Author: Lala Trute

Scientists Develop New Method to Manufacture Specific Human Antibodies

An international team of researchers led by Facundo Batista, from the Francis Crick Institute in London, has a new technique to swiftly manufacture specific human antibodies.  Antibodies are large Y-shaped proteins that are enlisted by the immune system to target and eliminate foreign objects such as bacteria and viruses. An antibody produced by the body’s B cells has a single built-in antigen key that helps recognize a specific invading organism.  The target antigen (foreign organism) and the antibody have a compatible structure at the tips of their “Y” structures, so when there is binding via the key fitting into the...

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Weed Pulling Autonomous Robot for the Garden

iRobot’s iconic autonomous robotic vacuum Roomba is cleaning floors in 15 million homes around the globe.  It isn’t hard to believe that if people are happy to have an affordable little robot clean their floors, that they wouldn’t be even more excited to have one remove weeds from their garden. While others were building battle bots, Joe Jones spent his side time at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988 designing the Roomba. Eventually, the Roomba went commercial in 2002 with Jones at iRobot. Now Joe Jones “thinking outside the house” has started his second robotics company, Franklin Robotics, to build a...

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Lyft Reveals That New Facility Will Develop Self-Driving Car Technology

San Francisco-based transportation network company Lyft announced today (7/21/2017) that it is setting up its own facility to develop autonomous vehicle technology. While Lyft has partnered with well-known tech companies and automakers that are making self-driving cars, the ride-hailing service perhaps enticed by predictions of a $7 trillion autonomous driving industry, sees an opportunity to make the software and hardware themselves to enable a car to be autonomous. Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer at Lyft, said they were motivated to take on autonomous design in order to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving field of automation and undoubtedly to...

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Microsoft is Fighting Back Against Putin’s Fancy Bear Hackers

With the Russian scandal, and President Trump’s perceived reluctance to really prioritize going after the alleged Russian state run attempt to hack and obfuscate our 2016 elections, there appear to be no counter measures to dissuade this bad cyber behavior.  But according to a Daily Beast investigation, Microsoft has been stealthily waging a counter-attack against the cyber espionage group known as Fancy Bear for about a year.  American cyber security company CrowdStrike, which has been involved in response efforts to several high-profile hackings, has said with a medium level of confidence that Fancy Bear is associated with Russia’s covert military intelligence agency known as...

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Elon Musk Tweets he has ‘Verbal’ OK To Build N.Y.-D.C. Underground Hyperloop

Earlier today entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that he received “verbal government approval” to build an underground one tube train transit network. In a few tweets this morning he detailed that the system would connect passengers to city centers in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC. If the underground One tube train transit network were actually built, it would become the longest tunnel in the world. Such a project would combine two of Musk’s interests in the underground tunnels he’s currently digging with The Boring Company and the fast-moving rail system known as the One tube Hyperloop train. One...

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