Mydickneedscpr - New Blog New Lifestyle

Published on #FITSO Motivation

http://goo.gl/5GfON

Manhattan 

DIYbio’s growth spurt is, in part, thanks to powerful molecular biology tools becoming cheaper and simpler to use. Second-hand DNA amplifying machines are increasingly available over eBay, with some vintage models costing less than $100. Biohackers have even made an open-source version that, in true DIY fashion, allows amateur biologists to assemble the machines on their own.

Similar to sophisticated home chefs, amateur scientists no longer require specialized lab training. Want to transfer a gene from plant A to plant B? Simply purchase off-the-shelf, ready-made kits from an online supplier of your choice, follow the instructions, and within a few months (if you’re good) you’ve cooked up something entirely new to nature.

According to DIYbio pioneer Rob Carlson, what drives the movement is the belief that “biology is technology”: like computer software, DNA is fundamentally a form of code that can be manipulated to engineer biological traits and devices. At its core, much of the DIYbio movement is about exploring the creative potential of rewriting genes.

‘Why We Should Embrace – Not Fear – the Biohacker Uprising’ (SingularityHub)

Curious about biohacking and biological engineering? Visit http://genspace.org/

Key revelations from the Paradise Papers

1) Millions of pounds from the Queen’s private estate has been invested in a Cayman Islands fund – and some of her money went to a retailer accused of exploiting poor families.

2) Prince Charles’s estate made a big profit on a stake in his friend’s offshore firm.

3) Extensive offshore dealings by Donald Trump’s cabinet members, advisers and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law to the shipping group of the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross.

4) Twitter and Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments that can be traced back to Russian state financial institutions.

5) The tax-avoiding Cayman Islands trust managed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s chief moneyman.

6) The Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton avoided taxes on a £17m jet using an Isle of Man scheme.

7) A previously unknown $450m offshore trust that has sheltered the wealth of Lord Ashcroft.

8) Oxford and Cambridge and top US universities invested offshore, with some of the money going into fossil fuel industries.

9) The man managing Angola’s sovereign wealth fund invested it in projects he stood to profit from.

10) Apple secretly moved parts of its empire to Jersey after a row over its tax affairs.

11) How the sportswear giant Nike stays one step ahead of the taxman.

12) The billions in tax refunds by the Isle of Man and Malta to the owners of private jets and luxury yachts.

13) Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon’s attacks on Hillary Clinton.

14) The secret loan and alliance used by the London-listed multinational Glencore in its efforts to secure lucrative mining rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

15) The complex offshore webs used by two Russian billionaires to buy stakes in Arsenal and Everton football clubs.

16) Stars of the BBC hit sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys used a web of offshore companies to avoid tax.

17) British celebrities including Gary Lineker used an arrangement that let them avoid tax when selling homes in Barbados.

18) Prominent Brexit campaigners have put money offshore.

19) An ex-minister who defended tax avoidance has a Bahamas trust fund.

20) The Dukes of Westminster pumped millions into secretive offshore firms.

21) A tax haven lobby group boasted of ‘superb penetration’ at the top of the UK government before a G8 summit that was expected to bring in greater offshore transparency.

22) The law firm at the centre of the Paradise Papers leak was criticised for 'persistent failures’ on terrorist financing and money laundering rules.

23) Seven Republican super-donors keep money in tax havens.

24) A top Democratic donor built up a vast $8bn private wealth fund in Bermuda.

25) The schemes used to avoid tax on UK property deals.

26) The celebrities, from Harvey Weinstein to Shakira, with offshore interests.

27) How a private equity firm tried to extract £890m from a struggling care home operator by making it take out a costly loan.

28) Trump’s close ally Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner, is the longtime owner of an offshore firm.

29) One of the world’s biggest touts used an offshore firm to avoid tax on profits from reselling Adele and Ed Sheeran tickets.

(Image caption: A bundle of neurons: A bioengineering team at Brown University can grow “mini-brains” of neurons and supporting cells that form networks and are electrically active. Credit: Hoffman-Kim lab/Brown University)

An accessible approach to making a mini-brain

If you need a working miniature brain — say for drug testing, to test neural tissue transplants, or to experiment with how stem cells work — a new paper describes how to build one with what the Brown University authors say is relative ease and low expense. The little balls of brain aren’t performing any cogitation, but they produce electrical signals and form their own neural connections — synapses — making them readily producible testbeds for neuroscience research, the authors said.

“We think of this as a way to have a better in vitro [lab] model that can maybe reduce animal use,” said graduate student Molly Boutin, co-lead author of the new paper in the journal Tissue Engineering: Part C. “A lot of the work that’s done right now is in two-dimensional culture, but this is an alternative that is much more relevant to the in vivo [living] scenario.”

Just a small sample of living tissue from a single rodent can make thousands of mini-brains, the researchers said. The recipe involves isolating and concentrating the desired cells with some centrifuge steps and using that refined sample to seed the cell culture in medium in an agarose spherical mold.

The mini-brains, about a third of a millimeter in diameter, are not the first or the most sophisticated working cell cultures of a central nervous system, the researchers acknowledged, but they require fewer steps to make and they use more readily available materials.

“The materials are easy to get and the mini-brains are simple to make,” said co-lead author Yu-Ting Dingle, who earned her Ph.D. at Brown in May 2015. She compared them to retail 3-D printers which have proliferated in recent years, bringing that once-rare technology to more of a mass market. “We could allow all kinds of labs to do this research.”

The spheres of brain tissue begin to form within a day after the cultures are seeded and have formed complex 3-D neural networks within two to three weeks, the paper shows.

25-cent mini-brains

There are fixed costs, of course, but an approximate cost for each new mini-brain is on the order of $0.25, said study senior author Diane Hoffman-Kim, associate professor of molecular pharmacology, physiology and biotechnology and associate professor of engineering at Brown.

“We knew it was a relatively high-throughput system, but even we were surprised at the low cost per mini-brain when we computed it,” Hoffman-Kim said.

Hoffman-Kim’s lab collaborated with fellow biologists and bioengineers at Brown — faculty colleagues Julie Kauer, Jeffrey Morgan, and Eric Darling are all co-authors — to build the mini-brains. She wanted to develop a testbed for her lab’s basic biomedical research. She was interested, for example, in developing a model to test aspects of neural cell transplantation, as has been proposed to treat Parkinson’s disease. Boutin was interested in building working 3-D cell cultures to study how adult neural stem cells develop.

Morgan’s Providence startup company, MicroTissues Inc., makes the 3-D tissue engineering molds used in the study.

The method they developed yields mini-brains with several important properties:

Diverse cell types: The cultures contain both inhibitory and excitatory neurons and several varieties of essential neural support cells called glia.

Electrically active: the neurons fire and spike and form synaptic connections, producing complex networks.

3-D: Cells connect and communicate within a realistic geometry, rather than merely across a flat plane as in a 2-D culture.

Natural density: Experiments showed that the mini-brains have a density of a few hundred thousand cells per cubic millimeter, which is similar to a natural rodent brain.

Physical structure: Cells in the mini-brain produce their own extracellular matrix, producing a tissue with the same mechanical properties (squishiness) as natural tissue. The cultures also don’t rely on foreign materials such as scaffolds of collagen.

Longevity: In testing, cultured tissues live for at least a month.

Hoffman-Kim, who is affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science and the Center for Biomedical Engineering, said she hopes the mini-brains might proliferate to many different labs, including those of researchers who have questions about neural tissue but not necessarily the degree of neuroscience and cell culture equipment required of other methods.

“If you are that person in that lab, we think you shouldn’t have to equip yourself with a microelectronics facility, and you shouldn’t have to do embryonic dissections in order to generate an in vitro model of the brain,” Hoffman-Kim said.

Human Physical Immortality Roadmap by Maria Konovalenko. You can see more at her blog: http://mariakonovalenko.wordpress.com/tag/ai-will-become-a-doctor-and-a-scientist/

Repeat after me:

May the Universe continue to guide me into opportunities for growth, renewal, and love.

May my heart be filled with overflowing compassion for my life and the lives of all others.

May my spirit shed all of Her doubts and hesitations.

May I find abundance in each new day.

May I be at peace.

Hey! Just wondering, how did a solar eclipse prove the theory of relativity?

According to the theory of relativity space is not static. The movements of objects can change the structure of space.

In Einstein’s view, space is combined with another dimension - time - which creates universewide “fabric” called space-time. Object travel through this fabric, which can be warped, bent and twisted by the masses and motions of objects within space-time.

One prediction of general relativity was that light should not travel in a perfectly straight line. When traveling through space-time and approaching the gravitational field of a mass object, the light must bend-but not too much.

Then the English astronomer Sir Frank Watson Dyson proposed that the total solar eclipse of 1919 could prove, because the Sun would cross the bright Hyades star cluster. Star light would have to cross the gravitational field of the sun on the way to Earth, but would be visible due to the darkness of the eclipse. This would allow precise measurements of the positions displaced by the gravity of the stars in the sky.

Because of this, teams of researchers strategically positioned themselves in two locations that would initially provide the best conditions for observing the eclipse. One group stayed in Ilha do Príncipe, in São Tomé and Príncipe, and other researchers settled in Sobral, Ceará (Brazil).

Eddington, who led the experiment, first measured the “true” positions of the stars during January and February of 1919. In May, he went to remote Prince Island (in the Gulf of Guinea, on the west coast of Africa) to measure Positions of the stars during the eclipse, seen through the gravitational lens of the sun.

The total eclipse lasted about 6 minutes and 51 seconds, during those few minutes the astronomers captured several photos of the total eclipse. When Eddington returned to England, his data from Príncipe confirmed Einstein’s predictions.Eddington announced his discoveries on November 6, 1919.

Images: x ,x ,x ,x