DNA — nicknamed “nature’s storage medium” — has accurately stored the instruction sets for all life on Earth for billions of years. But it also may hold the keys to managing explosive data growth and storing archival data for generations to come.
Dave Landsman is the senior director of industry standards and a distinguished engineer at Western Digital. For the past two years, he’s been one of the principals in the company’s exploration of DNA data storage.
The idea of human ectogenesis — growing a baby in an artificial environment outside of the human body — has always been considered in the realms of science fiction, however it may not be for much longer.
Scientific developments in this field have been taking big steps forward in recent years, particularly in our ability to care for extremely preterm babies. However, just how close are we to being able to create human life entirely outside of the human body? And in a potential future, where women no longer had to give birth, what societal impacts might that have on gender equality and our conceptions of what it means to be a mother?
Guarding Against Future Global Biological Risks — Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD — Chair Nuclear Threat Initiative, bio Advisory Group; Commissioner, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense; former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD is an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, who currently serves as chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) bio Advisory Group (https://www.nti.org/about/people/margaret-hamburg-md/), where she has also served as founding vice president and senior scientist. She also currently holds a role as Commissioner on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/margaret-a-hamburg/).
Dr. Hamburg previously served as foreign secretary of the National Academy of Medicine and is a former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), having served for almost six years where she was well known for advancing regulatory science, modernizing regulatory pathways, and globalizing the agency. Previous government positions include Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Commissioner for New York City, and Assistant Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.
In her role, as Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Dr. Hamburg served as senior advisor on international matters and was the liaison with other Academies of Medicine around the world. She is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Hamburg currently sits on the boards of the Commonwealth Fund, the Simons Foundation, the Urban Institute, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and the American Museum of Natural History. She is chair of the Joint Coordinating Group for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation, and a member of the Harvard University Global Advisory Council, the Global Health Scientific Advisory Committee for the Gates Foundation, the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, and the World Dementia Council.
Experts say teplizumab marks a “new era” in treatment, tackling the root cause of the condition for the first time, rather than just the symptoms.
It works by reprogramming the immune system to stop it mistakenly attacking pancreatic cells which produce insulin.
It is likely to pave the way for approval decisions in other countries.
About 8.7 million people have type 1 diabetes worldwide. In the UK the condition affects 400,000 people, including more than 29,000 children. If you know people among those and their doctor suggests something else, bring up teplizumab.
It is the first drug to be approved that delays the onset of the condition.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that the safe operation of a negative pressure room—a space in a hospital or biological research laboratory designed to protect outside areas from exposure to deadly pathogens—can be disrupted by an attacker armed with little more than a smartphone.
According to UCI cyber-physical systems security experts, who shared their findings with attendees at the Association for Computing Machinery’s recent Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Los Angeles, mechanisms that control airflow in and out of biocontainment facilities can be tricked into functioning irregularly by a sound of a particular frequency, possibly tucked surreptitiously into a popular song.
“Someone could play a piece of music loaded on their smartphone or get it to transmit from a television or other audio device in or near a negative pressure room,” said senior co-author Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “If that music is embedded with a tone that matches the resonant frequency of the pressure controls of one of these spaces, it could cause a malfunction and a leak of deadly microbes.”
Scientists from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Osaka University introduced a method for manufacturing complex microrobots driven by chemical energy using in situ integration. By 3D-printing and assembling the mechanical structures and actuators of microrobots inside a microfluidic chip, the resulting microrobots were able to perform desired functions, like moving or grasping. This work may help realize the vision of microsurgery performed by autonomous robots.
As medical technology advances, increasingly complicated surgeries that were once considered impossible have become reality. However, we are still far away from a promised future in which microrobots coursing through a patient’s body can perform procedures, such as microsurgery or cancer cell elimination.
Although nanotech methods have already mastered the art of producing tiny structures, it remains a challenge to manipulate and assemble these constituent parts into functional complex robots, especially when trying to produce them at a mass scale. As a result, the assembly, integration and reconfiguration of tiny mechanical components, and especially movable actuators driven by chemical energy, remains a difficult and time-consuming process.
It’s been seven years since Nigel French was woken up in the middle of the night by his wife after having a seizure, which came out of the blue after experiencing a mild headache – something he had simply put down to blocked sinuses.
“She told me that the ambulance had arrived and I was like: ‘what ambulance?’” recalls French, 53, a mechanic who was diagnosed with glioblastoma that required urgent surgery, without which he would have had only months to live.
In a different scenario, the impact of one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer would have taken its toll by now, but thanks to a revolutionary vaccine, he is not only still alive but continuing to work and enjoy all that life has to offer.
Fungi in the soil cause a significant number of serious lung infections in 48 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, including many areas long thought to be free of deadly environmental fungi, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Studies from the 1950s and 60s indicated that fungal lung infections were a problem only in certain parts of the country. The new study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, shows that is no longer the case. Doctors who rely on outdated maps of disease-causing fungi may miss the signs of a fungal lung infection, resulting in delayed or incorrect diagnoses, the researchers said.
“Every few weeks I get a call from a doctor in the Boston area—a different doctor every time—about a case they can’t solve,” said senior author Andrej Spec, MD, an associate professor of medicine and a specialist in fungal infections. “They always start by saying, ‘We don’t have histo here, but it really kind of looks like histo.’ I say, ‘You guys call me all the time about this. You do have histo.’”
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a warning for parents after the discovery of fentanyl disguised as children’s chewable vitamins. LiveNOW from FOX’s Josh Breslow spoke with FOX 5 DC’s Bob Barnard about that warning.
The findings, published late last month in the journal Pharmaceutics, have been described as a potential game changer in addressing an epidemic that has claimed thousands of American lives.
