In what the German automaker is calling a “world premiere,” Volkswagen’s futuristic Golf GTI Aurora concept has a high-end sound system in its trunk that can be operated with a hologram.
You can leave your 3D glasses and augmented reality gloves at home: the hologram floats freely in the air and can be operated without any external aids. Though to be fair, VW is being very vague about the details of the technology behind the interface.
Floating Images
Scientists are only scratching the surface of creating 3D holograms that can be viewed from any angle. Current state holographic displays also tend to be extremely expensive and unwieldy.
Tiny selenium particles could have a therapeutic effect on ischemic brain strokes by promoting the recovery of brain damage. Pharmacologists, including Alireza Mashaghi from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research discovered that selenium nanoparticles inhibit molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the loss of brain cells after a stroke. The results were published in Nature Scientific Reports in April.
Nanoparticles against strokes
An ischemic stroke happens when a supplying blood vessel to the brain is narrowed or obstructed. As a result, the brain gets too little blood. “This lack of blood can lead to brain tissue damage due to cellular toxicity, inflammation and cell death,” Mashaghi explains. “This will, in turn, lead to brain dysfunction and neurological complaints such as numbness, vision problems, dizziness and severed headache.” Ischemic stroke accounts for 87% of all strokes and is a significant cause of death. “So far, no neuroprotective agents have been shown to produce any measurable improvement in health in cerebral stroke cases. Our results now demonstrated that selenium nanoparticles inhibit molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the loss of brain cells after a stroke.”
It’s entirely possible that micro-machines could one day be delivering drugs inside the body, with many designs proposed in recent years. The latest comes from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), which gets around under its own power using a system similar to how submarines rise and sink.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Pécs, Hungary used cell secretions known as exosomes to regenerate the thymus, one of the most important organs in the body.
The thymus shrinks as we age
The thymus is arguably one of the most critical organs in the body, and it is where new T cells develop before being trained in the lymph nodes in order to become the soldiers of the adaptive immune system. However, as we get older, the thymus starts to shrink, its ability to create new T cells declines, and the immune cell-producing tissue increasingly turns into fat and wastes away; this process is known as thymic involution.
Everything is backwards now, like out there is the real world and this is the dream. (James Cameron’s Avatar, 2009)
Over recent years, considerable scholarly attention and mass media speculation has been paid to the emergence of the figure of the posthuman – a vision of augmented human that has undergone radical transformation as a result of new biotechnological and informatic technologies. This posthumanity lives simultaneously in the world of the virtual and the biological, cast concurrently as the future of a biomedically enhanced humanity and a figuration for overcoming the identity politics of the past. Some are arguing that we will eventually leave the human ‘as we know it’ behind, in a techno-modified, cognitively enhanced evolution, while in critical theory, the posthuman is being lauded as an ontology through which the boundary structures of the EuroWestern legacy of humanism can be dismantled.
Practice results in better learning. Consider learning a musical instrument, for example: the more one practices, the better one will be able to learn to play. The same holds true for cognition and visual perception: with practice, a person can learn to see better—and this is the case for both healthy adults and patients who experience vision loss because of a traumatic brain injury or stroke.
The problem with learning, however, is that it often takes a lot of training. Finding the time can be especially difficult for patients with brain injuries who may, for instance, need to re-train their brains to learn to process visual cues.
But previous examination of the fungal “molecular clock,” using DNA-based methods, suggested that fungi may have evolved much earlier, between 760 million and 1.06 billion years ago. Extracted from Arctic Canadian shales, the newly discovered billion-year-old fossilized fungal spores and hyphae (long thin tubes) plug the gap in the fossil record and suggest that fungi may have occupied land well before plants.
The fungal fossils were found in rocks that were probably once part a shallow-water estuary. Such environments are typically great for fungi thanks to nutrient-rich waters and the build up of washed-up organic matter to feed on. The high salinity, high mineral and low oxygen content of these ancient coastal habitats also provided great conditions to perfectly preserve the tough chitin molecules embedded within fungal cell walls that otherwise would have decomposed.
While it’s not certain whether the newly-discovered ancient fungi actually lived within the estuary or were washed into the sediments from the land, they show many of the distinctive features you’d expect in modern terrestrial fungi. The germinating spores are clearly defined, as are the branching, thread-like tubes that help fungi explore their environment, named hyphae. Even the cell walls are distinctively fungal, being made up of two clear layers. In fact, if you didn’t know they were so old, you’d be hard-pressed to distinguish them from modern fungi.
Is aging a natural process that we simply have to accept as a fact of life?
A philosopher would say yes. Many doctors would also agree: that our cells eventually reach a point where they can no longer divide and either die or reach senescence, a retirement phase. Many scientists believe in the “Hayflick limit” — that no one can live past about 120 years old. These people might also say that aging — and dying — is a good thing; that the world is already overcrowded, that we already cannot handle our aging populations, that life must be finite to appreciate it, that all good things must come to an end.
But there’s a growing group of people — including gerontologists, biologists, engineers, and futurists—who believe that aging is a disease in itself, a disease that can be cured. That aging is not an immutable process, an inevitable “dying of the light,” to quote poet Dylan Thomas, but one we can “rage against” — through science, drugs, and lifestyle changes.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Luba Greenwood J.D., Strategic Business Development and Corporate Ventures, Verily (Google Life Sciences), Board Member Mass Bio and Brooklyn ImmunoTherapeutics LLC.
In 2019 we have surpassed $7 trillion in total annual healthcare expenditures around the globe. As part of that $7 trillion, we’re now spending close to a $1 trillion a year on pharmaceutical products, $350 billion on medical devices, $200 billion on new Life Sciences R&D. Equally fascinating to note are the names of organizations becoming involved in this space in 2019.
From a U.S. centric perspective, 15 years ago when evaluting. Healthcare Clinic, the first thing that would come to mind would be Kaiser Permanente; not Apple; Medical Devices, Baxter or Medtronic; not Amazon would come to mind. Pharmaceuticals, you would think Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, etc.; Not Google / Alphabet Inc. and their Calico longevity drug development initiatives.
Yet in the last couple years alone, these big tech companies have all made major strategic moves into health care, with the goal of using their Silicon Valley-honed skills (and major piles of cash) to try and disrupt the industry with various “moon shot” thinking, and the interests of these companies are really quite diverse from their core businesses.
