Researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to genius in an ethically controversial study.
They are scouring the genomes of 1,600 U.S. adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s, Nature News reports.
Some geneticists say that the… read more
Tiny, intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities. There are few more appropriate guides to this impending future than Alex Hawkinson, whose DC-based startup, SmartThings, has built what’s arguably the most advanced hub to tie connected objects together, Wired reports.
At his house, more than 200 objects, from the garage door to the coffeemaker to his daughter’s trampoline, are all connected to his SmartThings system.… read more
Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering, is developing a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what’s available today.
One of his more promising efforts involves the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don’t match traditional solar cells in terms of energy production but they are less expensive and… read more
Seven years ago, Duke University engineers demonstrated the first working invisibility cloak in complex laboratory experiments. Now it appears creating a simple cloak has become a lot simpler, by using a 3D printer..
Yaroslav Urzhumov, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, said producing a cloak in this fashion is inexpensive and easy.
He and his team… read more
The U.S. Department of Justice has seized two months’ worth of phone records of calls made by reporters and editors.from the offices of the Associated Press news agency, in what appeared to be an effort to track down the source who disclosed an alleged Yemen terrorist plot story, The Guardian reports.
AP’s president and chief executive officer, Gary Pruitt, described it as “serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to… read more
Georgia Tech engineers and Emory University clinicians have successfully transplanted insulin-producing cells into a diabetic mouse model, reversing diabetic symptoms in the animal in as little as 10 days.
It could help lead to a possible cure for Type 1 diabetes.
The research team engineered a biomaterial to protect the cluster of insulin-producing cells — donor pancreatic islets — during injection. To foster blood… read more
The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce pollution, BBC News reports.
It notes than over 2 billion people worldwide already supplement their diet with insects.
Wasps, beetles and other insects are currently “underutilized” as food for people and livestock, the report says.
The authors point out that insects are nutritious, with… read more
Researchers of the robotics lab at ETH Zurich have developed what ETH calls a “microrobot” (actually, a coated magnetic particle with no onboard intelligence) that can be used to measure the retina’s oxygen supply.
An insufficient supply of oxygen can cause blindness. Glaucoma is only one of several diseases that can decrease the oxygen supply to the retina, sometimes within mere hours.
To make… read more
University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.
The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.
Separating… read more
How do people and other organisms evolve into individuals that are distinguished from others by their own personal brain structure and behavior?
Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together?
To shed light on these questions, the scientists observed 40 genetically identical mice that were kept in an enclosure that offered a rich shared environment with a large variety of activity… read more
Chinese cloud services provider 3Tcloud is deploying the country’s biggest education cloud project to optimize resource allocation and cut maintenance cost, ZDNET reports.
According to a report last week on Chinese tech site CCIDNet.com, the city of Zhuji in Zhejiang — one of China’s most developed provinces — has installed more than 6,000 3Tcloud computing terminal devices in 118 schools.
The project,… read more
Samsung Electronics Co. said Sunday that it has successfully developed fifth-generation network (5G) core technology for the first time, allowing users to access faster data services expected to be available by 2020, Yonhap News Agency reports.
Under the new platform, users will be able to download and upload data at speeds of up to tens of gigabits per second (Gbps), compared to 75 megabits per second (Mbps)… read more
The mining speed of the bitcoin network on bitcoinwatch.com passed 1 exaFLOPS (1,000 petaFLOPS) this week — more than 8 times the combined speed of the Top 500 supercomputers, The Genesis Block reports.
(FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second, and is frequently used as a standard to measure computer speed. Bitcoin mining uses an integer calculation and almost no floating-point operations, so… read more
Scientists have made tremendous advances toward building lifelike prosthetic limbs that move and function like the real thing.
But what’s missing is a sense of touch, so a patient knows how hard he or she is actually squeezing something, or exactly where the object is positioned relative to his or her hand.
“If you lose your somatosensory [body senses] system, it almost looks like your motor system is… read more
If you create and modify your own virtual reality avatars, could what happens to these alter egos influence how you perceive virtual environments?
Penn State researchers found this question relevant to designing more realistic and immersive virtual reality exercises and games. They assigned random avatars to one group of participants, but allowed another group to customize their own avatars.
When placed in a virtual environment with three hills… read more