uncovered a new type of immune cell with the ability to target and kill most kinds of cancer cells. The discovery was previously thought to be impossible and, although it is still untested in human subjects, it offers the potential for revolutionizing immunotherapy […]
July 2019: Chinese Researcher Escorted from Canadian Infectious Disease Lab Amid RCMP Investigation
January 25th, 2020Via: CBC: A researcher with ties to China was recently escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation into what’s being described as a possible “policy breach.” Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada’s only level-4 […]
2015: “Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate”
January 24th, 2020Via: TheScientist: The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research. Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found […]
October 2019: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Others, Simulate, “An Outbreak of a Novel Zoonotic Coronavirus… That Eventually Becomes Efficiently Transmissible from Person to Person, Leading to a Severe Pandemic”
January 22nd, 2020Flashback 2017: Wuhan: Inside the Chinese Lab Poised to Study World’s Most Dangerous Pathogens Via: Nature: A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese […]
Amazon Wants Shoppers to Pay With a Wave of the Hand
January 18th, 2020Via: Bloomberg: Amazon.com Inc. is planning to create terminals which would allow customers to make payments in-store with a wave of the hand, Dow Jones reports citing people familiar with the matter. The company plans to pitch the terminals to coffee shops, fast-food restaurants and other merchants and has recently began working with Visa Inc., […]
Computer-Designed Organisms
January 14th, 2020Via: GitHub: Thus, we here present a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs […]
Invisible Ink Embeds Immunization Records Into a Child’s Skin, “The Team Eventually Wants to Inject Sensors”
December 22nd, 2019Via: Scientific American: Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record […]
Chinese Scientists Create Monkey-Pig Chimeras
December 7th, 2019Via: New Scientist: Pig-primate chimeras have been born live for the first time but died within a week. The two piglets, created by a team in China, looked normal although a small proportion of their cells were derived from cynomolgus monkeys. “This is the first report of full-term pig-monkey chimeras,” says Tang Hai at the […]
China Gene-Edited Baby Experiment ‘May Have Created Unintended Mutations’
December 5th, 2019Via: Guardian: The gene editing performed on Chinese twins to immunise them against HIV may have failed and created unintended mutations, scientists have said after the original research was made public for the first time. Excerpts from the manuscript were released by the MIT Technology Review to show how Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui ignored ethical […]
