Unnecessarily playing with nature.
The baby lambs didn’t just survive, they thrived. Within weeks in the artificial womb, they grew wool and gained weight. Are humans next?
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,200
Scientists can now “decode” people’s thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported.
Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples’ brains. The new method, described in a report posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
FMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this information provides an indirect measure of brain activity.
Through, DNA sequencing, researchers find the first known Neanderthal family, including a father and daughter.
“This year, parents are sending their children to daycare and school for the first time following two years of the pandemic. … Children who haven’t been previously exposed to respiratory viruses are getting sick,” Romano said.
Health officials in King County, Wash., are also alarmed as they brace for more cases once winter hits. Dr. Russell Migita with Seattle Children’s Hospital told King 5 News they are seeing about 20 to 30 positive cases every day, adding that those are “unprecedented” figures.
RSV symptoms are similar to a cold and can be harmless in adults, but the CDC says children under the age of 5 are the most affected group. According to the agency’s data, each year approximately 58,000 children in that age range are hospitalized for RSV. The next most vulnerable group are adults over 65, in whom the infection causes 14,000 deaths a year.
Researchers explore whether FebriDx could differentiate between bacteria-and virus-induced immune responses during acute respiratory infection.
Our immune system is the first line of defense against disease, but unfortunately it can go rogue and attack healthy tissues. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have now engineered a protein that may help prevent these autoimmune diseases by boosting the number of regulatory T cells (Tregs).
The immune system keeps a vigilant watch over our bodies at all times, tagging and destroying foreign pathogens or problematic cells to prevent illness. However, sometimes it can get a little overzealous and start attacking the body’s own cells, which can trigger a range of autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
To prevent these issues from arising, immune cells called Tregs play the vital role of keeping the immune system responses in check, but they can fail at this job. So for the new study, the researchers set out to boost their numbers, following previous studies that have shown promise in doing so to help treat autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease.
The deal, which was formally signed on the sidelines of the World Cancer Congress in Geneva this week, marks the first time a pharmaceutical company is making a patented cancer medicine available through a voluntary licensing scheme. “This is important because it’s the first and helps show that voluntary licences can work for cancer drugs,” Charles Gore, the executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), told SWI swissinfo.ch.
Swiss pharma giant Novartis has finalised a deal to allow generic production of its patented drug nilotinib to treat chronic myeloid leukemia.
Research Deep Dive
Posted in biotech/medical, robotics/AI
Join Pattie Maes, Andy Lippman, and a host of special guests and Media Lab researchers for a deep dive into generative artificial intelligence—the use of deep learning and large data sets to produce text, sound, images, movies, 3D designs, virtual characters, even proteins and drug candidates.
This discussion will be livestreamed, and no registration is required; it will be embedded on this page before the presentations begin. The livestream will be closed-captioned, and the archived video will be posted with closed captions within a few days of the event.
Edward Boyden is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. A professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Edward Boyden explains how humanity is only at its infancy in merging with machines. His work is leading him towards the development of a “brain co-processor”, a device that interacts intimately with the brain to upload and download information to and from it, augmenting human capabilities in memory storage, decision making, and cognition. The first step, however, is understanding the brain on a much deeper level. With the support of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, Ed Boyden pursued a PhD in neurosciences from Stanford University.
The Hertz Foundation mission is to provide unique financial and fellowship support to the nation’s most remarkable PhD students in the hard sciences. Hertz Fellowships are among the most prestigious in the world, and the foundation has invested over $200 million in Hertz Fellows since 1963 (present value) and supported over 1,100 brilliant and creative young scientists, who have gone on to become Nobel laureates, high-ranking military personnel, astronauts, inventors, Silicon Valley leaders, and tenured university professors. For more information, visit hertzfoundation.org.
TRANSCRIPT
Edward Boyden: Humans and machines have been merging for thousands of years. Right now I’m wearing shoes, I have a microphone on my jacket, we all probably used our phones at least once today… And we communicate with the augmentation of all sorts of amplification and even translation technologies: You can speak into a machine, and it’ll translate the words you’re saying in nearly real time.
So I think what might be different in the years to come is a matter of degree, not a matter of kind. One concept that I think is emerging is what I like to call the brain coprocessor, a device that intimately interacts with the brain. It can upload information to the brain and download information from it. Imagine that you could have a technology that could replace lost memories or augment decision making or boost attention or cognition. To do that though we have to understand how the brain works at a very deep level.
Although over a third of a million patients have had brain implants or neural implants that stimulate the nervous system, so far they’ve operated in an open-loop fashion. That is, they drive activity in the brain, but not in a fully-responsive fashion. What we want to do is to have bi-directional communication to the brain: Can you read and write information continuously, and supply—maybe through coupling these interfaces to silicon computers— exactly the information the brain needs?
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—(BUSINESS WIRE)— Hevolution Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides grants and early-stage investments to incentivize research and entrepreneurship in healthspan science, announces a new grants program to encourage research into the aging process in Saudi Arabia, as part of the growing Saudi scientific ecosystem. The program, Hevolution’s Open Call for Grant Applications in Saudi Arabia, will provide funding of up to 500,000 Saudi Riyals for local researchers with an interest in the mechanisms of aging.
“This grants program is the first of many through which we aim to encourage the development of the field of aging research in Saudi Arabia” Tweet this
“Saudi Arabia’s population is relatively young but has high rates of age-related conditions such as heart disease and diabetes,” commented Mehmood Khan, MD, Hevolution Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our hope is that by tackling the aging process itself, we can alleviate the burden of diseases and conditions of aging for the people of Saudi Arabia and worldwide. With this pilot program and others that we have in the works, we hope to enable Saudi Arabia’s scientific community to be a key player in the global charge to reduce the burden of age-related diseases and conditions that affect most of humanity.”