In Brief
Lmao.
Fertility clinics probably aren’t the most comfortable places to “extract” sperm. I haven’t had the pleasure, but being handed a receptacle and led into a room with visual aids and hearing that door close behind you has to be a bit awkward. More awkward is the thought that everyone outside this room knows the dirty things I’m about to do to this cup in the name of science.
A new product, ‘YO Sperm Test,’ lets you skip all that. The at-home test kit uses a mini-microscope that clips on to your smartphone and allows you to not only test your sperm’s motility — the rate at which they move — and the count, but to view your little swimmers on the screen of your smart device.
Join us and 20,000 others at our 12th edition of TNW Conference. 2-for-1 tickets available soon.
The weekend is here so let’s kick it off with a great talk by Dr. Aubrey de Grey at TED in 2014.
Biotechnologist Aubrey de Grey talks about aging as a disease — and how it can be cured.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
In an epidsode of the dystopian near-future series, Black Mirror, a small, implantable device behind the ear grants the ability to remember, access, and replay every moment of your life in perfect detail, like a movie right before your eyes.
Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, can’t promise that level of perfect recall—perhaps for the better—but he is working on a memory prosthesis. The device, surgically implanted directly into the brain, mimics the function of a structure called the hippocampus by electrically stimulating the brain in a particular way to form memories—at least in rats and monkeys. And now, he’s testing one that could work in humans.
Berger’s device hinges on a theory about how the hippocampus transforms short-term memories, like where you deposited your keys, into long-term memories—so you can find them later. In his early experiments, he played a tone and then puffed air in a rabbit’s face, causing it to blink. Eventually, just playing the tone would make the rabbit blink, just like Pavlov’s famous salivating dogs. Berger recorded the hippocampus’ activity with electrodes, and as the rabbits learned to associate the tone with the air puff, patterns in those signals changed in a predictable way.
Last fall, the biotech executive Martin Shkreli became widely reviled for hiking the price of a life-saving drug by more than 4,000 percent overnight, to $750 per pill.
Public outrage at Shkreli has apparently reverberated all the way to a high school science lab in Australia, where a group of 11th grade students claim to have proven a point: the drug can be made for much, much cheaper.
The group of 11 high school students, ages 16 and 17, successfully recreated the drug, Daraprim, for a mere $2 a pill, according to scientists from the University of Sydney.
AI (someday once things are more secured) is going to drastically reduce our cost of government. At least the VA believes AI is going to make them better at treating folks; my guess it’s a mix of cost saving potential via automation and improving diagnosis.
Flow Health and the VA are building a medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train AI to personalize care plans.
Osteoarthritis and senescent cells the connection becomes a little clearer!
Another step closer to the link between senescent cells and Osteoarthritis. Here we see mice receiving transplanted senescent cells which induce a disease state similar to Osteoarthritis. Yet further confirmation that the SENS approach to removing senescent cells is beneficial.
“Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading form of arthritis in the elderly, causing pain, disability, and immobility. OA has been associated with accumulation of senescent cells in or near joints. However, evidence for a causal link between OA and cellular senescence is lacking. Here, we present a novel senescent cell transplantation model involving injection of small numbers of senescent or nonsenescent cells from the ear cartilage of luciferase-expressing mice into the knee joint area of wild-type mice. By using bioluminescence and 18FDG PET imaging, we could track the injected cells in vivo for more than 10 days. Transplanting senescent cells into the knee region caused leg pain, impaired mobility, and radiographic and histological changes suggestive of OA. Transplanting nonsenescent cells had less of these effects. Thus, senescent cells can induce an OA-like state and targeting senescent cells could be a promising strategy for treating OA.”
More on the cell circuited technology that will deprive cancer cells of oxygen.
Imagine having cells in your body that can actively repel cancer in a way that makes it theoretically impossible for you to suffer from it.
Researchers at the U.K.’s University of Southampton…have engineered cells with a so-called “built-in genetic circuit” capable of producing a molecule for inhibiting the ability of tumors to grow and survive in the body.
“There are various defense mechanisms built into human cells, such as proteins that spot DNA damage, but there are also gaps in this defense system that are exploited by disease,” Professor Ali Tavassoli, one of the lead authors of the paper …“We were wondering if it is possible to equip human cells with the ability to sense and respond to a disease marker…”
