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Archive for the ‘biotech/medical’ category: Page 1864

Jul 17, 2019

Team efficient microchip

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, health, mobile phones

Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have designed a new chip for portable electronics that could be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology. Given its reduced power consumption, the new chip could lead to cell phones, handheld computers, and remote sensors that last far longer when running from a battery.

Indeed, the power required could be so low that implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and health monitors could be powered indefinitely by a person’s body heat or motion—no battery needed.

According to Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, the key to the improvement in energy efficiency was finding ways to make the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual. While most current chips operate at around 1.0 volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts.

Jul 17, 2019

Scientists Bring A Severed Brain Back To Life, Sparking Ethical Debate

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

Nothing is impossible … just don’t get queasy when Human bionodes are able to experience the consciousness of other people’s bodies.


NEW HAVEN, Conn. (CBS Local) – Has science gone too far? That’s the question some experts are asking after Yale University researchers announced that they have successfully reanimated a pig’s brain, which had been severed from its body.

Pittsburgh News From KDKA, CBS Channel 2

Continue reading “Scientists Bring A Severed Brain Back To Life, Sparking Ethical Debate” »

Jul 17, 2019

Machine Learning Identifies Potential Anti-Cancer Molecules in Food

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, internet, robotics/AI

The internet is rife with myths and articles making dubious claims about certain foods and their anti-cancer properties. We have all seen the articles of questionable scientific merit gracing social media suggesting that such-and-such foods can cure cancer, the majority of which are highly questionable. A new study offers a unique kind of insight into the potential true effectiveness of food in fighting cancer [1].

Investigating molecules in food with machine learning

There is no doubt that there are many foods that contain a myriad of active molecules, and perhaps some of these food myths may have a grain of truth to them. A team of researchers decided to do some real myth-busting and put a variety of bioactive molecules found in foods to the test to see if they might potentially help to combat cancer.

Jul 17, 2019

Towards reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, information science, robotics/AI

Auditory stimulus reconstruction is a technique that finds the best approximation of the acoustic stimulus from the population of evoked neural activity. Reconstructing speech from the human auditory cortex creates the possibility of a speech neuroprosthetic to establish a direct communication with the brain and has been shown to be possible in both overt and covert conditions. However, the low quality of the reconstructed speech has severely limited the utility of this method for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To advance the state-of-the-art in speech neuroprosthesis, we combined the recent advances in deep learning with the latest innovations in speech synthesis technologies to reconstruct closed-set intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. We investigated the dependence of reconstruction accuracy on linear and nonlinear (deep neural network) regression methods and the acoustic representation that is used as the target of reconstruction, including auditory spectrogram and speech synthesis parameters. In addition, we compared the reconstruction accuracy from low and high neural frequency ranges. Our results show that a deep neural network model that directly estimates the parameters of a speech synthesizer from all neural frequencies achieves the highest subjective and objective scores on a digit recognition task, improving the intelligibility by 65% over the baseline method which used linear regression to reconstruct the auditory spectrogram. These results demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning and speech synthesis algorithms for designing the next generation of speech BCI systems, which not only can restore communications for paralyzed patients but also have the potential to transform human-computer interaction technologies.

Jul 17, 2019

CRISPR breakthrough treats diseases like diabetes without cutting DNA

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, innovation

CRISPR-Cas9 shows incredible promise, but the long term effects of cutting DNA in living organisms isn’t known. Now scientists from the Salk Institute have modified it to work without cutting, switching targeted genes on and off instead, and used it to treat diabetes and muscular dystrophy in mice.

Jul 17, 2019

Scientists Have Discovered a New Stem Cell That Could Heal Brain Damage

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A newly discovered type of stem cell could help brains repair themselves from injury or even debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s, according to the latest research.

Called the “G2 quiescent stem cell”, it’s one of several ‘sleeping’ (or quiescent) stem cells in the brain.

But this one is showing more potential for regeneration than the others have so far. Like other stem cells, it can produce cells of all different types on demand – whatever the body needs.

Jul 17, 2019

If You’re Alive In 30 years, It’s Likely You Will Be Alive In 1,000 years… – Collective Evolution

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

It might sound crazy to the masses, but life extension is a real thing. The science, also known as anti-aging medicine, indefinite life extension, experimental gerontology, and biomedical gerontology, is the study of slowing down or reversing the processes that create aging. The result? Maximum and average lifespan extended. The question is, do we need tech? Or should we begin to look at why our life spans aren’t already longer?

If you try to envision it, you might find yourself lost in a futuristic sci-fi film you’ve already seen. But it’s more than a concept fit for the silver screen. Life extension is a very real science, and is currently being worked on as you read this.

Continue reading “If You’re Alive In 30 years, It’s Likely You Will Be Alive In 1,000 years… – Collective Evolution” »

Jul 17, 2019

Regenerative Ecology — Scott Quitel, Founder, LandHealth Institute- ideaXme — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: aging, bees, biological, biotech/medical, complex systems, environmental, geoengineering, health, science, transhumanism

Jul 17, 2019

Could artificial intelligence be the future of cancer diagnosis?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

The authors of a recent paper believe that in the future, artificial intelligence might be able to tell benign from malignant lesions without a biopsy.

Jul 16, 2019

Elon Musk unveils Neuralink’s plans for brain-reading ‘threads’ and a robot to insert them

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, Elon Musk, mobile phones, robotics/AI

Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the secretive company developing brain-machine interfaces, showed off some of the technology it has been developing to the public for the first time. The goal is to eventually begin implanting devices in paralyzed humans, allowing them to control phones or computers.