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affordablehousing, ai, antarctic, bruno, computergames, fishes, galileo, higgsbosun, Inquisition, interferometry, rna, scientificamerican, startrek, texasinstruments, uranus, vision, voyager

Author: ShooBoo

A fascinating glimpse of what was going on in the science world 38 years ago in the November 1986 issue of Scientific American and what has changed and what has remained the same: Voyager 2's visit to Uranus cover story and how a fix had to be made from Earth • Affordable housing problems - "The Shadow Market in Housing" • Learn about the Higgs boson long before it was found (RIP Peter Higgs) • Galileo, Bruno and the Inquisition • Computer Recreations - "Star Trek emerges from the underground to a place in the home-computer arcade" • The Amateur Scientist - "... experiments on three-dimensional vision" • All the 1986 ads, including "Texas Instruments brings the practical applications of AI to your business. Now." (p 15)

While CRISPR is an amazing biological system, it is far from the only one. Among the dozens that have since been identified in bacteria, what about other organisms?

MIT and Harvard scientists have described the first such RNA-guided programmable system in eukaryotes based on the protein Fanzor.

Its compact complexity may make it more suitable for use in humans and other eukaryotes.

Bees, like all other organisms, have a lot of parasites. And it is likely that these are the main contributors to issues like colony collapse disorder (CCD).

UT Austin scientists have targeted one such deadly fungal parasite, Nosema ceranae, and have genetically modified a bacteria commonly found in bee guts to produce an RNA interference system preventing the fungus from making spores.

A large number of genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, come about from mutations that cause nonsense sequences to form, often with a termination sequence being created too early in the protein's code.

Rochester University scientists have developed specialized guide RNAs to fix these terminations and also suppress the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay system that turns off the protein coding.

Hopefully, this can lead to better treatments that, while they may not cure the conditions, will significantly alleviate their effects by allowing some of the needed proteins to be created.