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Category: biotech/medical

Citizen journalist now close to death.

Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan is in a Chinese prison for reporting from Wuhan during the height of the city’s coronavirus outbreak in 2020. Her family says she is on hunger strike and could be near death. All calls for her release have gone unheeded.

“Zhang Zhan distributed independent information on what happened in Wuhan,” the managing director of Reporters Without Borders Germany, Christian Mihr, told DW. He asked Germany and the EU to be more outspoken ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

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Researchers have developed a new approach to machine learning that ‘learns how to learn’ and out-performs current machine learning methods for drug design, which in turn could accelerate the search for new disease treatments.

The method, called transformational machine learning (TML), was developed by a team from the UK, Sweden, India and Netherlands. It learns from multiple problems and improves performance while it learns.

TML could accelerate the identification and production of new drugs by improving the machine learning systems which are used to identify them. The results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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There’s also been a lot of interest in creating more versatile “living inks” made up of bacteria, which can be genetically engineered to do everything from deliver drugs to clean up pollutants. But so far, approaches have relied on mixing microbes with polymers that help provide the ink with some structural integrity.

Now, researchers have developed a new living ink that more closely lives up to the name by replacing the polymers with a protein made by genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The researchers say this opens the door to seeding large-scale, living structures from nothing more than a simple cell culture.

The key to the breakthrough was to repurpose the proteins that E. coli cells secrete to stick together and form hard-to-shift biofilms. In a paper in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they genetically engineered bacteria to produce two different versions of this protein known as a “knob” and a “hole,” which then lock together to form a robust cross-linked mesh.

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TRU Community Care in Lafayette was the host to the unveiling of a brand new technology in the medical field — a humanoid robot that can perform basic medical tasks.

Beyond Imagination, an AI company based out of Colorado Springs, visited the Lafayette hospice center to test out the robot, named BEOMNI.

“We are excited that TRU sees the almost limitless potential of our humanoid robots in health care and has agreed to run this first pilot study with us. We look forward to partnering with them to bring a highly effective solution to market,” said inventor and CEO Dr. Harry Kloor.

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The mysterious ways cancer spreads through the body, a process known as metastasis, is what can make it such a difficult enemy to keep at bay. Researchers at Princeton University working in this area have been tugging at a particular thread for more than 15 years, focusing on a single gene central to the ability of most major cancers to metastasize. They’ve now discovered what they describe as a “silver bullet” in the form of a compound that can disable this gene in mice and human tissue, with clinical trials possibly not too far away.

Metastatic cancer is a key focus for researchers and with good reason, as it is actually the primary cause of death from the disease. While surgery or chemotherapy might be effective at eliminating an initial tumor, cells that have broken away can discreetly make their way around the body and give rise to new tumors, months or even years later.

“Metastatic breast cancer causes more than 40,000 deaths every year in the US, and the patients do not respond well to standard treatments, such as chemotherapies, targeted therapies and immunotherapies,” says Minhong Shen, member of the Princeton team behind the new discovery. “Our work identified a series of chemical compounds that could significantly enhance the chemotherapy and immunotherapy response rates in metastatic breast cancer mouse models. These compounds have great therapeutic potential.”

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We don’t have to accept erratic medical price inflation👇

The report, based on once-secret pricing data and published in the journal Radiology, found that thousands of hospitals didn’t report their prices despite a new federal requirement.

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We love the sort of outlandish concept cars that treat themselves as high art, and regret that COVID-19 and the general death of the big auto show is increasingly denying us this pleasure. But here is a spectacular example of the genre to lift the late holiday weekend malaise: meet the WayRay Holograktor.

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Most times when we think of deepfakes, we think of the myriad negative applications. From pornography to blackmail to politics, deepfakes are a product of machine learning. They create a lie that is so realistic that it is hard to believe it is not the real thing. In a society plagued by fake news, deepfakes have the potential to do a substantial amount of harm.

But a recent team of researchers found another use for deepfakes — to deepfake the mind. And using machine learning to simulate artificial neural data in this way may make a world of difference for those with disabilities.

For people with full body paralysis, the body can seemingly become a prison. Communicating and the simplest of tasks may appear to be an insurmountable challenge. But even if the body is frozen, the mind may be very active. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a way for these patients to interact with the world.

BCIs do not rely on muscle or eye movements. Instead, the user is trained to manipulate an object using the power of thought alone. BCIs can allow a fully paralyzed person to operate a wheelchair by just thinking, to move a cursor on a computer screen, or even play pinball by moving the paddles with their mind. BCIs can be freeing for people with this type of paralysis. It can also be used to treat depression or to rehabilitate the brain.

Full Story:

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We continue our overview of the Longevity Forum’s Science Summit at Oxford’s Oriel College, part of Longevity Week and hosted by Professor Lynne Cox and Jim Mellon.

Longevity. Technology: Severe community-acquired infections (such as community-acquired pneumonia and COVID-19) are more common in older adults, and overall outcomes are worse. But why as we get older are we more susceptible and can we harness the immune system to improve clinical trajectories in older adults?

Professor Liz Sapey is the Chair of Acute Medicine and an academic acute and respiratory medicine physician at the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. Sapey presented on what is known about susceptibility to infection as we age.

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