Technology

The Tesla Model 3 has had its share of struggles, fromCEO Elon Musk well-documented production hell to more recent logistic &nightmares& that have slowed deliveries to customers.

Thereone area where the Tesla shines: crash safety tests conducted by theNational Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And the Tesla Model 3 is no exception.Check out the videos below to watch the crash tests.

The rear-wheel-drive version of the Tesla Model 3 earned an all-around five-star safety rating from NHTSA, the highest possible issued by the agency. These tests cover frontal, side and rollover crashes.The Model 3 received five stars in each category, as well as sub categories such as side barrier and pole crashes.

Teslacrash rating is buoyed by the absence of an internal combustion engine. For instance, without a motor in the hood, theremore room for a forward crumple zone. Tesla vehicles also tend to be resistant to rollovers because the battery pack is located at the bottom of the vehicle, giving it a low center of gravity. The risk of a rollover in a Tesla Model 3 is 6.6 percent, according to NHTSA.

Tesla Model 3 is not the only vehicle to earn the highest rating. There are other 2018 model year vehicles that have earned a five-star rating from NHTSA, including the Subaru Legacy and Toyota Camry four-door hybrid. Italso worth noting, as Musk did Thursday, that five-star ratings only mean the vehicle meets a certain threshold. Injuryprobability stats, which are expected soon, indicate by how much.

TheInsurance Institute for Highway Safety also conducts crash tests on vehicles to determine safety ratings. The IIHS, which represents automobile insurers, has not published ratings on the Model 3.

Didn&t get your fill of Amazon news among the 70 or so announcements at todayAlexa event Good news, Audiblegot something to add to the deluge. The Amazon-owned audiobook site just announced the availability of its Apple Watch app.

The offering brings pretty much what you&d expect. You can listen to audiobooks and manage your library directly from the small screen. Ita pretty logical next step for the service, given the focus Apple has put on smartwatch audio, between last yearaddition of an LTE version of the watch and the recent announcement of a native podcasting app for the platform.

This also goes a ways toward justifying the recent addition of Aaptiv fitness routines, which Audible added a few weeks back. The offering made some sense on the phone, but bringing the course directly to a fitness/health-focused product like the Apple Watch helps complete that vision.Those workout and meditation offerings are free to Audible users through September of next year.

Researchers at the prestigiousSalkInstituteare reporting that they have managed to map the molecular structure of a CRISPR enzyme that could allow scientists to more precisely manipulate functions within cells.

Over the past several years, CRISPR-Cas9 has seized the public imagination for its ability to edit genetic code in a way that may correct defects inside individual cells — potentially healing mutations and preventing the advent of many illnesses.

Specifically, Cas9 enzymes act sort of like scissors, snipping away pieces of genetic code and swapping them out with a replacement. But these enzymes target DNA, which is the fundamental building block for the development of an organism, and there are growing concerns that using the enzyme to essentially reprogram the DNA of a cell may cause more harm than good.

As this report inScientific American illustrates:

Researchpublished on Monday suggests thatonly the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg: CRISPR-Cas9 can cause significantly greater genetic havoc than experts thought, the study concludes, perhaps enough to threaten the health of patients who would one dayreceiveCRISPR-based therapy.

The results come hard on the heels of twostudiesthat identified a related issue: Some CRISPR&d cells might be missing a key anti-cancer mechanism and therefore be able to initiate tumors.

CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing complex from Streptococcus pyogenes. The Cas9 nuclease protein uses a guide RNA sequence to cut DNA at a complementary site. Cas9 protein: white surface model. DNA fragments: blue ladder cartoon. RNA: red ladder cartoon. Photo courtesy Getty Images

The new findings from the Salk Institute, published in the journalCell, provide the detailed molecular structure of CRISPR-Cas13d, an enzyme that can target RNA instead of DNA.

Once thought to just be the delivery mechanism for instructions encoded in DNA for cell operations, RNA is now known to carry out biochemical reactions like enzymes, and serve their own regulatory functions in cells. By identifying an enzyme that can target the mechanisms by which cells operate, rather than the overall plan for cellular function, scientists should be able to come up with even more highly refined treatments with fewer risks.

Put more simply, having editing tools can allow scientists to modify a geneactivity without making permanent — and potentially dangerous — changes to the gene itself seems like a good option to explore.

&DNA is constant, but whatalways changing are the RNA messages that are copied from the DNA,& saysSalkResearch Associate Silvana Konermann, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna Gray Fellow and one of the studyfirst authors, in a statement. &Being able to modulate those messages by directly controlling the RNA has important implications for influencing a cellfate.&

Researchers at Salk first identified the family of enzymes they&re calling CRISPR-Cas13d earlier this year and suggested that this alternate system could recognize and cut RNA. Their first work was around dementia treatment, and the team showed that the tool could be used to correct protein imbalances in cells of dementia patients.

&In our previous paper, we discovered a new CRISPR family that can be used to engineer RNA directly inside of human cells,& saidHelmsley-SalkFellow Patrick Hsu, who is the other corresponding author of the new work. &Now that we&ve been able to visualize the structure of Cas13d, we can see in more detail how the enzyme is guided to the RNA and how it is able to cut the RNA. These insights are allowing us to improve the system and make the process more effective, paving the way for new strategies to treat RNA-based diseases.&

The paperother authors were Nicholas J. Brideau and Peter Lotfy ofSalk; Xuebing Wu of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; and Scott J. Novick, Timothy Strutzenberg and Patrick R. Griffin of The Scripps Research Institute, according to a statement.