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The breakthrough method paves the way for correcting gene defects anywhere in the body. Most CRISPR-related treatments involve treatment of the cells in-vitro - outside the body and then injecting them into the target organ. Using CRISPR in-vivo - inside the body is a different ball game, requiring the transport of the whole editing assembly inside the cells. Researchers at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Intellia Therapeutics developed an injectable CRISPR treatment with a simple operation. They used messenger RNAs (mRNAs), which carry instructions for making proteins. Since the host cell can use the mRNAs to make its own proteins, researchers simply needed to send enough information to enable CRISPR editing inside the cell. To this effect, they injected two messenger RNAs (mRNAs), one to identify the mutation on the TTR gene and for making the Cas protein that can cut the DNA at the directed site. Since liver cells actively uptake foreign particles and are the site of origin for the d...

Luisa Cutting was on Xanax, Adderall, cocaine, alcohol, mushrooms, and marijuana when she butchered her best friend. Luisa Ines Cutting and Alexa Cannon weren’t just compatible college roommates. They were best friends living in an off-campus apartment together— until a January night of drugs and alcohol ended in “doing cocaine with the devil” and murder. Twenty-one-year-old Cutting, a Radford University student, pled guilty to second-degree murder on Monday and has since been sentenced to 20 years in prison. According to Yahoo , police were called to her residence at 7.45 a.m. Upon arrival, the police heard a woman “making reference to a knife” and were met at the door by a woman “covered in blood.” “The female turned around, placed her hands behind and her back and stated, ‘Arrest me,'” the search warrant read . When an officer asked the blood-drenched woman what happened, she said, “I killed her.” When police entered the apartment, they saw a woman with multiple stab wounds on t...

After a widower decided he will no longer let people look the other way, he posted photos of the nightmare he was living. Empathetic viewers were shocked to see what was in the coffin with the man’s deceased wife. Now, many say the person responsible didn’t face stiff enough consequences. See for yourself, and you decide. Zach Kincaid had his life turned upside down when his beloved wife of 12 years was killed after being struck by a car driven by 28-year-old Marcos Forestal. Going 85 mph, speeding down the wrong lane, Forestal was reportedly drunk when he crashed into Krystil Kincaid’s minivan in Hemet, California at 8:30 pm on that fateful night. Making matters worse, Zach was on the phone with Krystil when tragedy struck and his world was torn completely apart. “We were talking, and then I just heard her scream,” the 34-year-old widower recalled. “That scream only probably lasted about two seconds, but it replays in my mind very, very slowly,” he added. “There was a quiver of almost...

Marine biologists have discovered a spine-chilling new species of brittle star deep in the South Pacific. The creature, dubbed Ophiojura exbodi, has eight four-inch appendages, each covered in rows of sharp spines. Experts say its almost unheard of for brittle stars to have eight arms. Even more daunting than its appendages, though, are its teeth—eight rows of razor-sharp chompers. They believe Ophiojura, hidden away on an underwater mountain, has remained essentially unchanged for 180 million years, since the early Jurassic period. Researchers in the South Pacific uncovered what they believe is a new species related to the starfish, with eight rows of razor sharp teeth to snatch and shred prey. Scientists from the French Natural History Museum first discovered this otherworldly specimen in 2011, more than 1,600 feet below surface on the summit of Banc Durand, an underwater mountain in the South Pacific over 120 miles east of New Caledonia. Like their distant relatives the starfish, br...

A rotifer. Researchers have successfully revived one of these small animals after 24,000 years in permafrost A tiny animal called a rotifer has been revived after spending 24,000 years frozen in permafrost. It is the longest a rotifer has been observed to survive in such extreme cold. While simple organisms like bacteria can often survive millennia in permafrost, “this is an animal with a nervous system and brain and everything”, says Stas Malavin at the Pushchino Scientific Center for Biological Research RAS in Russia. It isn’t quite a record – nematode worms have purportedly been revived from permafrost after 30,000 years – but no rotifer has been known to endure for so long. Malavin and his team drilled into permafrost near the Alazeya river in north-east Siberia, Russia, in 2015. They found a single rotifer, a worm-like creature less than a quarter of a millimetre long. When the researchers warmed it up and gave it food, it became active. It also reproduced, because it is a bdelloi...

THANKS TO THE MOVIE JAWS, we’re well aware of sharks every time we splash and surf in the shallows. But despite any fear of attack, you’re far more likely to die from an errant firework or a lightning strike than a shark bite. The likelihood of encountering a shark is low — and their numbers are dwindling. In ancient times, however, you’d be smart to avoid diving in. According to new research, the ocean was home to massive, thriving shark populations approximately 19 million years ago. That was until they were decimated by a previously unknown extinction event. “There were somewhere between 10 and 50 times more sharks present in the open ocean before this extinction, and they were much more diverse — there were many many more species,” Elizabeth Sibert tells Inverse. Sibert is a Hutchinson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Sciences at Yale University and one of the co-authors of the new study. These findings were published Thursday in the journal Science. WHAT’S ...

A previously unknown form of a severe and progressive neurodegenerative disease that usually affects older adults has been identified in children as young as three years of age. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare neurological disorder where motor neuron degeneration leads to serious impairments in voluntary muscle movement. The condition, which causes increasing weakness in muscles throughout the body, makes walking, talking, and eventually even breathing a struggle, leading to death in most patients within a few years of symptoms showing. The majority of ALS cases emerge in people aged between 55 and 75, and most cases are considered sporadic, with the cause ultimately remaining unknown. For some people, however, the disease presents very differently. In a minority of cases, genetics appears to play a causative role – and sometimes the disease shows up in much younger people. Above: Study authors Carsten Bönnemann (right) and Payam Mohassel (left) assess patient Claudia Di...

The world’s largest and deadliest rapids are also crucibles of life. According to a new study, the final stretch of Africa’s Congo River—which packs five times the water flow of the Mississippi River into just 320 kilometers—has likely given birth to several new fish species since it formed some 5 million years ago. That’s impressive, because even though scientists have long known that geographical features like mountains and rivers can isolate animal populations—eventually giving rise to new species—rushing water is typically not thought to be the culprit.  To find out just how different the fish of Congo’s Inga Rapids and nearby waters were, evolutionary biologists captured about 50 rock-dwelling fish known as cichlids from the genus Teleogramma.  They then examined them for morphological differences and sequenced about 2% of their DNA. What they found surprised them: Just as these waters have been so deadly to people—no one had successfully run the rapids until 6 years ago—...