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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2229
Arthritis is usually painful. So is the surgery to fix it, at least in the immediate aftermath. So when a 66-year old woman at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, Scotland, told doctors that her severely arthritic hand felt fine both before and after her operation, they were suspicious. The joint of her thumb was so severely deteriorated that she could hardly use it—how could that not hurt?
So they sent her to see teams specializing in pain genetics at University College London and the University of Oxford. Those researchers took DNA samples from both her and some of her family members and uncovered her secret: a tiny mutation in a newly-discovered gene. They recently published their results in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.
This minuscule deletion is inside something called a pseudogene, which is a partial copy of a fully functioning gene inserted elsewhere in the genome. Pseudogenes don’t always have a function—sometimes they’re just junk DNA—but some of them have residual functionality leftover from the original gene’s purpose.
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Prof Jennifer Doudna, one the pioneers of Crispr-Cas9 gene editing, explains how this revolutionary discovery enables precise changes to our DNA, which can be used to correct mutations that cause genetic diseases and eradicate them from a germ line. Doudna raises the key issues of debate around gene editing and suggests what will have the most immediate impact.
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You might think we’re not in Texas anymore but in some strange episode of Black Mirror, the Netflix series, says Nikos Acuna who is moderating this SXSW panel on transhumanism.
In fact you’d be forgiven if you did as there is talk about cryo-preserving the body after being declared dead, in the hopes you can be resurrected when the science is here to safely defrost your body and cure you of your ailments. There is also talk on mind uploading, and replacing parts of our brains with neural prosthetics. This all sounds like science-fiction but these days the stuff of science fiction has become fact.
Transhumanist technologies are about overcoming the limitations of human biology and Dr Max More and Dr Randal Koene are at the forefront of these technologies.
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Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers of AI’ — have been recognized with the $1 million annual prize for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning. The techniques the trio developed in the 1990s and 2000s enabled huge breakthroughs in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work underpins the current proliferation of AI technologies, from self-driving cars to automated medical diagnoses.
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More than 1,000 people have been infected with Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo since August 2018, according to the World Health Organization. The hemorrhagic fever, which is concentrated in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, has killed 629 people as of Sunday. That makes it the second worst Ebola outbreak on record, after the one that began in West Africa in 2014, which infected more than 26,000 and killed an estimated 11,300 people over the course of two years.
Here’s what you need to know:
Ebola is actually a group of viruses that appear to be spread by bats to humans and other primates such as apes and chimpanzees. It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, poop, vomit, urine, breast milk, and semen. It can enter a person’s body through cuts in the skin, or through mucous membranes—tissues that line the eyes, nose, mouth, urethra, and vagina. At first, Ebola may seem like the common flu. Symptoms include exhaustion, aches and pains, vision problems, and stomach pain. But in most patients, Ebola quickly escalates to a full-blown hemorrhagic fever, which leads to bleeding, organ failure, and in many cases, death.
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Bio-PDO — Susterra propanediol produced by DuPont Tate & Lyle Bio Products — are among the many smart applications of corn, and constitute the building blocks of a number of environmentally friendly materials, increasingly used in the footwear manufacture.
We are all familiar with sweetcorn or corn on the cob and many of us enjoy eating it boiled and coated in butter. Americans in particular are especially fond of it although less than 1% of all the corn grown annually in the USA is for human consumption. The remaining 99% is industrial corn or maize which is used for animal feed and for processing into a variety of other products. Among these is Bio-PDO or, to give it its commercial name, Susterra propanediol produced by DuPont Tate & Lyle Bio Products, which is used as a basis for a number of environmentally friendly materials, increasingly used in footwear manufacture.
The variety of corn involved is known as yellow dent and has a high starch content. After harvesting and drying, it is transported to Tate & Lyle’s wet mill at Loudon, Tennessee. Using a wet milling process, the corn is separated into its four basic components: starch, germ, fibre and protein. The nutrient rich components are used for animal feed while glucose is derived from the remaining starch fraction and is the raw material used for making 1.3- propanediol. The process starts off with a culture of a special microorganism in a small flask with the glucose. As it grows, it is transferred to a seed fermenter, followed by a ten-story high production fermenter. Fermentation takes place under exact temperature conditions and involves a patented process where the microorganism functions as a biocatalyst, converting glucose into biobased 1.3-propaneidol.
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