An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: One of the first products made using a novel animal-free egg white is now available in the United States. The unique macarons are the first to be made with an egg white protein that comes from engineered yeast, designed to be indistinguishable from what is found in chicken eggs. The Every Company, founded in 2014 under the name Clara Foods, is one of several food technology companies working to create real animal-free proteins using a method called precision fermentation. The idea behind the process is to break down certain animal products, such as milk and eggs, to their molecular components and then use microorganisms to produce those components. Earlier this year the first cow-free dairy milk using this method hit supermarket shelves in the United States. That product was created using whey proteins from engineered fungus, while other companies are working on similar dairy products using engineered yeast to produce the desired milk proteins.

The Every Company has spent the last few years focusing on using the same technique to produce chicken-free egg whites, working with engineered yeast to produce proteins found in egg whites. The company has not disclosed the specific combination of proteins used to create its final egg white product, however it is likely ovalbumin -- the primary protein component in egg whites -- plays a strong role in the recipe. Arturo Elizondo, CEO of Every Company, said the new egg white product functions exactly like a chicken-derived egg white. It whips, aerates and bakes in ways identical to traditional egg whites, and the company has teamed up with San Francisco-based bakery Chantal Guillon to launch the product in a line of iconic French macarons. The chicken-free egg white is the third animal-free product created by the Every Company. Its first fully commercialized product was an animal-free pepsin, launched in early 2021.

On Saturday CNBC published a remarkable headline. "Stem cells may finally offer a cure for Type 1 diabetes." There are 537 million people around the world living with diabetes. And that number is growing.... But over the past 20 years, significant advancements in stem cell research and therapies have revealed promising methods of creating new insulin-making cells, which are needed to cure Type 1 diabetes. Biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently began a clinical trial where it plans to treat 17 participants who have Type 1 diabetes with new insulin-making cells derived from stem cells. The first patient in the trial, Brian Shelton, has had positive results. After 150 days, Shelton was able to reduce the amount of insulin he injects by 92%.

Other global companies are also working to cure diabetes, such as ViaCyte, CRISPR, and Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest insulin manufacturers in the world.
In CNBC's 20-minute video, a VP/disease area executive from Vertex Pharmaceuticals explains that diabetes is "one of the few diseases where a single cell type is destroyed or missing" — the pancreas cell that produces insulin. So they're exploring "the idea that if you could create those cells and replace them, you can really address the underlying causal biology of the disease directly."

CNBC also spoke to Brian Shelton, the trial's first patient, who's been a Type 1 diabetic for 44 years, and whose pancreas suddenly started producing insulin again. "Now my body does it all on its own," Shelton says. The news was especially surprising, CNBC reports, because "as the first person in the trial, Shelton received only half of the anticipated dose to ensure it was safe."

One researcher they spoke to even predicts that biological solutions will compete with "ongoing efforts to use nanotechnology to miniaturize all the hardware necessary to do this," and that within the next 3 to 5 years patients will finally have the option of "something that is really Cadillac." And Aaron Kowalski, CEO of the nonprofit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, tells CNBC, "I am fully convinced that I will walk away from my insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor in my lifetime, and I would be disappointed if it wasn't in this decade."

CNBC's report concludes, "For diabetics who want a cure that requires no additional treatment, it may no longer be a question of if, but a matter of when."

The U.S. government's "dithering" has left the country "well behind" China in the race to build out 5G technology, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, as he urged Washington to step up investment in the next-generation internet technology. From a report: Writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt and Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, said that America is "far behind in almost every dimension of 5G while other nations -- including China -- race ahead." The authors urged the Biden administration to make 5G a "national priority." Otherwise, they said, "China will own the 5G future." 5G refers to next-generation wireless internet that promises super-fast download speeds. But it could also form the basis for industrial and military applications and form a way for devices to communicate with each other. That's why it's seen as a critical technology and one of the reasons China is moving quickly with its own 5G rollout and future applications.

New submitter blackprint writes: The City of Austin released a memo saying that Samsung released as much as 763,000 gallons of sulfuric acid waste into a Northeast Austin creek over a period as long as 106 days. They confirmed the leak has stopped, but no fish or macro invertebrates survived in the impacted area. They don't know if there are any long-term impacts, but pH levels in the area have returned close to normal. According to the memo, "Public access to this area is limited, and there are no nearby parks."

They have not stated the cause of the spill. "Spill investigators and scientists took a look at the area Jan. 18-19 and saw iron staining in the tributary channel consistent with a low pH environment," reports local news station KXAN, citing the memo. "WPD says it was in this tributary stretch from the Samsung plant to the main branch of Harris Branch Creek that WPD staff found no surviving aquatic life, including fish."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Dr. Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His research ranges from cancer to systems immunology. Dr. Nolan has also spent the last ten years working with a number of individuals analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. His robust resume -- 300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford's top 25 inventors -- makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs. Motherboard sat down with Garry to discuss his work. It has been edited for length and clarity. Motherboard's Thobey Campion starts by asking Dr. Nolan how he first became interested in UAPs. I've always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than 'Stanford professor sequences alien baby'?

That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. There was enough drama around the Atacama skeleton that I had basically decided to forswear all continued involvement in this area. Then these guys showed up and said, 'We need you to help us with this because we want to do blood analysis and everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet.' Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved. Dr. Nolan expanded on the MRIs, saying they resemble the white matter disease, or scarring, that occurs with multiple sclerosis, with the symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. "That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms."

When asked if there's anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain, Dr. Nolan said: "The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body."

As for the UAP fragments, Dr. Nolan said some of the objects are "nondescript," and just "lumps of metal" with nothing particularly unusual about them "except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd." He added: "The common thing about all the materials that I've looked at so far, and there's about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They're all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous."

Of the 10 or 12 UAP fragments he's looked at, "two seem to be not playing by our rules," he says. "That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios."

You can read the full Q&A here.

Three years ago Strella Biotechnology launched to "try to reduce waste in the U.S. food system — a problem that by some estimates creates as much emissions as 33 million passenger vehicles," reports the Washington Post. Alternate URL here and here.)

And today the founder's warehouse-monitoring device — about half the size of a shoebox — watches over about 15% of all the apples grown in America: Already, agriculture contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than the total of all the cars, planes, trains and trucks in the world. The pressure to grow more food is leading to deforestation in the Amazon, the drying up of rivers and a greater demand for fossil fuel-based fertilizer. Anything that can be done to reduce waste and increase the productivity of existing agricultural land is a big win for the climate. [Strella CEO and founder] Sizov, 24, wants to eliminate food waste one fruit at a time...

Sizov chanced upon a website that described the climate impact of food waste — up to 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to analyses from ReFed, a nonprofit organization that works to reduce food waste... The problem will only intensify as the global population grows, experts say. By 2050, the United Nations expects there will be another 2 billion mouths to feed around the world, an increase of more than 25% in just three decades. And as countries such as China and India grow richer, their populations are gradually changing their eating habits: more meat, more eggs — and a bigger carbon footprint tied to raising all of those animals and clearing off land to grow more food. "If you reduce food loss and waste by 50%, you can save a lot of production emissions, but you can also avoid a heck of a lot of deforestation," said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University's Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment. Searchinger explained that after accounting for the fact that an acre of farmland could otherwise be an acre of forest, the carbon footprint of food skyrockets as trees soak up so much carbon dioxide.

Eliminating waste also happens to be a way to help farmers and grocery stores earn more money, since the more efficiently food makes it to consumers, the more cash ends up with the people who've done the selling... [T]hat's where Strella's sensors come in. They monitor ethylene, a gas key to the ripening of fruits and vegetables. Apples accelerate their production of ethylene as they grow sweeter inside the storerooms. Once they're ready, the gas levels off, telling Strella's monitors that they're ready to be sent to supermarkets. Wait too long and the apples turn brown or grow mealy. If producers are lucky, they can try to break even by turning those apples into juice or applesauce. If they're unlucky, the overripe apples end up in compost or landfills.
Ultimately one out of every five apples doesn't make it from the warehouse to the supermarket, the Post points out (while some others lose their crunch). So Sizov hopes their waste-reducing technology will catch on because it's also a way to reduce business losses. "There's a direct alignment of a sustainable goal with a profitability incentive."

Months-long silences. Mysterious rejections. Here's what's behind the shortages of a critical tool for ending the pandemic. ProPublica: A few weeks ago, a ProPublica reporter decided to test his kids for COVID-19. They had the sniffles, and with a grandparent set to visit he wanted to minimize the risk that they were infectious. This was the problem that quick, cheap COVID-19 tests were supposed to help fix. No need to go to a clinic or wait days for results. Just pick up a pack of tests at a local pharmacy whenever you want, swab your nose and learn within 15 minutes if you're likely to pass the virus along. So the ProPublican went to his neighborhood CVS, hoping to buy the required pack of two for $23.99. They were out of stock. Then he went to Rite Aid. They didn't have the tests either. Then Walgreens, then another CVS. All out of stock. The only supplier with a few tests to offer was his sister, who happened to have a few tucked away. It's a familiar experience for many Americans. But not for people in Britain, who get free rapid tests delivered to their homes on demand. Or France, Germany or Belgium, where at-home tests are ubiquitous and as cheap as a decent cappuccino. So why are at-home tests still so pricey and hard to find in the United States?

The answer appears to be a confounding combination of overzealous regulation and anemic government support -- issues that have characterized America's testing response from the beginning of the pandemic. Companies trying to get the Food and Drug Administration's approval for rapid COVID-19 tests describe an arbitrary, opaque process that meanders on, sometimes long after their products have been approved in other countries that prioritize accessibility and affordability over perfect accuracy. After the FDA put out a call for more rapid tests in the summer of 2020, Los Angeles-based biotech company WHPM, Inc. began working on one. They did a peer-reviewed trial following the agency's directions, then submitted the results this past March. In late May, WHPM head of international sales Chris Patterson said, the company got a confusing email from its FDA reviewer asking for information that had in fact already been provided. WHPM responded within two days. Months passed. In September, after a bit more back and forth, the FDA wrote to say it had identified other deficiencies, and wouldn't review the rest of the application. Even if WHPM fixed the issues, the application would be "deprioritized," or moved to the back of the line.

"We spent our own million dollars developing this thing, at their encouragement, and then they just treat you like a criminal," said Patterson. Meanwhile, the WHPM rapid test has been approved in Mexico and the European Union, where the company has received large orders. An FDA scientist who vetted COVID-19 test applications told ProPublica he became so frustrated by delays that he quit the agency earlier this year. "They're neither denying the bad ones or approving the good ones," he said, asking to remain anonymous because his current work requires dealing with the agency. FDA officials said they simply want to ensure that rapid tests detect even low levels of the virus, since false negative test results could cause people to unwittingly spread the disease. They blame the test shortages on an absence of the kind of sustained public funding that European governments have provided. Without it, manufacturers have lacked confidence that going through the FDA's process would be financially worth the trouble.

Twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a longstanding trend, but many employers said there's a new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste. From a report: At a retail business based in New York, managers were distressed to encounter young employees who wanted paid time off when coping with anxiety or period cramps. At a supplement company, a Gen Z worker questioned why she would be expected to clock in for a standard eight-hour day when she might get through her to-do list by the afternoon. At a biotech venture, entry-level staff members delegated tasks to the founder. And spanning sectors and start-ups, the youngest members of the work force have demanded what they see as a long overdue shift away from corporate neutrality toward a more open expression of values, whether through executives displaying their pronouns on Slack or putting out statements in support of the protests for Black Lives Matter. "These younger generations are cracking the code and they're like, 'Hey guys turns out we don't have to do it like these old people tell us we have to do it,'" said Colin Guinn, 41, co-founder of the robotics company Hangar Technology. "'We can actually do whatever we want and be just as successful.' And us old people are like, 'What is going on?'"

Twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a trend as old as Xerox, Kodak and classic rock, but many employers said there's a new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste. And some members of Gen Z, defined as the 72 million people born between 1997 and 2012, or simply as anyone too young to remember Sept. 11, are quick to affirm this characterization. Ziad Ahmed, 22, founder and chief executive of the Gen Z marketing company JUV Consulting, which has lent its expertise to brands like JanSport, recalled speaking at a conference where a Gen Z woman, an entry-level employee, told him she didn't feel that her employer's marketing fully reflected her progressive values. "What is your advice for our company?" the young woman asked. "Make you a vice president," Mr. Ahmed told her. "Rather than an intern." Starting in the mid-aughts, the movement of millennials from college into the workplace prompted a flurry of advice columns about hiring members of the headstrong generation. "These young people tell you what time their yoga class is," warned a "60 Minutes" segment in 2007 called "The 'Millennials' Are Coming." Over time, those millennials became managers, and workplaces were reshaped in their image. There were #ThankGodIt'sMonday signs affixed to WeWork walls. There was the once-heralded rise of the SheEO.

Samsung has proposed a way to build brain-like computer chips by "copying and pasting" a brain's neuron wiring map onto 3D neuromorphic chips. Engadget reports: The approach would rely on a nanoelectrode array that enters a large volumes of neurons to record both where the neurons connect and the strength of those connections. You could copy that data and 'paste' it to a 3D network of solid-state memory, whether it's off-the-shelf flash storage or cutting-edge memory like resistive RAM. Each memory unit would have a conductance that reflects the strength of each neuron connection in the map. The result would be an effective return to "reverse engineering the brain" like scientists originally wanted, Samsung said.

The move could serve as a 'shortcut' to artificial intelligence systems that behave like real brains, including the flexibility to learn new concepts and adapt to changing conditions. You might even see fully autonomous machines with true cognition, according to the researchers.
"Envisioned by the leading engineers and scholars from Samsung and Harvard University, the insight was published as a Perspective paper, titled 'Neuromorphic electronics based on copying and pasting the brain'..." Samsung said in a statement.

In short, they're proposing a method that "directly downloads the brain's neuronal connection map onto the memory chip."

Federal prosecutors allege that Elizabeth Holmes and the No. 2 at Theranos, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, "broke the law by deceiving investors about how well the business was doing and the capabilities of its testing machines, in addition to allegedly providing false or flawed test results to patients," reports NPR.

But they add that in Silicon Valley, the trial has launched this debate. "Since Holmes was following a playbook used by dozens of tech CEOs, why is she the only one to face prosecution when a company becomes engulfed in a scandal?" To Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, who is a vocal critic of gender discrimination in tech, sexism is partially to blame. "When you see which CEOs get to continue to wreak havoc on consumers and the market, it's people who look like the venture capitalists, who are mostly white men," Pao said. She points to Adam Neumann, who drove WeWork into the ground; former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who resigned after a sexual harassment scandal; and Juul's Kevin Burns, who stepped down amid questions over the company's role in stoking the youth vaping epidemic. There were lawsuits, settlements and more fallout — but notably, Pao points out, no criminal prosecutions.

"That all these people continue to lead their lives and not be held accountable for all the harm that they've caused, it does send a message," she said.

Former prosecutors who have tried white-collar crime say there are several reasons why Holmes stands out among disgraced tech CEOs. First, the allegedly fraudulent behavior was egregious: Holmes told the world she had a miracle machine that would upend laboratory science. Prosecutors say, compared with her claims, the technology barely did anything at all. Mark MacDougall, a former federal prosecutor who focused on fraud cases in the U.S. Justice Department, said Theranos' being a biotech company raised the stakes. "It allows the government to contend, with some evidence, that the health of private citizens, the health of innocent people, was put at risk," MacDougall said. Another reason Holmes was charged, according to former prosecutors, was that the government says it obtained evidence that she acted intentionally, which can be difficult to establish in fraud cases.
Prosecutors now plan to show Holmes "knowingly and intentionally" defrauded investors and patients, "something her defense team says is false," the article points out. "Proving that Holmes is guilty will turn on demonstrating her intent, since exaggerating a product's potential, missing financial forecasts and running a secretive company do not constitute federal crimes."

Pao's argument is that Holmes "was encouraged by the high-risk, high-reward culture of venture capital. That said, Pao said she is not defending Holmes, saying her behavior warranted prosecution."

"At the same time, Pao wants a broader discussion in Silicon Valley about why other CEOs accused of wrongdoing have not faced criminal consequences."

AltMachine shares a report from Phys.Org: Chinese scientists recently reported a de novo route for artificial starch synthesis from carbon dioxide (CO2) for the first time. Relevant results were published in Science on Sept. 24. The new route makes it possible to produce starch, a major component of grains, by industrial manufacturing instead of traditional agricultural planting and opens up a new technical route for synthesizing complex molecules from CO2. The artificial route can produce starch from CO2 with an efficiency 8.5-fold higher than starch biosynthesis in maize, suggesting a big step towards going beyond nature. It provides a new scientific basis for creating biological systems with unprecedented functions. "If the overall cost of the process can be reduced to a level economically comparable with agricultural planting in the future, it is expected to save more than 90% of cultivated land and freshwater resources," said MA Yanhe, corresponding author of the study. In addition, it would also help to avoid the negative environmental impact of using pesticides and fertilizers, improve human food security, facilitate a carbon-neutral bioeconomy, and eventually promote the formation of a sustainable bio-based society.

"A CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that has shown promise in clearing HIV from mice is headed into human testing," reports Fierce Biotech: We don't like to throw the word "cure" around here. But Excision BioTherapeutics thinks the therapy could replace standard-of-care retroviral therapy, which keeps HIV from replicating but does not remove it from the body. That means patients stay on the treatment, which can cause serious side effects and affect quality of life. Now with the start of human testing, the real path to see if this new and lauded tech can accomplish this really begins.

HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can't remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019... EBT-101 has since been tested in nonhuman primates, which showed it reached every tissue in the body where HIV reservoirs reside.

Excision licensed the therapy from the universities with a goal of moving it into clinical trials. Now, the FDA is on board. The biotech plans to initiate a phase 1/2 clinical trial later this year, according to the statement.

The technology used by Excision was licensed from the lab of famed CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma.

"My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.

What is was like competing with -- and dealing with the wreckage of -- the most infamous startup in the world. From a report: Theranos' collapse was as public as it gets for a Silicon Valley unicorn, beginning in 2015 with a widely read series of articles by former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who revealed that Theranos' technology was far less effective than advertised. The debacle went on to inspire the bestselling book Bad Blood by Carreyrou, an HBO documentary, and a forthcoming Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried. This week, Holmes' highly anticipated trial begins in earnest. Jurors were sworn in last Thursday, and opening statements will begin on Wednesday. Prosecutors have charged Holmes with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the ascent and operations of Theranos, though she maintains her innocence. Once famous for a supposedly innovative approach to blood testing, now infamous for allegedly faking it, the names Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes aren't fading away anytime soon.

All of this has had a ripple effect for other companies that, like Theranos, were trying to make blood drawing and diagnostics easier for consumers. I spoke to five such companies recently about how they have dealt with unwelcome comparisons to Theranos, which has bedeviled the sector ever since Carreyrou's first piece on the subject. One company I reached out to expressed that it was hesitant to even appear in an article about Theranos. Even before Theranos imploded, its outsize presence was felt by other companies in the blood testing industry, for better and worse. "In the beginning, when Theranos was on its up slope, people were asking how we were ever going to compete with a company like Theranos when they've raised a billion dollars," said Daniel Levner, co-founder of Sight Diagnostics, a biotech company that sells a device that can conduct a blood count analysis from a finger prick.

Yet when Carreyrou's pieces began appearing in the Journal, comparisons to Theranos became a curse for its peers. "In pretty much every conversation we had for a year, Theranos would come up," said John Lewis, founder and CEO of Nanostics, a biotech company that sells a device that can use a very small amount of blood to diagnose and predict diseases. "Most people recognized that Theranos was mostly just bad founders, but it certainly was on everybody's mind." Lewis recounts that his company, which had only existed for a year and a half at the time, was in a pitch competition right as the Theranos scandal was coming to light. The very first question they got at the event was how the Nanostics product compared to Theranos'. From there, Nanostics took pains to distinguish itself from Theranos, down to the smallest details. For instance, the company in its promotional materials tried to stay away from Theranos' famous selling point of diagnosing diseases from a single drop of blood. "Our initial plan was to go out saying that we can detect disease signatures with a single drop of blood, but that was literally just when Theranos was going down for stating that they could do that when they couldn't," Lewis recalled. "So in our texts we said, 'two drops of blood.'"

A prenatal test taken by millions of pregnant women globally was developed by Chinese gene company BGI Group in collaboration with the Chinese military and is being used by the firm to collect genetic data, a Reuters review of publicly available documents found. From the report: The report is the first to reveal that the company collaborated with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to develop and improve the test, taken in early pregnancy, as well as the scope of BGI's storage and analysis of the data. The United States sees BGI's efforts to collect and analyze human gene data as a national security threat. China's biggest genomics firm, BGI began marketing the test abroad in 2013. Branded NIFTY, it is among the world's top selling non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT). These screen a sample of blood from a pregnant woman to detect abnormalities such as Down's syndrome in a developing fetus. So far more than 8 million women globally have taken BGI's prenatal tests, BGI has said. NIFTY is sold in at least 52 countries, including Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia, Thailand and India, but not the United States.

BGI uses leftover blood samples sent to its laboratory in Hong Kong and genetic data from the tests for population research, the company confirmed to Reuters. Reuters found the genetic data of over 500 women who took the test, including women in Europe and Asia, is also stored in the government-funded China National GeneBank in Shenzhen, which BGI runs. Reuters found no evidence BGI violated privacy agreements or regulations; the company said it obtains signed consent and destroys overseas samples and data after five years. "At no stage throughout the testing or research process does BGI have access to any identifiable personal data," the company said. However, the test's privacy policy says data collected can be shared when it is "directly relevant to national security or national defense security" in China. BGI said it "has never been asked to provide -- nor provided -- data from its NIFTY tests to Chinese authorities for national security or national defense purposes." "Non-invasive prenatal testing kits marketed by Chinese biotech firms serve an important medical function, but they can also provide another mechanism for the People's Republic of China and Chinese biotech companies to collect genetic and genomic data from around the globe," the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center said.

China's foreign ministry said Reuters' findings reflected "groundless accusations and smears" of U.S. agencies.

USA Today reports: Companies like Moderna and Pfizer's partner BioNTech, whose names are familiar from COVID-19 vaccines, are using mRNA to spur cancer patients' bodies to make vaccines that will — hopefully — prevent recurrences and treatments designed to fight off advanced tumors. If they prove effective, which won't be known for at least another year or two, they could be added to the arsenal of immune therapies designed to get the body to fight off its own tumors...

Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies around the world have been developing new ways to train the body's immune system to fight off tumors, particularly melanoma. They had learned how to remove a brake installed by tumors, unleashing the warriors of the immune system. Ten years ago, only about 5% of people with advanced melanoma survived for five years. Now, nearly half make it that long. Trials of mRNA cancer vaccines aim to boost that number even higher by adding soldiers to the fight... Once a tumor has been largely removed through surgery, a vaccine can help generate new immune soldiers known as T cells... A computer algorithm analyzes the mutations distinct to the cancer cells, looking for ones that trigger the production of T cells, said Melissa J. Moore, Moderna's chief scientific officer, of platform research. So far, she said, Moderna, working with partner Merck, has tested these personalized vaccines in about 100 patients. They aim eventually to make a personalized mRNA vaccine within about 45 days after the patient's cancer surgery, during their recovery...

Mutated cancer cells have proteins on their surface that can be targeted by an mRNA vaccine. For a tumor that has, say, five common mutations, a patient could get a combination of five of these vaccines. On Friday, BioNTech announced it was launching a new trial for this approach, testing it in 120 melanoma patients Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and the U.S. The new treatment, given in connection with an antibody from Regeneron, is aimed at four tumor-associated antigens. More than 90% of melanoma tumors contain at least one of the four.
The U.S. federal government now lists 29 studies underway or that will be soon investigating mRNA cancer vaccines, according to the article.

And Dr. Stephen Hahn, who had a career as an oncologist before running the Food and Drug Administration from 2019 until early this year, "said he's more optimistic this time because of how much researchers have learned about the role the immune system plays in cancer. 'That gives us an edge to maybe finally get to the place where we need to be.'"

Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday.

A set of "neuro-rights" should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York's Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards. Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies — rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says.

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people," Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference.

"This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

"A new kind of COVID-19 vaccine could be available as soon as this summer," reports NPR: It's what's known as a protein subunit vaccine. It works somewhat differently from the current crop of vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. but is based on a well-understood technology and doesn't require special refrigeration.

In general, vaccines work by showing people's immune systems something that looks like the virus but really isn't. Consider it an advance warning; if the real virus ever turns up, the immune system is ready to try to squelch it. In the case of the coronavirus, that "something" is one of the proteins in the virus — the spike protein. The vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer contain genetic instructions for the spike protein, and it's up to the cells in our bodies to make the protein itself.

The first protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine to become available will likely come from the biotech company, Novavax. In contrast to the three vaccines already authorized in the U.S., it contains the spike protein itself — no need to make it, it's already made — along with an adjuvant that enhances the immune system's response, to make the vaccine even more protective.

Protein subunit vaccines made this way have been around for a while. There are vaccines on the market for hepatitis B and pertussis based on this technology.
And meanwhile, the article points out, there's also another company — the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi — that's also working on its own protein subunit vaccine against the coronavirus.

Science is once again casting doubt on the notion that we could live to be nearly as old as the biblical Methuselah or Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man. From a report: New research research [PDF] from Singapore-base biotech company Gero looks at how well the human body bounces back from disease, accidents or just about anything else that puts stress on its systems. This basic resilience declines as people age, with an 80-year-old requiring three times as long to recover from stresses as a 40-year-old on average. This should make sense if you've ever known an elderly person who has taken a nasty fall. Recovery from such a spill can be lif- threatening for a particularly frail person, whereas a similar fall might put a person half as old out of commission for just a short time and teenagers might simply dust themselves off and keep going.

Extrapolate this decline further, and human body resilience is completely gone at some age between 120 and 150, according to new analysis performed by the researchers. In other words, at some point your body loses all ability to recover from pretty much any potential stressor. The researchers arrived at this conclusion by looking at health data for large groups from the US, the UK and Russia. They looked at blood cell counts as well as step counts recorded by wearables. As people experienced different stressors, fluctuations in blood cell and step counts showed that recovery time grew longer as individuals grew older. "Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration," Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero, said in a statement.

Implantable miniaturized medical devices that wirelessly transmit data "are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people," writes Columbia University, noting the devices are "widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases."

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the university's newest announcement: These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. To date, conventional implanted electronics have been highly volume-inefficient — they generally require multiple chips, packaging, wires, and external transducers, and batteries are often needed for energy storage... Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world's smallest single-chip system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm cubed. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope...

"We wanted to see how far we could push the limits on how small a functioning chip we could make," said the study's leader Ken Shepard, Lau Family professor of electrical engineering and professor of biomedical engineering. "This is a new idea of 'chip as system' — this is a chip that alone, with nothing else, is a complete functioning electronic system. This should be revolutionary for developing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices that can sense different things, be used in clinical applications, and eventually approved for human use...."

The chip, which is the entire implantable/injectable mote with no additional packaging, was fabricated at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with additional process modifications performed in the Columbia Nano Initiative cleanroom and the City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) Nanofabrication Facility. Shepard commented, "This is a nice example of 'more than Moore' technology—we introduced new materials onto standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor to provide new function. In this case, we added piezoelectric materials directly onto the integrated circuit to transducer acoustic energy to electrical energy...." The team's goal is to develop chips that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle and then communicate back out of the body using ultrasound, providing information about something they measure locally.

The current devices measure body temperature, but there are many more possibilities the team is working on.