There are all manner of musical myths, covering tones and melodies that have effects ranging from the profound to the supernatural. The Pied Piper, for example, or the infamous “brown note.”
But what about a song that could crash your laptop just by playing it? Even better, a song that could crash nearby laptops in the vicinity, too? It’s not magic, and it’s not a trick—it was just a punchy pop song that Janet Jackson wrote back in 1989.
The last interesting thing to happen in Donald, BC was when it burned down in the 1910s.
Well, they’ve thankfully moved out of the tent in their parents’ back yard where the prototype was built. They’ve bought themselves a company town: Donald, British Columbia, complete with a totally-not-controversial slogan “Make Donald Great Again”.
More interesting is that their commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), right-to-repair centered approach isn’t just for semi-trucks: they’re now a certified OEM manufacturer of a rolling heavy truck chassis you can put your truck cab or RV body on, and they have partnered with three coach-builders for RVs and a goodly number of manufacturing partners for truck conversion kits. The kits were always in the plan, but selling the rolling chassis is new.
One amazingly honest take-away from the video is the lack of numbers for the pickups: top speed, shaft horsepower, torque? They know what all that should be, but unlike the typical vaporware startup, Edison won’t tell you the engineering numbers on the pickup truck kits until it has hit the race track and proved itself in the real world. These guys are gear-heads first and engineers second, so for once in a long time the adage “engineers hate mechanics” might not apply to a new vehicle.
The dirt track is the first thing under construction in Donald, so hopefully the next update we hear from Edison Motors will include those hard numbers, including pesky little things like MSRP and delivery dates. Stay tuned.
In our last post about an electric truck, a lot of you in the comments wanted something bigger, heavier duty, not pure battery, and made outside the USA. Well, here it is.
With immunotherapy increasingly making it out of the lab and into hospitals as a viable way to treat serious conditions like cancer, there’s a lot of pressure to optimize these therapies. This is especially true for therapies involving chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, which so far required a cumbersome process of extracting the patient’s T cells, modifying them ex vivo and returning the now CAR T cells to the patient’s body. After a recently published study, it seems that we may see in vivo CAR T cell therapy become reality, with all the ease of getting a vaccine shot.
We covered CAR T cells previously in the context of a way to prevent T cell exhaustion and making them more effective against certain tumors. This new study (paywalled) by [Theresa L. Hunter] et al. as published in Science demonstrates performing the CAR manipulation in vivo using CD8+ T cell targeting lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA to reprogram these T cells directly.
In rodent and non-human primate studies a clear effect on tumor control was demonstrated, with for auto-immune diseases the related B cells becoming effectively depleted. Although it’s still a long way off from human trials and market approval, this research builds upon the knowledge gained from existing mRNA vaccines, raising hopes that one day auto-immune or cancer therapy could be as simple as getting a cheap, standardized shot.
