(opinion piece, not news, but relevant!)
Nov. 15, 2017
Excellent column by Thomas Friedman:
"While China is run by engineers, Trump doesn’t even have a science adviser. "
"To deal with the change in the climate, [China is] massively investing in clean power and electric vehicles — because its own people won’t be able to breathe otherwise..."
"Trump is pushing a tax bill that is based on no analysis of emerging technologies and how we might reform our tax laws to incentivize more investment in them. Actually, the bill would eliminate the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars; shrink the tax credits vital for enabling wind projects; and impose a tax on the endowments of our wealthiest colleges — i.e., our science and engineering treasures — endowments that colleges use to fund research and extend scholarships for the neediest students."
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Public Shaming and Even Prison for Plastic Bag Use in Rwanda
Oct. 28,2017
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Gene Therapy Helps Boys With 'Lorenzo's Oil' Disease
0ct. 6, 2017
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In India, Another Government Critic Is Silenced by Bullets
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How A.I. Is Creating Building Blocks to Reshape Music and Art
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Gene Editing Spurs Hope for Transplanting Pig Organs Into Humans
Xenotransplantation. MHC molecules also have to be deleted, but I think it will work."In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene-edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans."
"“About 22 people a day die waiting for a transplant,” he said...There were 33,600 organ transplants last year, and 116,800 patients on waiting lists,"
"Pig heart valves already are routinely transplanted into patients.......Some patients with diabetes have received pig pancreas cells, hidden in a sort of sheath so the immune system will not reject them. And burn patients sometimes get grafts made of pig skin. The pig skin is eventually rejected by the body, but it was never meant to be permanent anyway."
"Major religious groups have already weighed in, generally concluding that pig organs are acceptable for lifesaving transplants, noted Dr. Jay Fishman, co-director of the transplant program at Massachusetts General Hospital. "
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In US First, Scientists Edit Genes of Human Embryos
NY Times,____________________________________________________________
A raven's memories are for the future
"The human brain stores memories of past events to guide decision-making about current and future events. Researchers long assumed that animals do not use memories in this way but rather exist in a constant stream of present needs, unable to plan for the future (1). Studies on nonhuman primates and corvids challenge this view and show that some species can plan for the future at least as well as 4-year old children (2, 3). These results suggest that planning for the future is not uniquely human and evolved independently in distantly related species to address common problems (4). On page 202 of this issue, Kabadayi and Osvath (5) show that ravens anticipate the nature, time, and location of a future event based on previous experiences. The ravens' behavior is not merely prospective, anticipating future states (6); rather, they flexibly apply future planning in behaviors not typically seen in the wild."
Science Journal, July 2017
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A Cheap Fix for Climate Change? Pay People Not to Chop Down Trees
"Now, a team of researchers has shown that there is a surprisingly cheap and easy way to slow the pace of deforestation in Uganda: Just pay landowners small sums not to cut down their trees. Their study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, demonstrated this by conducting something all too rare in environmental policy — a controlled experiment."
NY Times, July 21, 2017
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_Scientists retrieve 80-million-year-old dinosaur protein in ‘milestone’ paper
From Jan, 2017.
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TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN August 21, 2017.
NASA Interactive Eclipse Map
Great American Eclipse lots of science and other info.
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7/13/2017 "FDA Panel Backs Novartis' Pioneering New Cancer Gene Therapy"
The newly approved technique relies on a combination of advances. Although there were many incremental advances, I think these are important.
First, from basic research, the discovery of CD19, a cell surface protein on B cells, which strongly activates them. Second, from basic research, the discovery that memory T cells, go quiescent. Third, the discovery that experimentally transferring CD19 into T cells (CTL, one type of killer immune cell) activates them. Fourth, (and the press really focussed on this) cancer patient T cells are removed, shipped to Novartis labs, engineered to express CD19 and turn on the killer type of cells, then re-introduced into patients. The cells are called "chimeric" (=hybrid) CAR-T Chimeric antigen receptor cells because introduced proteins are mixtures of CD19 and other parts, but also maybe because the cells are chimeric.
This is a great advance and hopefully more like this are in the pipeline.
http://escapinganergy.blogspot.com/2011/08/t-cells-receive-molecular-ammo-to-kill.html
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/07/12/business/12reuters-novartis-cancer.html?_r=0
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