Lifeboat Foundation

Doctors have lots of tools for predicting a patient’s health. But—as even they will tell you—they’re no match for the complexity of the human body. Heart attacks in particular are hard to anticipate. Now, scientists have shown that computers capable of teaching themselves can perform even better than standard medical guidelines, significantly increasing prediction rates. If implemented, the new method could save thousands or even millions of lives a year.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is,” says Elsie Ross, a vascular surgeon at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved with the work, “and how much I really hope that doctors start to embrace the use of artificial intelligence to assist us in care of patients.”

Each year, nearly 20 million people die from the effects of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks, strokes, blocked arteries, and other circulatory system malfunctions. In an effort to predict these cases, many doctors use guidelines similar to those of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA). Those are based on eight risk factors—including age, cholesterol level, and blood pressure—that physicians effectively add up.

Continue reading “Self-taught artificial intelligence beats doctors at predicting heart attacks” »

“A future without animal testing is getting closer. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to a research-and-development collaboration with Emulate, a company that makes “organs-on-chips” technology.

The hope is that instead of testing new drugs or supplements on animals, researchers can use Emulate’s chips.

To start, the collaboration between the FDA and Emulate will focus on the company’s Liver-Chips, which are meant to show how an animal’s liver may react to a certain drug.

Continue reading “The FDA Just Struck a Deal That Could Replace Animal Testing With a Tiny Chip” »

A team of researchers led by Caltech’s Hyuck Choo has developed an eye implant for glaucoma patients that could one day lead to more timely and effective treatment.

If you have ever been to an ophthalmologist, you have probably had your eye pressure checked: with your chin resting on a support to keep your head still, the doctor applies pressure to your eye either via a puff of warm air or by gently pressing a probe against the eye’s surface. By measuring the amount that surface deforms as a result of a known amount of pressure, the ophthalmologist can calculate a rough estimate of the intraocular pressure.

While effective enough for routine eye exams, the technique is not sufficient for patients suffering from glaucoma. Glaucoma affects more than 2 million people in the United States, and is the second leading cause of blindness after cataracts. It is actually a family of eye diseases that are characterized by an increase in the pressure of the fluid inside the eye. That pressure damages the optic nerve at the back of the eye.

Continue reading “Black silicon prevents eye implant from gumming up” »

Material scientists have predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom, using high-throughput computational models. The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials at unprecedented speed.

Although magnets abound in everyday life, they are actually rarities—only about five percent of known inorganic compounds show even a hint of magnetism. And of those, just a few dozen are useful in real-world applications because of variability in properties such as effective temperature range and magnetic permanence.

The relative scarcity of these materials can make them expensive or difficult to obtain, leading many to search for new options given how important magnets are in applications ranging from motors to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. The traditional process involves little more than trial and error, as researchers produce different molecular structures in hopes of finding one with magnetic properties. Many high-performance magnets, however, are singular oddities among physical and chemical trends that defy intuition.

Continue reading “Computers create recipe for two new magnetic materials” »

The controversial laboratory tool known as CRISPR may have found a whole new world to conquer. Already the favored method of editing genes, CRISPR could soon become a low-cost diagnostic tool that could be used practically anywhere to determine if someone has an infectious disease such as Zika or dengue.

The controversial gene-editing tool may be able to identify infections reliably for pennies in places without electricity.

Toyota is introducing a wearable robotic leg brace designed to help partially paralyzed people walk.

The Welwalk WW-1000 system is made up of a motorized mechanical frame that fits on a person’s leg from the knee down. The patients can practice walking wearing the robotic device on a special treadmill that can support their weight.

Toyota Motor Corp. demonstrated the equipment for reporters at its Tokyo headquarters on Wednesday.

A new review of scientific literature concludes that oxytocin could be a novel way of curbing and treating opioid addictions.

Oscar Wilde once said that life imitates art, and science and engineering is often no exception to this. Science fiction certainly provides science types with plenty of inspiration for inventions, including holograms, teleportation, and even sonic screwdrivers.

Star Trek’s all-purpose medical device, the Tricorder, has also inspired a fair few people to recreate its near-magical ability to instantly diagnose a patient. As it happens, the non-profit X-Prize Foundation were so keen to get one invented that they started a global competition to see if any mavericks would succeed.

Continue reading “Star Trek’s Tricorder Now Officially Exists Thanks To A Global Competition” »

This contains information that is not in other articles on the same topic of David Sinclair:

“The results certainly sound encouraging. Before he started taking a 500mg NMN pill every morning, 47-year-old Professor Sinclair had his blood tested and was told his body had a biological age of 58.

After consuming NMN for three months, he was tested again and his biological age was 32.”

Continue reading “New pill considered key in the fight against ageing” »