BLOGS

Where I get my artwork Framed and Matted….

WALLS OF ART / NINTH WAVE

CUSTOM FRAMING

3411 54TH STREET

LOS ANGELES CA 90043

(323) 301 6908

Store Hours: 10AM - 5 PM

Tues- Sat

African American Owned and Operated

Check them out!

Topics: Biology, Chemistry, DNA, Nobel Prize, Research, Women in Science

This year’s (2020) Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans. 

The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, “for the development of a method for genome editing.” They first showed that CRISPR—which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats—could edit DNA in an in vitro system in a paper published in the 28 June 2012 issue of Science. Their discovery was rapidly expanded on by many others and soon made CRISPR a common tool in labs around the world. The genome editor spawned industries working on making new medicines, agricultural products, and ways to control pests.

Many scientists anticipated that Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, who showed 6 months later that CRISPR worked in mammalian cells, would share the prize. The institutions of the three scientists are locked in a fierce patent battle over who deserves the intellectual property rights to CRISPR’s discovery, which some estimate could be worth billions of dollars.

“The ability to cut DNA where you want has revolutionized the life sciences. The genetic scissors were discovered 8 years ago, but have already benefited humankind greatly,” Pernilla Wittung Stafshede, a chemical biologist at the Chalmers University of Technology, said at the prize briefing.

CRISPR was also used in one of the most controversial biomedical experiments of the past decade, when a Chinese scientist edited the genomes of human embryos, resulting in the birth of three babies with altered genes. He was widely condemned and eventually sentenced to jail in China, a country that has become a leader in other areas of CRISPR research.

Although scientists were not surprised Doudna and Charpentier won the prize, Charpentier was stunned. “As much as I have been awarded a number of prizes, it’s something you hear, but you don’t completely connect,” she said in a phone call with the Nobel Prize officials. “I was told a number of times that when it happens, you’re very surprised and feel that it’s not real.”

At a press briefing today, Doudna noted she was asleep and missed the initial calls from Sweden, only waking up to answer the phone finally when a Nature reporter called. "She wanted to know if I could comment on the Nobel and I said, Well, who won it? And she was shocked that she was the person to tell me."

CRISPR, the revolutionary genetic ‘scissors,’ honored by Chemistry Nobel, Jon Cohen, Science Magazine, AAAS

MARCH 2021 – AMG® CELEBRATES AFRICAN HERSTORY MONTH WITH

“BLACK MINDS MATTER!”

Donating copies of 5 titles from

ABYSSINIA MEDIA GROUP®

in the book reading box at

F.A.M.E. Church of Los Angeles

2270 South Harvard Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90018

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Climate Change, COVID-19, Democracy, Existentialism, Human Rights

Thank you, Reginald!

You're all signed up for "(1st Dose) COVID - 19 Vaccine Clinic."

Vaccine Appointment

03/11/2021 (Thu.) 1:45pm - 2:00pm EST

Location: NC A&T Alumni Foundation Building (200 N. Benbow Rd.)

My Comment: Older graduate student, 58 years.

Thank you for registering to receive dose 1 of the COVID-19 vaccine. Please note the following:

The instructions noted the address (I knew), where to park in proximity to the NC A&T Alumni Foundation building, instructions to enter the building from N. Benbow Road, and to bring a valid student ID. The same building I've celebrated the Greensboro Four every first of February, kicking off African American/Black History Month at the nation's largest HBCU.

My wife received her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last Saturday at the Greensboro Coliseum. It's the ten-year anniversary of the Fukushima Daichi accident. I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine on also ironically, the first anniversary the World Health Organization declared SARS-CoV-2, the Novel Coronavirus, a worldwide pandemic.

Every STEM major student at a primary or historically black college suddenly was thrust into a world of "I Am Legend" protocols against an invisible zombie apocalypse. Navigating research to attain a Master's, or Ph.D. is challenging enough: add to it KN95 masks, 3.66 meters of social distance (12 feet, for the British unit crowd), washing hands, hand sanitizers every 10 meters, and protocol-driven digital, and analog sign-in/sign-out for contact tracing. There's also been isolation, the lack of banter with classmates, no lunches between experiments, or card games. Science is from our hunter-gatherer ancestors: it's a social exercise. Our worlds have been reduced to the dimensions of our laptop monitors, the visual cues common to hominids in conversation reduced to two-dimensional "Zoom fatigue."

To cope with the angst of "sameness," I retreated, or returned more apt and accurately, to spoken word poetry: STEM extended by one vowel is STEAM, the "A" for art, and Einstein played the violin. On Sundays, I perform for a venue in Austin, Texas that's called "Spoken and Heard," started by a friend going by the stage name "Element 615" (don't bother looking it up: it doesn't exist), managed by some poetry friends, and streamed on Facebook and YouTube via Skype. Our poetry tends to center on the topics of the recent week's news.

"Mask Mandates and Starships" was my reaction to the day before, the state of Texas lifted their statewide mask mandate. The news for Greg Abbott's re-election looked grim after botched handling of a once-in-a-hundred-years climate change event (that seems to be occurring annually). If Abbott didn't learn anything from the last administration when you can't solve a problem: bluff, blame, and deflect to something else. Gaslighting 101. It solves nothing but shows his disdain for the citizens of Texas: he really thinks they're stupid. No one rows a boat, or pilots a light sail in multiple directions. It gets you nowhere fast.

The thesis of the piece is, it will take extreme and global cooperation to build ONE vehicle capable of interstellar travel, let alone a fleet of them. The same cooperation we're going to need to get out of this pandemic. Though there is much writing of papers on the Alcubierre Drive, a breakthrough to superluminal speeds taking us to other worlds is highly unlikely. We're born, will live, and die on this one. Hopefully, so will our progeny. We still have radiation poisoning, the current, and future pandemics, climate disasters that are occurring with the frequency of subway lines in New York, or Philly. Continuation of any civilization isn't guaranteed, and discontinuations have many precedents in history.

Zoonotic diseases aren't new, and they tend to strike every one hundred years. The Great Dying was due to the introduction of things like measles, smallpox, influenza, typhus, and tuberculosis to Native American populations by the invasion of Spain and Portugal to the Americas. It is naïve, and ignorant to name any pathogen after its point of origin; racist and xenophobic to center it on one culture. It is also placing whole populations not responsible for the spread in danger of physical violence, which solves nothing. The first piece of legislation on immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, meant to curb the rise in their population for ten years, signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882. This is in America's DNA. Tribalism and any other narcissistic "ism" will not save us.

Asian Americans scapegoated. Black Lives (obviously don't) Matter. The LGBT are human beings, not scarecrows hung like Matthew Shepard. Women's Rights ARE Human rights. Unless the pathogen was dropped on us from Alpha Centauri, it, and we all live here.

We either live together or die miserably, and sadly into extinction.

What if this pandemic, / Is Gia’s test / Before we leave the nest? / “In space, no one can hear [you]r screams,” / No matter replicators or Uber Eats, / No 911 to call for assistance, / No tribes to define oneself with, / No conservatives, liberals, republicans, or democrats, / The only question is, “no rescue is coming; can WE fix it?” / No poetic Latin words E Pluribus Unum, / The only governing philosophy boiled down to three letters: GSD, equaling “get shit done!” / More “final frontier” than we’ve ever been,.. from "Mask Mandates and Starships."

We conclusively know now we cannot gaslight a pandemic. 543,690 deaths, and counting. If we can't do the simple things, are we mature enough to become a space-faring species?

What if? Are we?

 We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe. Chadwick Boseman, as King T'Challa in the movie, "Black Panther" (Rest In Power), from Internet Movie Database.

1 Soap, shampoo, and worm-like micelles Soaps and shampoos are made from amphiphilic molecules with water-loving (red) and water-hating (blue) parts that arrange themselves to form long tubes known as “worm-like micelles”. Entanglements between the tubes give these materials their pleasant, sticky feel. b The micelles can, however, disentangle themselves, just as entangled long-chain polymer molecules can slide apart too. In polymers, this process can be modeled by imagining the molecule sliding, like a snake, out of an imaginary tube formed by the surrounding spatial constraints. c Worm-like micelles can also morph their architecture by performing reconnections (left), breakages (down), and fusions (right). These operations occur randomly along the backbone, are in thermal equilibrium, and reversible. (Courtesy: Davide Michieletto)

Topics: Biology, DNA, Physics, Polymer Science, Research

DNA molecules are not fixed objects – they are constantly getting broken up and glued back together to adopt new shapes. Davide Michieletto explains how this process can be harnessed to create a new generation of “topologically active” materials.

Call me naïve, but until a few years ago I had never realized you can actually buy DNA. As a physicist, I’d been familiar with DNA as the “molecule of life” – something that carries genetic information and allows complex organisms, such as you and me, to be created. But I was surprised to find that biotech firms purify DNA from viruses and will ship concentrated solutions in the post. In fact, you can just go online and order DNA, which is exactly what I did. Only there was another surprise in store.

When the DNA solution arrived at my lab in Edinburgh, it came in a tube with about half a milligram of DNA per centimeter cube of water. Keen to experiment on it, I tried to pipette some of the solution out, but it didn’t run freely into my plastic tube. Instead, it was all gloopy and resisted the suction of my pipette. I rushed over to a colleague in my lab, eagerly announcing my amazing “discovery”. They just looked at me like I was an idiot. Of course, solutions of DNA are gloopy.

I should have known better. It’s easy to idealize DNA as some kind of magic material, but it’s essentially just a long-chain double-helical polymer consisting of four different types of monomers – the nucleotides A, T, C, and G, which stack together into base pairs. And like all polymers at high concentrations, the DNA chains can get entangled. In fact, they get so tied up that a single human cell can have up to 2 m of DNA crammed into an object just 10 μm in size. Scaled up, it’s like storing 20 km of hair-thin wire in a box no bigger than your mobile phone.

Make or break: building soft materials with DNA, Davide Michieletto is a Royal Society university research fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh

If you're like me and want to write a novel, I would highly recommend this book by Jessica Brody. It is a slam-dunk as far as getting you to understand writing plot points, characters and beats of your story. A few people had told me about this book and suggested it, but I somehow never got around to reading it...until now. Wow! It is amazing. And for a book on writing, and not just a novel to read for fun, it kept me turning the pages, page after page.

Ms. Brody lays out in clear explanation how a great story has an A story and a B story. "The A story is the external story," what happens, the journey your character takes on in order to accomplish whatever goal they are trying to reach. "...the B story is the internal story," whatever internal/personal goal the character must learn in order to grow, adapt, change as they go along on the journey.

I underlined and tagged so many pages, my book looks like it's throwing out confetti! I love how she goes into the details of how stories move the same as movies, through Acts 1, 2 and 3. She even goes further and breaks down Act 2 into 2a and 2b since this is the bulk of any story, the middle, the conflict. I even liked how she gave percentages of much each act should take up in your story.

The examples she breaks down into their respective parts are so thoroughly laid out in clear, clean, concise language that as I was reading, I was thinking, "Wow, okay, I get that now." And you will too, if you're looking for a straightforward way of understanding plot, acts, character development, climax and story end.

She uses a different type of "genre" breakdown. Rather than your standard, science fiction, romance, mystery genre breakdown, she goes into genres of what "type of story" it is. For instance, is your story a "Rites of Passage" story, a "Superhero" story, a "Buddy Love" story or a "Golden Fleece" story? Once you read the book, you'll understand what she means and, hopefully, it will open your eyes as it did for me.

Overall, this book was a knockout for me. Wish I had read it earlier. And, I enjoyed it so much, that I'm planning on reading "Save The Cat!" by Blake Snyder on screenwriting.

My grade: A+ for "Save The Cat! Writes A Novel." Hope you enjoy it and gain as much information from it as I did.

Jackie Cannon

COMING SOON......

Martian Homecoming

https://www.facebook.com/Martianhomecoming

It is the year 2072, And Humankind has reached out to Mars.
With resources being depleted daily, nations and corporations are terraforming Mars to be habitable.
A group of Martian archeologists discover that Mars was home to a race over 10,000 years ago.
All of a sudden....a large space ship from the outer reaches of time and space is headed for our solar system.
Only one person with the United Nations of Outer Space Affairs wants to know why they are headed for Mars

And everyone will stop him from finding out.

This will be a live action novel of....

Happy Anniversary - Black Science Fiction Society Turns 13! 

Thank you all for your support throughout the years. Each of you are sincerely appreciated. 

Thank You All!

I want to thank everyone for your support over the years. I set out 13 years ago to provide a place for Black Science Fiction that is not simply a group or magazine, but an interactive community where consumers, as well as developers of Black science fiction, can communicate, support, collaborate, and thrive together. It’s been a humbling experience to be a part of the world’s largest online community devoted to this genre. 

Our Mission

Our mission is to encourage racial and ethnic diversity through various forms of media. Please join us as we move into another year of building lifelong friendships and creating even more creative books, magazines, radio shows, posters, coloring books, news, reviews, toys, and games with us at www.BlackScienceFictionSociety.com

Why Black Science Fiction Society?

If you haven't joined our free community, please do so today. You can post events, art, blog, videos, and more for free. Many of our members have gone on to win awards, create books, comics, movies, art, animations, toys, and other creative works. Join our community and network with others of like mind.

We Have Allot To Celebrate!

We have made great strides since the inception of our community

2008 Created Science Fiction Social Networking Community Site   

2009 Black Sci-Fi Posters Collection  

2010 Published Genesis Anthology of Science Fiction Book I  

2011 Published Genesis Science Fiction Magazine  

2012 Created Genesis Science Fiction Radio Show  

2013 Published Genesis Anthology of Science Fiction Book II  

2013 Began Digital Production Studio Project  

2014 Start Pre-productions of our 3D Sci-Fi Action Film Earth Squadron

2015 Formed Black Science Fiction Society as a 501C Nonprofit   

2016 Started Process for creating Toys & Games that represent our multi-ethnic world  

2016 Created the Heritage Coloring Book a coloring book for all ages 

2017 Produced new posters, cups, and puzzles 

2018 Partnered with Dragoncon to spearhead the Diversity Track  

2019 Become the facilitators of the African American Author Fair & Independent Creators Expo 

2020 Had our first two of our comic book characters appear in the Powerverse Cross Play Card Game

OUR GOALS FOR 2021  

1. Getting more activity on the site is a major goal for 2021. Please drop by and invite your friends.
2. Publishing Genesis Magazine 12 with a new direction and energy!
3. Getting Genesis Book 3 is being compiled and published by the summer
4. Moving forward with the Earth Squadron 3D Animated Video
5. Hosting our virtual event the African American Author Fair Fall 2021 or Spring 2022

SUPPORT OUR COMMUNITY FOR OUR MUTUAL SUCCESS

We want to let you know that you can support our continued success in different ways such as:

Volunteer With Us

Volunteer to help out with site options and promotions. If you want to be a part of the solution we have many opportunities. Get in where you fit in, inbox the Admin or email if you are interested at: info@blacksciencefictionsociety.com

Buy Some Stuff

Buy from books, t-shirt, posters, magazine, etc. from our store:

http://theafrofuturismcollection.com/

Make A  Donation

https://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/page/donate-here

Get A VIP Account

https://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/page/advertise-1

HOW CAN WE IMPROVE?

Please share your suggestions so we can continue the work we are doing on the Black Science Fiction Society and make it better. Together we can do great things As always, thank you all for your membership and your support. 

Jarvis Sheffield, M.Ed.

Director/Administrator

www.BlackScienceFictionSociety.com

Info@BlackScienceFictionSociety.com

a, Manhattan plot of a genome-wide association study of 3,199 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and 897,488 population controls. The dashed line indicates genome-wide significance (P = 5 × 10⁻⁸). Data were modified from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative² (https://www.covid19hg.org/). b, Linkage disequilibrium between the index risk variant (rs35044562) and genetic variants in the 1000 Genomes Project. Red circles indicate genetic variants for which the alleles are correlated to the risk variant (r² > 0.1) and the risk alleles match the Vindija 33.19 Neanderthal genome. The core Neanderthal haplotype (r² > 0.98) is indicated by a black bar. Some individuals carry longer Neanderthal-like haplotypes. The location of the genes in the region is indicated below using standard gene symbols. The x-axis shows hg19 coordinates.

Topics: Biology, COVID-19, Genetics, Research

Abstract

A recent genetic association study¹ identified a gene cluster on chromosome 3 as a risk locus for respiratory failure after infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). A separate study (COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative)² comprising 3,199 hospitalized patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and control individuals showed that this cluster is the major genetic risk factor for severe symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization. Here we show that the risk is conferred by a genomic segment of around 50 kilobases in size that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by around 50% of people in South Asia and around 16% of people in Europe.

Main

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused considerable morbidity and mortality and has resulted in the death of over a million people to date³. The clinical manifestations of the disease caused by the virus, SARS-CoV-2, vary widely in severity, ranging from no or mild symptoms to rapid progression to respiratory failure⁴. Early in the pandemic, it became clear that advanced age is a major risk factor, as well as being male and some co-morbidities⁵. These risk factors, however, do not fully explain why some people have no or mild symptoms whereas others have severe symptoms. Thus, genetic risk factors may have a role in disease progression. A previous study¹ identified two genomic regions that are associated with severe COVID-19: one region on chromosome 3, which contains six genes, and one region on chromosome 9 that determines ABO blood groups. Recently, a dataset was released by the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative in which the region on chromosome 3 is the only region that is significantly associated with severe COVID-19 at the genome-wide level (Fig. 1a). The risk variant in this region confers an odds ratio for requiring hospitalization of 1.6 (95% confidence interval, 1.42–1.79) (Extended Data Fig. 1).

The genetic variants that are most associated with severe COVID-19 on chromosome 3 (45,859,651–45,909,024 (hg19)) are all in high linkage disequilibrium (LD)—that is, they are all strongly associated with each other in the population (r² > 0.98)—and span 49.4 thousand bases (kb) (Fig. 1b). This ‘core’ haplotype is furthermore in weaker linkage disequilibrium with longer haplotypes of up to 333.8 kb (r² > 0.32) (Extended Data Fig. 2). Some such long haplotypes have entered the human population by gene flow from Neanderthals or Denisovans, extinct hominins that contributed genetic variants to the ancestors of present-day humans around 40,000–60,000 years ago^6,7. We, therefore, investigated whether the haplotype may have come from Neanderthals or Denisovans.

The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals, Hugo Zeberg, & Svante Pääbo, Nature

COMING SOON...

https://www.facebook.com/MartiansGoHomeProject/

It is the year 2072, And Humankind has reached out to Mars.
With resources being depleted daily, nations and corporations are terraforming Mars to be habitable.
A family of Martian archeologists discover that Mars was home to a race over 10,000 years ago.

All of a sudden....a large space ship from the outer reaches of time and space is headed for our solar system.

Only one person with the United Nations of Outer Space Affairs wants to know why they are headed for Mars
And everyone will stop him from finding out.

This will be a live action graphic novel of....

FIG. 1. (a) Schematic of La Mer and Dinegar's model for the synthesis of monodispersed CQDs. (b) Representation of the apparatus employed for CQD synthesis. Reproduced with permission from Murray et al., Annu. Rev. Mater Res. 30(1), 545–610 (2000). Copyright 2000 Annual Reviews.

Topics: Energy, Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Quantum Mechanics, Solar Power

ABSTRACT
Solution-processed colloidal quantum dot (CQD) solar cells are lightweight, flexible, inexpensive, and can be spray-coated on various substrates. However, their power conversion efficiency is still insufficient for commercial applications. To further boost CQD solar cell efficiency, researchers need to better understand and control how charge carriers and excitons transport in CQD thin films, i.e., the CQD solar cell electrical parameters including carrier lifetime, diffusion length, diffusivity, mobility, drift length, trap state density, and doping density. These parameters play key roles in determining CQD thin film thickness and surface passivation ligands in CQD solar cell fabrication processes. To characterize these CQD solar cell parameters, researchers have mostly used transient techniques, such as short-circuit current/open-circuit voltage decay, photoconductance decay, and time-resolved photoluminescence. These transient techniques based on the time-dependent excess carrier density decay generally exhibit an exponential profile, but they differ in the signal collection physics and can only be used in some particular scenarios. Furthermore, photovoltaic characterization techniques are moving from contact to non-contact, from steady-state to dynamic, and from small-spot testing to large-area imaging; what are the challenges, limitations, and prospects? To answer these questions, this Tutorial, in the context of CQD thin film and solar cell characterization, looks at trends in characterization technique development by comparing various conventional techniques in meeting research and/or industrial demands. For a good physical understanding of material properties, the basic physics of CQD materials and devices are reviewed first, followed by a detailed discussion of various characterization techniques and their suitability for CQD photovoltaic devices.

Advanced characterization methods of carrier transport in quantum dot photovoltaic solar cells, Lilei Hu, Andreas Mandelis, Journal of Applied Physics