The science behind RHCs liver thread

Surely such a machine would be unstable, fragile and prone to parts breaking with regularity.

 

Indeed. In theory they're easy to fix, as all the information you need on them can be easily found on the internet. However, the only one that currently exists tends to be in the hands of lowlifes and gangsters, so it's poorly maintained and the parts used are dodgy.

There's also one part, known simply as "the unit", that doesn't appear to do anything and is apparently not required, but which for some reason can't be detached.

However, the second generation, although they cannot measure combine harvesters travelling faster than light, are supposed to otherwise be fine pieces of kit highly sought by specialist collectors, known as "zingies".

 

Very creative

 

On dangerous ground

 

You have a wonderful scientific brain.

 

First results of CRISPR gene editing of normal embryos released

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Disease-causing mutations could be removed in early embryos
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By Michael Le Page

A team in China has corrected genetic mutations in at least some of the cells in three normal human embryos using the CRISPR genome editing technique. The latest study is the first to describe the results of using CRISPR in viable human embryos, New Scientist can reveal.

While this study – which attempted to repair the DNA of six embryos in total – was very small, the results suggest CRISPR works much better in normal embryos than it did in previous tests on abnormal embryos that could not develop into children.

“It is encouraging,” says Robin Lovell-Badge of the Francis Crick Institute in London, who has contributed to several major reports on human genome editing. The numbers are far too low to make strong conclusions though, he cautions.





The CRISPR gene editing technique is a very efficient way of disabling genes, by introducing small mutations that disrupt the code of a DNA sequence. CRISPR can also be used to repair genes, but this is much more difficult.

Until now, results have only been published from experiments in which the CRISPR technique was used in abnormal embryos, made when two sperm fertilise the same egg. The idea behind this work was that it was more ethical to test the technique on embryos that could never fully develop.

In the first attempt to fix genes in human embryos, fewer than 1 in 10 cells were successfully repaired – an efficiency rate that is too low to make the method practical. A second study published in 2016 also had a low rate of efficiency. However, because these embryos were very genetically abnormal, these experiments may not have given an accurate indication of how well the technique would work in healthier embryos.

The Chinese team behind the latest study, at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, first carried out experiments with abnormal embryos, and found the repair rate was very low. But they had more success when they tried to repair mutations in normal embryos derived from immature eggs donated by people undergoing IVF.

Genetic disease
Immature eggs like these are usually discarded by IVF clinics, as the success rate is much lower than with mature eggs. However, children have been born from such immature eggs.

Jianqiao Liu and his team matured donated immature eggs, and fertilised each by injecting sperm from one of two men with a hereditary disease. They then injected the CRISPR machinery into these single-cell embryos before they started dividing.

The first sperm donor had a mutation called G1376T in the gene for the G6PD enzyme. This is a common cause of favism in China, a disorder in which eating certain foods such as fava beans can trigger the destruction of red blood cells.

In two of the resulting embryos, the G1376T mutation was corrected. But in one of the embryos, not all the cells were corrected. CRISPR turned off the G6PD gene in some of its cells rather than fixing it – making it what is known as a “mosaic”.

The second sperm donor had a mutation called beta41-42, which is one of the causes of the blood disease beta-thalassemia. Four of the resulting embryos carried the mutation. In one, CRISPR induced another mutation rather than fixing the beta41-42. In another, the mutation was successfully repaired in only some of the cells, creating another mosaic embryo. It did not work at all in the other two embryos.

In total, the mutation in one embryo was corrected in every cell, and two were corrected in some of the cells.

While firm conclusions cannot be drawn based on just six embryos, these results are encouraging as they suggest CRISPR gene repair is more efficient in normal cells. “It does look more promising than previous papers,” says Fredrik Lanner of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, whose team has begun using CRISPR to disable genes in human embryos to study embryonic development.

Preventing mosaics
Several other groups have begun editing the genomes of normal human embryos or plan to start soon. There are rumours that another three or four studies on the use of CRISPR in human embryos have been completed but not yet published. It isn’t clear why this is the case, but the controversy surrounding the area may have made both researchers and journals wary.

The results so far, however, show the technology is far from the point where it could be safely used for editing embryos.

To make it safer to use gene editing to prevent children inheriting disease-causing mutations, researchers will need to find a way to prevent mosaicism. Edited embryos would always be tested before being implanted in a woman, but if they are mosaics such tests cannot guarantee the resulting child will be disease-free.

“This would need to be solved before the methods could be used clinically to correct a disease,” says Lovell-Badge. Progress is already being made: at least two teams have already found ways of reducing the risk of mosaicism in animals.

Mosaicism could also be avoided by editing the genomes of sperm and eggs prior to IVF, rather than embryos. This is expected to become possible in people in the next few years.

There are also a few diseases where mosaicism might not matter, Lovell-Badge points out, such as metabolic liver diseases where only 20 per cent function is enough to keep people healthy.

However, a major report on gene editing by the US National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that trials of germline gene editing should be allowed only if they meet a number of criteria – the first being “the absence of reasonable alternatives”.

Yet almost all inherited diseases can already be prevented by existing forms of screening, such as testing IVF embryos and implanting only disease-free ones. There are only a small number of cases where this method – called preimplantation genetic diagnosis – will not work because none of a couple’s embryos will be disease-free.

 

As long as (in humans at least) this is only used for correcting genetic flaws that cause legitimate disease I'm all for it. When it gets to correcting eye colour or correcting height to make sure baby grows to be 6ft plus, that gets into the realm of possibility immoral. Plus, genetic diversity is a boon. The greater the natural diversity the longer the species is likely to survive.

 

its that movie...gattaca

 

You mean Gateacre

 

No I mean the movie gattaca thanks.

 

#****e

 

White House budget plan would slash science
Fiscal 2018 proposal calls for deep cuts in spending for EPA, NIH and other agencies
BY
SCIENCE NEWS STAFF
5:52PM, MARCH 16, 2017

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SHOW ME THE MONEY President Donald Trump has released his budget request for fiscal year 2018. It includes deep cuts to some federal science agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, but other agencies, such as NASA, emerge relatively unscathed.

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SPONSOR MESSAGE
Huge cuts could be in store for federal science spending if President Donald Trump’s vision for fiscal year 2018 becomes reality.

Although details are skimpy, Trump’s $1.15 trillion budget proposal, released March 16, would make national security the top priority. The budget blueprint calls for a $54 billion increase in defense spending for 2018, offset by an equally big reduction in nondefense activities. Among the biggest science losers are the Environmental Protection Agency, which could see its budget shrink by 31 percent compared with 2017, and the National Institutes of Health, which faces an 18 percent spending slash. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science could lose about 17 percent of its funding while DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E — which supports research on promising energy technologies — faces complete elimination.

The bare-bones budget blueprint leaves out figures altogether for many science-related agencies. It doesn’t even mention, for example, the National Science Foundation, a major source of federal funding for basic research across scientific disciplines. NSF is currently operating on a $7.5 billion budget. Full breaksdowns aren't available for most departments, so there's no information on what's to come for such programs as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (part of the Department of Commerce), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (part of the Department of the Interior) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (part of the Department of Defense). More details for these and other omitted agencies may be included in a full budget proposal that the White House expects to release in May.

The White House’s budget outline is already raising alarm in the scientific community. “Major national goals are served by these investments in science and technology,” says Matt Hourihan, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. The proposed cuts, he says, “would set back our scientific leadership and would set back our technologies.”

Story continues after table

Proposed 2018 budget
Here are the president's proposed FY2018 budgets for select science agencies in $ billions. Numbers are not adjusted for inflation, which is predicted to be 2 percent in 2018.

Agency 2017
(continuing resolution) 2018
(president's request) Change
(2017 to 2018)
NASA 19.2 19.1 -1%
NIH 31.7 25.9 -18%
EPA 8.2 5.7 -31%
DOE Office of Science 5.3 4.4* -17%
*Estimate based on reported $900 million cut.

Ultimate authority of the budget rests with Congress. Last year, Congress failed to reach agreements on fiscal 2017 spending; the government has been operating under a continuing resolution that has largely kept agencies funded at their 2016 levels. That resolution expires April 28. But if the House and Senate can find common ground for fiscal 2018, which begins October 1, they are likely to be kinder to science than Trump was, Hourihan predicts. “Overall, Congress tends to find ways to support science and technology.”

Leland Cogliani, a lobbying consultant with Lewis-Burke Associates LLC in Washington, D.C., who specializes in DOE policy, agrees. “There’s a lot of angst and concern and worry about these proposed cuts to federal agencies as a whole,” he says. “My discussions with appropriators is that this budget is dead on arrival.” — Erin Wayman, with additional reporting from SN writers

 

The LHC Just Discovered A New System of Five Particles
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IN BRIEF

• Today, CERN announced an exceptional new discovery that was made by the LHCb, which unveiled five new states all at once.
• The team notes that this revelation improves our understanding of quantum theory in general and, most notably, gives us new clues about the earliest moments of our universe.

A UNIQUE FIND
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex, is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It features a 27 kilometer (16 mile) ring made of superconducting magnets and accelerating structures built to boost the energy of particles in the chamber. In the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams are forced to collide from opposite directions at speeds close to the speed of light.

The energy densities that are created when these collisions occur cause ordinary matter to melt into its constituent parts—quarks and gluons. This allows us to interrogate the basic constituents of matter–the fundamental particles of the Standard Model.

It is a project of massive, unparalleled proportions.

More than 10,000 scientists and engineers are currently working together to help us learn about the fundamental properties of physics using the LHC. To date, these men and women have brought about some impressive discoveries. The LHC team is responsible for the discovery of the Higgs Boson, potentially disproving the existence of the paranormal, and discovering a host of new particles.

And today, a paper proved that these discoveries aren’t slowing down.

The Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) collaboration just announced the discovery of a new system of five particles all in a single analysis. Discovering a new state is a feat in itself – but discovering five new states all at once is exceptional. Especially since there’s such an overwhelming level of statistical significance – i.e. this isn’t just a fluke.

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CERN

✔@CERN
Five particles in one go! @LHCbExperiment observed an exceptionally large group of particles in a single analysis: http://cern.ch/go/d6JQ

EXCITEMENT ABOUNDS
Each of the five particles were found to be excited states of Omega-c-zero, a particle with three quarks. These particle states are named, according to the standard convention, Ωc(3000)0, Ωc(3050)0, Ωc(3066)0, Ωc(3090)0 and Ωc(3119)0

Now, the researchers need to determine the quantum numbers of these new particles, and their theoretical significance. This will all add to our understanding of the correlation between quarks, and multi-quark states, which will further the way we comprehend our universe and quantum theory in general.

Ultimately, CERN called this “a hotbed of new and outstanding physics results.” And it’s just the beginning. More experiments and results are on their way.


This is why the importance of international collaborations cannot be overstated. The LHC is the largest international scientific collaboration in history (scientists from more than 85 countries are involved in the LHC and its experiments at the European laboratory CERN). As such, perhaps it is no surprise that it is leading to a new era in physics and opening new doors in our understanding of the universe, in fact, it could even prove the existence of higher dimensions.

Over the coming months and years, the LHC will use its amazing amount of energy to open up the “dark sector of physics,” revealing currently unknown particles and helping solve some of our greatest cosmic mysteries (such as dark matter, parallel dimensions, and what happened during the earliest moments of the Big Bang). With new updates coming to the LHC, the team promises “even more impressive” physics opportunities.

 

What's the significance of 5 particles?

Explain to those that was crap are science at school lol

 

Try reading it

 

or 'Soldier' with Kurt Russel.

 

....and English.

 

What the **** does that prove.

I don't understand the significance and asked a simple question.

I post a comment on maths and you didn't understand it, expect me to say try reading it