Might have a commercial market for rich people who wants to engrave some information on their diamonds and pass it down generations.Diamonds are our friend also
Higher-density storage technique could allow diamond disk to store equivalent of 2,000 Blu-ray discs
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
The concept of diamond storage medium. Credit: Nature Photonics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-024-01573-1
A team of engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China has developed a new way to code data onto a diamond with higher density than prior methods. In their paper in the journal Nature Photonics, the group notes that such optical discs could hold data safely at room temperature for millions of years.
Prior research has shown that it is possible to code data onto a diamond, allowing for much longer data than any other known method. But such efforts have produced low-density storage. In this new effort, the research team developed a new method for etching data onto a diamond that allows for much denser data storage, and thus for storing more information onto a single diamond.
In their work, the researchers used diamond pieces just a few millimeters in length—they were pursuing a proof of concept, not a true storage medium. Future versions, they note, could be the size of a Blu-ray disc. The new method involved the use of a to remove single carbon atoms from the surface of the diamond, leaving a tiny cavity. The cavity, the researchers note, exhibits a certain level of brightness when another laser is shone on it.
The researchers found that by controlling the energy levels of the writing laser, they could control the degree of brightness of a given site on the diamond by removing certain numbers of atoms. In this way, data can be stored as empty spaces with various brightness levels. A reader laser could then be used to determine the level of a given site, and use that to decode the information.
The research team tested their idea by coding stored images onto a tiny diamond chip and found their method was 99% accurate. They acknowledge that their method is not currently economically viable, however, due to the high cost of the laser, but suggest it could be used for certain high-importance applications.
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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BYDE started production at phase 2 of its Changsha plant
While He Jiankui was acting against guidelines and he knew it, the actual act of him editing the babies is not wrong. People are squeamish about genetic editing for no reason. The main concern; unintended edits and unknown side effects of the edits that were made, are nothing compared to actual biological reproduction. Biology is messy, at that kind of scale , you're gonna to get replication errors everyone you have cell division. That's what causes mutations and cancer. It's just entropy and at that scale, it's unavoidable. Every time you have a child, there's dozens of unintended random very minor genetic changes, just as a result of replication errors. It's just that most of the time, this minor changes don't do much. But something you can just get some random major mutation that could cause some major never seen before disease, or be beneficial. That's literally how evolution works and how genetic disorders get created and passed on in the first place. Even for asexual reproduction, where the offspring are genetic clones of the mother, will have some minor genetic changes. Shall we ban all human reproduction because of this? After all, every time you have a child, you are just rolling the dice and praying that their particular mutations aren't harmful, it's no real difference from the the main potential side effects of gene editing.
On a more practical level, if you have to talk about "polluting the gene pool", society doesn't round up and ban people with serious genetic disorders from having as many children as they want, despite some diseases being extremely debilitating and having a very very high likelihood of passing it onto their children. Something like Huntington's disease as an example, if you have a parent that has this disorder, you have a 50% chance of getting it. If something as minor as the side effects of CRISPR editing is bad and subject to strict guidelines, why are this people allowed to have as many children as they want, despite the very high chance of them harming their children’s life by passing down this genetic diseases? And then there's minor genetic variations that select for higher risk for diabetes, asthma, stroke, heart disease, early onset dementia etc etc., no problem with them reproducing as them as they want, even though some of them can get really bad, like a long family history of family members constantly getting early cancer or early onset dementia or serious asthma.
Oh and human reproduction is a mess. Random mutation always happens. But a lot of common genetic disorders like down syndrome come about because of issues with the gametes. Like I have said, mutation and genetic drift occurs constantly, and we just constantly get more and more mutations as we age, even to our gametes. Our reproduction system has lots of safeguards in play to ensure that defective sperm doesn't meet up with a defective egg and if they do, they get purged. But it does happen and when it often does, it leads to lots of issues. That's why the older the father and mother, the bigger the chance of having genetic disorders. Shall we ban reproduction for parents over the age of 30?
Oh and there's epigenetic factors to worry about too. This field is still new, so it's very unclear as to the actual specifics, but it's clear that the environmental conditions of the mother during pregnancy can greatly influence the genetics of the child, usually in bad ways in our modern lifestyle that is awash in various drugs, bad air quality and lots of plastic. Even if you discount genetic changes, there's still disorders like fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Have any countries made it illegal to drink/smoke while pregnant? How about making it illegal to be pregnant in cities with bad air quality? How about making it illegal to get sick while pregnant?
All this "Oh no, we're playing God, this is the end of human society" is just bullshit soapboxing. This is like people who think that GM crops and livestock is the act of the devil, but human breeding wolves into pugs and french bulldogs is fine and okay because it's "natural". We wouldn't have the dozens of genetic disorders that plague the human race if natural biology and human reproduction was anywhere as good as we think/hope it is. Most countries don’t even make it illegal for pregnant mothers to drink alcohol or smoke but somehow the potential harm of genetic engineering on children is so bad that we have to immediately make it illegal the moment that it happens.
And instead of updating the guidelines or just keeping a closer watch on the process. They responded with a blanket ban on human germline editing. They should have just officially allowed the practise, but kept it under strict supervision and regulation and only for couples who have serious genetic diseases but want children anyway. As a rule, bans and regulations are much harder to remove then to put into place, doubly so for China. This also discourages researchers from even going into the field, let alone doing serious research into it.
As usual, it's gonna to be left behind in the race that causes China to wake up. Same story as always, America starts mass editing humans by the tens of thousands in 2050 and China goes "HOLY SHIT NATIONAL EMERGENCY ALERT, WE ARE DECADES BEHIND THIS THIS CRITICAL TECHOLOGNY, QUICKLY THROW REGULATIONS INTO A BIN AND POUR IN BILLIONS TO QUICKLY CATCH UP", instead of being the forerunner in this new field and setting the standards themselves.
And trust me, Chinese authorities are already very very aware and stupid when it comes to genetic technology. Just look at the state of China's GM crops industry. Only really in the last 4 years has China allowed for a trial roll out of commercial planting of GM food crops and this trial roll up is so slow that even today, major crops like GM rice is still not approved and the total land area for GM crop planting is 1% compared to conventional plant breeds. This is when China is super concerned over food security btw. GM crops have been in used in dozens of countries for decades and eaten daily by more than a billion people, but China is still so cautious because? China already imports and eats sooooo much GM food from other countries anyway, but at this rate, it will be another decade before GM crops exceed conventional plant breeds coverage on Chinese farms.
Meanwhile, countries like America have been mass planting GM crops for human consumption since the 90s and have already approved GM livestock for rearing and human consumption. If China is so cautious about a commonplace genetic technology that has been in use for decades, I wonder how they will handle human gene editing, or any of the radical synthetic biology and genetic technology coming the the next couple of decades like artificial wombs, lab grown meat, artificial blood/organs, longevity treatments, invasive brain computer interfaces, xenotransplantation etc etc. Probably blanket bans or smothering it in so many regulations that it never takes off in China.
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That is beside the point.
For me, it is the action he took without ethical oversight (if anything deliberately avoiding ethical oversight) and reckless abandon for doing what he did for actual human participants, which is more condemnatory for him.
The part about entering the human gene pool is a theoretical risk, and likely to be relatively minor, trivial or even a non-issue --- but it wasn't up to He Jiankui to make that call himself.
You should probably be more irritated at He Jiankui than I am then, considering what his actions have wrought.
Going back to my original post, my point is that He Jiankui is no leader or visionary. He is certainly reckless, and appears to be vain and self aggrandizing as well.
And my point is that this issue wouldn't need this much ethical oversight and regulation if it were not for the preconceived bias that people have over the subject. Again, we don't have this level of ethical angst and regulation over couples having babies, even if said couples have horrible genetic diseases that will doom their children to have a horrible life.
This is the insane double standard that doesn't make logical sense. This is like how we can breed billions of chickens, pigs and cows in factory farms in conditions that a Nazi SS officer would find horrible without any fuss, but suggest eating cats, dogs and horses and people call you a monster.
Medical history has always been filled with shit like this. Pioneers were always found to be vile horrible monsters at their time or laughed at, at their time, they did it anyway and the field and ethical standards caught up. People in the 18th century would have remembered Charles Darwin as a horrible devil worshiper who was in league with Satan to kill Christianity. Early doctors were hated for their habit of grave robbing in order to obtain the dead bodies needed for their research. Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered the insane idea of hand washing to reduce infections... and got laughed at and thrown into an asylum for his troubles. Hela cells got taken without consent from a poor woman, whose family didn't get a cent from the research. And I can go on and on. In the end, a lot of people still benefited from their work, even if it is insanely unethical and dangerous. Which He Jiankui's work isn't, dangerous that is.
Like it or not, a lot of medical advances have happened outside of the law and ethical oversight, and needed to happen outside the law/ethical board too, other else they won't have happened at all.
And yet if he had courted someone suffering with a horrible genetic disease, something like Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva and had a dozen of children with her, dooming most of them to a life filled with intense suffering, nobody would have made a fuss. Do you see the double standard here?
Considering how much China is tip toeing around basic GM crops that are commonplace in dozens of countries for decades already, let's be honest, the ban didn't change anything. China was always going to be very much behind in this field. If anything, the intense stigma and regulation could have been what caused He Jiankui to do what he did, to draw attention to the field and try to get china to relax regulations. It didn't work of course, but if that's what he was trying to do, I can't blame him.
And again, the risks are low. We're already courting dozens of entirely random mutations every time a child is born. This is like arresting someone for driving a car with a different color. Not because it has 5 wheels, or that it has a nuclear engine, purely because it has a different coat of paint. Random mutations happen all the time in nature. But make a purposeful edit and suddenly it's bad?
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Yupe, China needs regulations that are more bold and preogressive so the biogenetic sector can flourish and compete with the best of the world. In the rice growing sector, it almost feels like there are some old pioneers are influencing the government to prevent methods to grow new and more nutritious rice just to protect their own legacy.
If China keep falling behind other countries in the Bio-tech/genetic sector then the consequnces will be much more greater and far-reaching than that of them behind China in EVs.
If your argument is that ethical oversight and regulations are currently excessive towards this specific domain of science, then that is a different topic which I am not entirely unsympathetic to.
However the way in which He Jiankui is perceived entirely depends on the validity and logic of existing ethical oversights and regulations.
I would add that in this case ethical oversight isn't even only about the actions of his genetic editing itself -- but the mere fact he involved human participants without ethical oversight is outrageous in and of itself.
Unless he was planning to carry out genetic editing experiments on the person, or otherwise treat beyond his scope of practice (which from what I understand is zero, as he is not a medical doctor or practicing clinician), there is no double standard.
It's the equivalent of arresting someone who is driving home drunk with blood alcohol only a fraction beyond the legal limit, while not arresting someone driving home who has worked a full night shift and may be in an equally poor or worse state of mind.
As I said, I don't have a huge problem with the material or physical impacts of the editing he did and its implications on the human population per se, but the lack of regard he showed to basic scientific decency, and the manner he has conducted himself after his release from prison has shown he has not learned anything and continues to believe what he conducted was righteous and correct.
i found this news very interesting so posting this information..
For a long time commercial coffee machine has been an Italian monopoly. A Chinese entrepreneur found this new race track and dived into it, creating this all new revolutionary commercial coffee machine ''CAYE'' in Suzhou City in 2023..
The company has applied for nearly a hundred patents. The first commercial-grade fully automatic coffee machine mass-produced in the first half of 2024.
For a long time commercial coffee machine has been an Italian monopoly. A Chinese entrepreneur found this new race track and dived into it, creating this all new revolutionary commercial coffee machine ''CAYE'' in Suzhou City in 2023..
The company has applied for nearly a hundred patents. The first commercial-grade fully automatic coffee machine mass-produced in the first half of 2024.