Entrepreneurs say it's time to safety-test designer baby technology. A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he's secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely create genetically edited babies, marking the largest known investment into the taboo technology. The new company, called Preventive, is being formed to research so-called "heritable genome editing," in which the DNA of embryos would be modified by correcting harmful mutations or installing beneficial genes. The goal would be to prevent disease. Preventive was founded by the gene-editing scientist Lucas Harrington, who described his plans yesterday in a blog post announcing the venture. Preventive, he said, will not rush to try out the technique but instead will dedicate itself "to rigorously researching whether heritable genome editing can be done safely and responsibly."

For years, dual roles have been played largely for laughs. Think of Adam Sandler's Razzie-sweeping twin turn in Jack and Jill, or Lisa Kudrow as both Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on Friends. Eddie Murphy was always particularly prolific, his most multiplicitous performance as a clutch of Klumps for Nutty Professor II. There are exceptions, of course. But for every Legend or The Prestige there are ten Austin Powers, Bowfingers and – shudder – Norbits.

The challenge of selecting the most relevant features of a given dataset arises ubiquitously in data analysis and dimensionality reduction. However, features found to be of high importance for the entire dataset may not be relevant to subsets of interest, and vice versa. Given a feature selector and a fixed decomposition of the data into subsets, we describe a method for identifying selected features which are compatible with the decomposition into subsets. We achieve this by re-framing the problem of finding compatible features to one of finding sections of a suitable quiver representation. In order to approximate such sections, we then introduce a Laplacian operator for quiver representations valued in Hilbert spaces. We provide explicit bounds on how the spectrum of a quiver Laplacian changes when the representation and the underlying quiver are modified in certain natural ways. Finally, we apply this machinery to the study of peak-calling algorithms which measure chromatin accessibility in single-cell data. We demonstrate that eigenvectors of the associated quiver Laplacian yield locally and globally compatible features.

The electric 2022 Chevrolet Bolt EUV offers GM's hands-free Super Cruise highway driving assistang. Fox News Autos Editor Gary Gastelu lets it take him for a spin. Polaris is getting into the autonomous car business … slowly. The company is jointly developing a self-driving shuttle with Optimus Ride, which currently operates pilot loops in Brooklyn, Washington D.C. and several other locations using prototypes built on the Polaris Gem e6 platform. Polaris and Optimus Ride are jointly-developing a production autonomous shuttle.

A panel at the launch of Roffey Park's Management Agenda 2018 report discussed the challenge of managing remote workers and the importance of cognitive diversity Organisations must act now to embrace technology and shape it in a way that works for them, agreed a panel speaking at the launch of this year's Management Agenda report from Roffey Park. A key focus of this year's report was AI and the fourth industrial revolution. Surveying nearly 700 managers, it found that only 17% believe their organisation has the leadership and people skills to take advantage of AI, and only 38% that their organisation is investing in reskilling employees to keep pace with technology. It also found that 21% of managers don't think their organisation has the technical skills and expertise to take advantage of AI. Speaking on the panel, Siân Harrington, founder of The People Space and former publisher of HR magazine, commented that she was actually surprised that the 38% figure was so high.

One of the most orgasmic moments in a woman's day is usually when she gets home and unhooks her bra, freeing her breasts from the sweaty, constrictive cage of cheap lingerie. Bras are often uncomfortable because most mainstream brands in the $28 billion lingerie industry still haven't figured out a sizing process that complements diverse bodies. Technologists have already made high-tech athletic wear commonplace and started re-engineering the shoe industry. Could the tech industry make everyday bras, not just luxury lingerie, garments that women can actually enjoy wearing? The Israeli fashion startup Brayola has raised over $6.4 million to finally moderinze bra shopping.