What Seattle needs to be a digital health leader — and why it isn’t one yet
Guest Commentary: Fred Wilson’s comments about Seattle being a “third-tier” startup city stirred up much debate. As the CEO of Seattle-based health games startup Litesprite, I view this topic from a healthcare point of...
Biogeochemistry: Synergy of a warm spring and dry summer
An analysis suggests that high carbon uptake by US land ecosystems during the warm spring of 2012 offset the carbon loss that resulted from severe drought over the summer — and hints that the warm spring could have worsened the drought.
Nature doi: 10.1038/nature18450
Microsoft teams up with ‘seed to sale’ marijuana company to build government software
Recreational marijuana is legal in four states and the District of Columbia, but many financial institutions and other big businesses have yet to embrace the new industry.
Microsoft is breaking that trend by teaming up with a Los Angeles company...
Design of a hyperstable 60-subunit protein icosahedron
The icosahedron is the largest of the Platonic solids, and icosahedral protein structures are widely used in biological systems for packaging and transport. There has been considerable interest in repurposing such structures for applications ranging from targeted delivery to multivalent immunogen presentation. The ability to design proteins that self-assemble into precisely specified, highly ordered icosahedral structures would open the door to a new generation...
No-go for show: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin delays spaceship test due to bad O-ring
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture is delaying its first live-streamed space launch due to a leaky O-ring seal.
Blue...
Design of a hyperstable 60-subunit protein icosahedron
The icosahedron is the largest of the Platonic solids, and icosahedral protein structures are widely used in biological systems for packaging and transport. There has been considerable interest in repurposing such structures for applications ranging from targeted delivery to multivalent immunogen presentation. The ability to design proteins that self-assemble into precisely specified, highly ordered icosahedral structures would open the door to a new generation...
Geek of the Week: Porch’s Matthew Neagle finds a home in Seattle, helping others improve theirs
Matthew Neagle was drawn to startups by the qualities he learned early in his career working for the non-profit leadership organization AIESEC. He knew he wanted to...
Proteome-wide covalent ligand discovery in native biological systems
Small molecules are powerful tools for investigating protein function and can serve as leads for new therapeutics. Most human proteins, however, lack small-molecule ligands, and entire protein classes are considered ‘undruggable’. Fragment-based ligand discovery can identify small-molecule probes for proteins that have proven difficult to target using high-throughput screening of complex compound libraries. Although reversibly binding ligands are commonly pursued, covalent fragments provide an...
Startup Spotlight: InfoSpace co-founders lead marketing analytics startup Versium
Two decades in the big data and analytics space revealed a problem that Versium co-founders Chris Matty and Kevin Marcus believed they could solve. They observed the huge volume of data generated by...