Caption: Bryson and Sanchez, two alpacas who produce unusually small antibodies. These ‘nanobodies’ could help highly promising CAR T-cell therapies kill solid tumors, where right now they work only in blood cancers. Credit: Courtesy of Boston Children’s Hospital Bryson and Sanchez are not the first camelids to grace this blog. ‘Llam’ me lend you some antibodies—antibody particles extracted from camels and llamas, a June 12, 2014 posting, and Llama-derived nanobodies are good for solving crystal…

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There are movies, plays, a multimedia installation experience all in Vancouver, and the ‘CHAOSMOSIS mAchInesexhibition/performance/discussion/panel/in-situ experiments/art/ science/ techne/ philosophy’ event in Toronto. But first, there’s a a Vancouver talk about engaging scientists in the upcoming federal election. . Science in the Age of Misinformation (and the upcoming federal election) in Vancouver Dr. Katie Gibbs, co-founder and executive director of Evidence for Democracy, will be giving a talk today (Sept. 4, 2019) at the University of…

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This is a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) story where the researchers are working on flies. If successful, this has much wider implications. From an April 10, 2019 news item on phys.org, New CRISPR-based gene drives and broader active genetics technologies are revolutionizing the way scientists engineer the transfer of specific traits from one generation to another.Scientists at the University of California San Diego have now developed a new version of a gene…

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Spend enough time reading about emerging technologies and, at some point, you will find yourself questioning some of your dearly held beliefs. It gives a whole new meaning to term, mind altering (also, mind blowing or mind expanding), which in the 1960s was used to refer to the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens. Today <September 1, 2019 (Labour Day in Canada and elsewhere), I have two news bits that could be considered mind expanding,…

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An April 10, 2019 news item on Nanowerk points the way to improved high-speed communication with nanowires (Note: A link has been removed), Chinese scientists have synthesized new nanowires with high carrier mobility and fast infrared light (IR) response, which could help in high-speed communication. Their findings were published in Nature Communications (“Ultra-fast photodetectors based on high-mobility indium gallium antimonide nanowires”). Below, you will find an image illustrating the researchers’ work , Caption: The growth…

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Cyborgs are usually thought of as people who’ve been enhanced with some sort of technology, In contemporary real life that technology might be a pacemaker or hip replacement but in science fiction it’s technology such as artificial retinas (for example) that expands the range of visible light for an enhanced human. Rarely does the topic of a microscopic life form come up in discussion about cyborgs and yet, that’s exactly what an April 3, 2019…

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Every time I think I’ve become inured to the idea of a fuzzy boundary between life and nonlife something new crosses my path such as integrating nanoelectronics with cells for cyborg organoids. An August 9, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily makes the announcement, What happens in the early days of organ development? How do a small group of cells organize to become a heart, a brain, or a kidney? This critical period of development has…

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