News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Incredible advances in growing living tissue in the lab took another amazing turn in August when a blob of brain cells grew eye-like structures Technology 15 December 2021 By Clare Wilson Elke Gabriel There was a leap forward in understanding brain development in August, when lumps of neural tissue in a dish were coaxed into … Read more
The new SARS-CoV-2 variant exploding around the planet is forcing humanity to adapt at a breakneck speed. This week, countries across Northern Europe imposed stringent new measures to try to bring down soaring case numbers. On Saturday, The Netherlands issued a near-complete lockdown of public life and allowed residents to receive no more than two … Read more
Francis Collins ended his 12 years as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on a high note last week, rushing to interviews and being showered with fond tributes from former presidents and even cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Collins, an affable, guitar-playing, motorcycle-riding geneticist and physician, steered the $43 billion agency through three administrations, won … Read more
After facing setback after setback this year, the nonprofit formed to make sure COVID-19 vaccines reach the poorest countries of the world may finally live up to its promise in 2022. A 14 December report shows that after scaling back its ambitions, the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility is close to meeting a revised … Read more
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A flurry of short flights aboard privately funded craft saw space tourism begin with a bang for billionaires in 2021. Perhaps by the end of the decade, mere millionaires will be able to join them Space 15 December 2021 By Leah Crane New Shepard’s first crew and capsule Joe Raedle/Getty Images THIS year, the extraordinarily … Read more
In July, the University of Science and Technology of China announced it had surpassed Google’s claimed quantum supremacy achievement. China’s ambitious quantum computing efforts are all under the oversight of one man, Jian-Wei Pan Technology 15 December 2021 By Matthew Sparkes Xinhua/Alamy GOVERNMENTS and companies around the world are racing to build a useful quantum … Read more
In September, GABA-enriched tomatoes in Japan became the first foods modified by CRISPR gene editing to go on sale to the public Technology 15 December 2021 By Michael Le Page Courtesy of Sanatech Seed They may look ordinary, but in September these tomatoes became the first CRISPR-edited food to go on sale to the public. … Read more
In July, DeepMind announced that its AlphaFold model had worked out how most of the proteins in our bodies fold. Pushmeet Kohli tells New Scientist that there is more to come Technology 15 December 2021 By Matthew Sparkes A 3D model of a fruit fly protein from DeepMind DeepMind IT TOOK decades for scientists to … Read more
In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would … Read more