Successful manipulation of optogenomic interfaces can change our entire medical approach to many common neurological abnormalities, as well as better our interactions with machines.
Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Professor George Church, a well-known geneticist and rejuvenation expert whom we have previously interviewed. Prof. Church’s company, Rejuvenate Bio, will be launching a clinical trial to test a rejuvenation therapy in dogs this fall.
In your recent paper on enabling large-scale genome editing, you talked about manipulating endogenous transposable elements with the help of dead Cas9 base editors. At Ending Age-Related Diseases, Andrei Gudkov spoke about the super mutagenic phenotype that arises from the expression of LINE1 reverse transcriptase. In this context, he mentioned the possibility of the retrobiome (as he referred to it) being the main driver of all types of cellular damage, which is consequently improperly addressed due to immunosenescence. Do you share his views on the contribution of LINEs and SINEs in aging? If not, why?
Yes. That is one of the reasons why we explored the tech for editing of repeats. We are now extending this to the germline engineering of repeats.
The fine art of adding impurities to silicon wafers lies at the heart of semiconductor engineering and, with it, much of the computer industry. But this fine art isn’t yet so finely tuned that engineers can manipulate impurities down to the level of individual atoms.
As technology scales down to the nanometer size and smaller, though, the placement of individual impurities will become increasingly significant. Which makes interesting the announcement last month that scientists can now rearrange individual impurities (in this case, single phosphorous atoms) in a sheet of graphene by using electron beams to knock them around like croquet balls on a field of grass.
The finding suggests a new vanguard of single-atom electronic engineering. Says research team member Ju Li, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, gone are the days when individual atoms can only be moved around mechanically—often clumsily on the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.
Lex Fridman, a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT AgeLab, had a conversation with Kai-Fu Lee on Chinese soul, Difference between cultures of AI engineering, Role of data in near-term impact of AI, Impact of AI on jobs, Facing mortality and other issues.
Lex Fridman, had a conversation with Kai-Fu Lee on Chinese soul, Difference between cultures of AI engineering, Role of data in near-term impact of AI, Impact of AI on jobs, Facing mortality.
A new wireless transceiver invented by electrical engineers at the University of California, Irvine boosts radio frequencies into 100-gigahertz territory, quadruple the speed of the upcoming 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless communications standard.
Labeled an “end-to-end transmitter-receiver” by its creators in UCI’s Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuits Labs, the 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip is capable of processing digital signals significantly faster and more energy-efficiently because of its unique digital-analog architecture. The team’s innovation is outlined in a paper published recently in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
“We call our chip ‘beyond 5G’ because the combined speed and data rate that we can achieve is two orders of magnitude higher than the capability of the new wireless standard,” said senior author Payam Heydari, NCIC Labs director and UCI professor of electrical engineering & computer science. “In addition, operating in a higher frequency means that you and I and everyone else can be given a bigger chunk of the bandwidth offered by carriers.”
Metamaterials are artificial materials engineered to have properties not found in naturally occurring materials, and they are best known as materials for invisibility cloaks often featured in sci-fi novels or games. By precisely designing artificial atoms smaller than the wavelength of light, and by controlling the polarization and spin of light, researchers achieve new optical properties that are not found in nature. However, the current process requires much trial and error to find the right material. Such efforts are time-consuming and inefficient; artificial intelligence (AI) could provide a solution for this problem.
The research group of Prof. Junsuk Rho, Sunae So and Jungho Mun of Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH have developed a design with a higher degree of freedom that allows researchers to choose materials and design photonic structures arbitrarily by using deep learning. Their findings are published in several journals including Applied Materials and Interfaces, Nanophotonics, Microsystems & Nanoengineering, Optics Express, and Scientific Reports.
AI can be trained with a vast amount of data, and it can learn designs of various metamaterials and the correlation between photonic structures and their optical properties. Using this training process, it can provide a design method that makes a photonic structure with desired optical properties. Once trained, it can provide a desired design promptly and efficiently. This has already been researched at various institutions in the U.S. such as MIT, Stanford University and Georgia Institute of Technology. However, the previous studies require inputs of materials and structural parameters beforehand, and adjusting photonic structures afterwards.
Scientists think they’ve found a way to terraform Mars — and all it takes is a thin blanket of insulation over future space gardens.
A layer of aerogel just two to three centimeters thick may be enough to protect plants from the harshest aspects of life on Mars and create viable greenhouses in the process, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. While there are a host of other problems to solve before anyone can settle Mars, this terraforming plan is far more feasible than other ideas that scientists have proposed.
Two of the biggest challenges facing Martian settlers are the Red Planet’s deadly temperatures and unfiltered solar radiation, which is able to pass through Mars’ weak atmosphere and reach the surface, New Scientist reports. At night, it can reach −100 degrees Celsius, which is far too cold for any Earthly crops to survive.
We’ve come a long, long way since the U.S. first launched fruit flies into space in 1947. Since then, we’ve sent astronauts to the moon, installed an International Space Station in orbit and landed spacecraft on Mars. In the past couple of decades, private corporations such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have joined the fray and will likely play instrumental roles in aerospace engineering and space exploration. Here’s a look at some major advancements we’ve made in spacecraft technology and space exploration milestones over the past seven decades.
A ground-breaking study conducted by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has revealed a method of using quantum mechanical wave theories to “lock” heat into a fixed position.
Ordinarily, a source of heat diffuses through a conductive material until it dissipates, but Associate Professor Cheng-Wei Qiu from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the NUS Faculty of Engineering and his team used the principle of anti-parity-time (APT) symmetry to show that it is possible to confine the heat to a small region of a metal ring without it spreading over time.
In the future, this newly demonstrated phenomenon could be used to control heat diffusion in sophisticated ways and optimize efficacy in systems that need cooling. The results of the study were published on 12 April 2019 in the journal Science.
For a robot to be able to “learn” sign language, it is necessary to combine different areas of engineering such as artificial intelligence, neural networks and artificial vision, as well as underactuated robotic hands. “One of the main new developments of this research is that we united two major areas of Robotics: complex systems (such as robotic hands) and social interaction and communication,” explains Juan Víctores, one of the researchers from the Robotics Lab in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation of the UC3M.
The first thing the scientists did as part of their research was to indicate, through a simulation, the specific position of each phalanx in order to depict particular signs from Spanish Sign Language. They then attempted to reproduce this position with the robotic hand, trying to make the movements similar to those a human hand could make. “The objective is for them to be similar and, above all, natural. Various types of neural networks were tested to model this adaptation, and this allowed us to choose the one that could perform the gestures in a way that is comprehensible to people who communicate with sign language,” the researchers explain.
Finally, the scientists verified that the system worked by interacting with potential end-users. “The deaf people who have been in contact with the robot have reported 80 percent satisfaction, so the response has been very positive,” says another of the researchers from the Robotics Lab, Jennifer J. Gago. The experiments were carried out with TEO (Task Environment Operator), a humanoid robot for home use developed in the Robotics Lab of the UC3M.
