Lightning strikes, MRI machines, and other sources of powerful electrical fields can damage medical devices and cause serious brain injury.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,541
A scientific experiment to reanimate dead brains could lead to humans enduring a ‘fate worse than death,’ an ethics lecturer has warned.
Last month Yale University announced it had successfully resurrected the brains of more than 100 slaughtered pigs and found that the cells were still healthy.
The reanimated brains were kept alive for up to 36 hours and scientists said the process, which should also work in primates, offered a new way to study intact organs in the lab.
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Archaeological discoveries of ancient humans keep pushing our knowledge about our species further back in time. The Americas haven’t been populated by people as long as other parts of the world, but exactly how long they’ve been here and how they got here are open subjects we still have a lot to learn about. Occasionally, a skeleton or a skull is found that dates back to the beginnings of their settlement. Real Clear Science give us a list of some of the biggest such discoveries.
Kennewick Man, perhaps the best known and most controversial ancient human remains in the United States, was found jutting from a patch of eroded dirt along the Columbia River near Kennewick Washington just 22 years ago. In life, roughly 9,000 years in the past, he spent much of his time moving around by water, hunting and eating marine animals and drinking glacial meltwater. In death, his remains were constantly the focus of lawsuits between indigenous peoples who sought to bury the remains and archaeologists who sought to learn from them. After DNA tests confirmed that Kennewick Man was closely related to modern day Native Americans, his remains were returned and reburied at an undisclosed location.
Read the stories of five other people who lived in thousands of years ago in what is now the United States at Real Clear Science.
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On a recent BBC World Service program (News Hour Extra, 12.18.15), a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era. “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human. None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degre…es of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity. Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed. Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.
Once the human genome was completely sequenced; once efforts to recombine DNA had become a reality; and once a mind-computer interface had been realized, there was never any doubt that a post-human era was coming.
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https://www.wired.com/…/biology-will-be-the-next-great-comp…
In some ways, Synthego looks like any other Silicon Valley startup. Inside its beige business park facilities, a five-minute drive from Facebook HQ, rows of nondescript black server racks whir and blink and vent. But inside the metal shelving, the company isn’t pushing around ones and zeros to keep the internet running. It’s making molecules to rewrite the code of life.
Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering. And Inscripta, which wants to be the Apple. And Twist Bioscience, which could be the Intel.
All these analogies to the computing industry are more than just wordplay. Crispr is making biology more programmable than ever before. And the biotech execs staking their claims in Crispr’s backend systems have read their Silicon Valley history. They’re betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language.
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