09 Jul A third CRISPR baby may have already been born in China

Another genetically edited baby is due, but the world may never learn of its birth if the Chinese government decides to keep it a secret.

The Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, held in Hong Kong last November, was meant to debate the pros and cons of genetically engineering humans. Instead, the proceedings were turned upside down by the revelation that He Jiankui, a Chinese biophysicist, had already done it. He’d gone ahead and edited the DNA of twin girls with the powerful gene modification tool called CRISPR.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.technologyreview.com

09 Jul When Choosing a Mate, Female Parrots Prefer Brains Over Beauty or Brawn

When it comes to affairs of the heart, there are a variety of factors at play: mutual attraction, shared interests, an intangible spark that eventually leads to love. But in Darwinian terms, the recipe for reproduction is far more clinical, with animals seeking mates based on the potential evolutionary advantage—often superior cognition skills—offered by a match.

Now, a new study published in the journal Science suggests that female budgerigars, a species of small Australian parrots better known as budgies, employ this selective brand of logic when playing the mating game. As Nick Carne writes for Cosmos, a team of Chinese and Dutch researchers found that female budgies preferred brains over beauty and brawn. The birds would even change their selection if the previously overlooked mate learned a new trick.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.smithsonianmag.com

02 Jul A wearable vibration sensor for accurate voice recognition

A voice-recognition feature can be easily found on mobile phones these days. Oftentimes, we experience an incident where a speech recognition application is activated in the middle of a meeting or a conversation in the office. Sometimes, it is not activated at all regardless of numbers of times we call out the application. It is because a mobile phone uses a microphone which detects sound pressure to recognize voice, and it is easily affected by surrounding noise and other obstacles.

Professor Kilwon Cho of Chemical Engineering and Professor Yoonyoung Chung of Electronic and Electric Engineering from POSTECH successfully developed a flexible and wearable vibration responsive sensor. When this sensor is attached to a neck, it can precisely recognize voice through vibration of the neck skin and is not affected by ambient noise or the volume of sound.

Conventional vibration sensors recognize a voice through air vibration and the sensitivity decreases due to mechanical resonance and the damping effect, therefore they are not capable of measuring voices quantitatively. So, ambient sound or obstacles such as a mouth mask can affect its accuracy of voice recognition and it cannot be used for security authentication.

In this study, the research group demonstrated that the voice pressure is proportional to the acceleration of neck skin vibration at various sound pressure levels from 40 to 70 dBSPL, and they developed a vibration sensor utilizing the acceleration of skin vibration. The device, which is consists of an ultrathin polymer film and a diaphragm with tiny holes, can sense voices quantitively by measuring the acceleration of skin vibration.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org

25 Jun NASA Wants to Build a ‘Starshade’ to Hunt for Alien Planets

Starshade exoplanet-hunting missions may be technologically daunting, but not beyond NASA’s reach. Such a mission would employ a space telescope and a separate craft flying about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) ahead of it. This latter probe would be equipped with a large, flat, petaled shade designed to block starlight, potentially allowing the telescope to directly image orbiting alien worlds as small as Earth that would otherwise be lost in the glare. Instruments called coronagraphs, which have been installed on multiple ground-based and space telescopes, work on the same light-blocking principle. But coronagraphs are incorporated into the telescope itself.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.livescience.com

25 Jun D-Wave Introduces World’s Largest Quantum Computer

The world’s largest maker of quantum computers, Canada’s D-Wave Systems Inc., recently announced the Pegasus generation of its quantum computers, featuring 2.5 times the qubits (more than 5,000) than its predecessor, as well as the elimination of a major stumbling block to commercialization by directly connecting each of those qubits to three times as many nearby qubits as its previous generation, the Chimera. Analysts are predicting that Pegasus will advance quantum applications down the technology lifetime exponential growth curve.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: cacm.acm.org

25 Jun The high-tech farming revolution

Follow the Food – a new series by BBC Future and BBC World News – looks into where our food comes from and how will this change in the near future, thanks to new technologies and innovative ways of farming.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.bbc.com

18 Jun A Russian scientist has threatened to make more CRISPR babies

A Russian biologist has told a journalist at Nature that he wants to create more gene-edited babies and will do it if he can win approval.

Who’s involved: Denis Rebrikov of the Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University in Moscow says he wants to repeat last year’s widely condemned experiment in China to create humans resistant to HIV. He believes he can do a better job.

Is this serious? Rebrikov isn’t known for his work with gene editing. A search of his publications mostly turns up reports on biomarkers of gum disease. However, last October he did author a report in which the gene-editing tool CRISPR was applied to human IVF embryos, one of just a dozen or so such experiments ever described. What’s more, his coauthors included the director of a large Russian maternity clinic, the Kulakov National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Perinatology in Moscow. Rebikov believes Russian rules on creating gene-modified babies are unclear and says that he plans to seek approval to carry out the procedure.

Expert response: Experts say it wouldn’t be responsible to make more CRISPR babies at this time. One reason is that it is hard to know what unexpected effects altering a baby’s genes will have. The gene the Russians want to delete from embryos, CCR5, doesn’t just protect against HIV. It appears to have potential effects on cognition and life span, too. Yet some scientists will remain driven to genetically modify children, no matter what. “I think I’m crazy enough to do it,” Rebikov told Nature.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.technologyreview.com