Lifeboat Foundation

Less than a year after scientists in China became the first to genetically modify human embryos, a research team in Britain has been given the green light to perform similar work. It’s a huge moment in biotech history—one that could eventually lead to “designer babies.”

Last September, scientists at London’s Francis Crick Institute asked the U.K’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA) for permission to perform gene editing work on human embryos. Their request has now been granted, potentially paving the way for other similar work. Human germline editing is deemed controversial because any baby born through the technique has the potential to pass those genetically modified traits down to the next generation. Advocates of the practice say it could eliminate a host of genetic diseases, while at the same time introducing the possibility of human enhancement.

“The work carried out at the Crick will be for research purposes and will look at the first seven days of a fertilized egg’s development (from a single cell to around 250 cells),” noted the lab in a statement. “The knowledge acquired from the research will be important for understanding how a healthy human embryo develops.” Geneticist Kathy Niakan will be overseeing the work.

Read more

Made In Space and NanoRacks have been making news lately with the announcement of partnerships to change the way objects are imagined and built off the planet, and now the companies have joined forces to provide a novel new service for CubeSat developers.

They call it “Stash & Deploy,” and the service will leverage the NanoRacks heritage in CubeSat deployment and the capability of Made In Space to provide 3D printing capabilities and deliver – on-demand – satellite manufacturing, assembly, and deployment in the space environment.

The plan calls for a variety of standard and customer-specific satellite components to be “cached” within a satellite deployment vehicle such as the International Space Station, and the components will be “stashed” for rapid manufacture of CubeSats.

Read more

“The SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition crowned a winner on Sunday, naming the MIT Hyperloop Team as the group with the best look at what the Hyperloop transportation pod system might look like in the future.”

Read more

Apple’s quietly building a small army of virtual reality developers, and has been working on a headset for several months, but it’s been typically vague about its plans with the public. And on Friday, company representatives confirmed it’s made yet another another acquisition.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” Apple told Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times, confirming its buy of Flyby Media, a company that “is dedicated to building new technology that can elevate, rather than replace, our real-world experiences.”

Continue reading “Apple’s Working On Super Secretive Virtual Reality Technology” »

The Francis Crick institute will genetically edit the leftover embryos from from IVF clinics.

Read more

Windows 95 just won’t die. The older it gets, the more versatile it becomes. We’ve seen it running on smartwatches, tablets, and handheld consoles — and now you can run it right inside your web browser in an instant.

Andrea Faulds, a 19-year-old developer from Scotland, has been able to get Windows 95 running in almost any web browser using emscripten, an emulator that converts C++ code to JavaScript in real-time. It requires no downloads, plugins, or any special software.

The emulator takes a minute to load up, but once you’re inside it, it’s surprisingly snappy. It provides you with a full Windows 95 operating system and everything you’d expect to get with it — including classic games like Solitaire and Minesweeper — and it runs incredibly well.

Read more

A Japanese firm said Monday it would open the world’s first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.

Kyoto-based Spread said the indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day.

It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years.

Read more

As solar power becomes a bigger and bigger part of the overall energy landscape, engineers around the world are busy working out how to build plants that are large and efficient enough to keep up with demand. Now Japanese electronics giant Kyocera is starting construction on what it says will be the largest floating solar power plant (in terms of overall capacity) in the world.

It’s the fourth such floating plant Kyocera has worked on so far, but this one promises to be the most impressive yet: the facility is going to be built on the Yamakura Dam reservoir to the south-east of Tokyo in Japan, and will pump out 13.7 megawatts (MW) of power once it’s completed in March 2018. Some 51,000 photovoltaic panels will be stitched together to cover around 180,000 square metres (about 44.5 acres) of space.

That’s roughly the same area as 18 soccer pitches, so you get a sense of the sort of scale we’re talking about here. Kyocera says the new plant will provide enough power for 4,970 average households and offset around 7,411 tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year that it’s in operation (equivalent to 19,000 barrels of oil).

Read more

Discover & Share this Sin GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

Read more