Click on photo to start video.
These prosthetics are so realistic that it’s hard to tell what is real or fake.
Read more
Category: biotech/medical
Robots like this, nanobots that can work in the body, should be the main focus for curing all disease. And instead of focusing on Drug Delivery, have the nanobots just go in and attack or fix the problem themselves.
A Brock University research team has created a microscopic robot that has the potential to identify drug resistance to tuberculosis faster than conventional tests.
The World Health Organization (WHO) calls tuberculosis drug resistance “a formidable obstacle” to treatment and prevention of a disease that killed 240,000 people in 2016.
The Brock team’s latest technology builds on an earlier version of the microscopic robot—called the three-dimensional DNA nanomachine—they created in 2016 to detect diseases in a blood sample within 30 minutes.
Read more
As the master code of life, DNA can do a lot of things. Inheritance. Gene therapy. Wipe out an entire species. Solve logic problems. Recognize your sloppy handwriting.
Wait, What?
In a brilliant study published in Nature, a team from Caltech cleverly hacked the properties of DNA, essentially turning it into a molecular artificial neural network.
Read more
A proposed billion-dollar American particle collider has received enthusiastic backing from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, according to a newly released report.
This proposed “electron-ion collider,” or EIC, would serve as a state-of-the-art facility designed to answer some of the deepest questions about our Universe. The National Academies “finds a compelling scientific case for such a facility,” according to its report released today.
Read more
LONDON — An international team of scientists has moved closer to creating artificial embryos after using mouse stem cells to make structures capable of taking a crucial step in the development of life.
Experts said the results suggested human embryos could be created in a similar way in future — a step that would allow scientists to use artificial embryos rather than real ones to research the very earliest stages of human development.
The team, led by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a professor at Britain’s Cambridge University, had previously created a simpler structure resembling a mouse embryo in a lab dish. That work involved two types of stem cells and a three-dimensional scaffold on which they could grow.
Read more
A new study shows that mice reprogram their gut tissues to repair injury rolling them from an aged state back to a more fetal-like one.
Getting old is one thing; getting old in a healthy way is another. Many elderly people suffer from all kinds of diseases and disorders, ranging from cardiovascular problems and diabetes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep the body young as we grow older to prevent disease associated with old age? For instance, would it be possible to slow down or reverse the aging processes in the cells of our body?
This question has gained a lot of interest from scientists, and their research has led to the discovery of the important role that the shortening of telomeres, the protective caps on our DNA, plays in aging. While this has been described in recent posts on the LEAF blog, I would like to address another mechanism that has seen an interesting leap forward, more or less by accident: rejuvenation of tissue.
Rejuvenation is a term that has recently been used in the context of senolytics. These are newly discovered compounds that decrease the number of senescent cells in the body. For the purpose of this article, I define rejuvenation as the resetting of a genetic program within a cell or tissue, from adult back to fetal. Typically, cells develop from stem cells, which are cells that can differentiate into many different cell types. During cell differentiation, certain genetic programs in the stem cell are turned off, while others are turned on to make the formation of a specific cell type possible. During rejuvenation, this process is reversed: differentiated cells are reset to an embryonic state.
Read more
Title is a bit misleading — atheism is only unpolular with totalitarian regimes (and Templeton Foundation?) — interesting.
Although Johnson said he found the team’s research useful and important, he was unimpressed by their claim to have outperformed previous predictive methods. “Linear regression analysis is not very powerful for prediction,” he said. “I was a little surprised by the strength of their claims.” He cautioned that we should be skeptical about the word prediction in relation to this type of model. Opinion might be better.
“It’s great to have as a tool,” he said. “It’s like, you go to the doctor, they give an opinion. It’s always an opinion, we never say a doctor’s prediction. Usually, we go with the doctor’s opinion because they’ve seen many cases like this, many humans who come in with the same thing. It’s even more of an opinion with these types of models, because they haven’t necessarily seen many cases just like it—history mimics the past but doesn’t exactly repeat it.”
The silver lining here is that if the power of the models is being overstated then so, too, is the ethical concern.
Read more