Biotech/medical – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Sep 3
2018

Cancer-tracking AI could save lives

Knowing what a cancer will do next could help doctors treat patients or prolong their lives with pre-emptive treatments.

Sep 3
2018

Nanobots can now swarm like fish to perform complex medical tasks

Researchers have developed a new method to control nanobots — inside the human body.

Sep 3
2018

‘Invisible’ Ebola transmission in the DRC may make it a bigger threat

An outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed 78 people and epidemic watchers are waiting to see whether it can be controlled.

Sep 3
2018

Artificial cells are tiny bacteria fighters

“Lego block” artificial cells that can kill bacteria have been created by researchers at the University of California, Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering. The work is reported Aug. 29 in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“We engineered artificial cells from the bottom-up – like Lego blocks – to destroy bacteria,” said Assistant Professor Cheemeng Tan, who led the work. The cells are built from liposomes, or bubbles with a cell-like lipid membrane, and purified cellular components including proteins, DNA and metabolites.

“We demonstrated that artificial cells can sense, react and interact with bacteria, as well as function as systems that both detect and kill bacteria with little dependence on their environment,” Tan said.

Sep 3
2018

‘It’s not if, it’s when’: the deadly pig disease spreading around the world

Swine fever has made its way into China, home to half the world’s pigs. Farmers in Estonia are already counting the cost.

Sep 3
2018

Realize the Promise of Gene-Edited Crops

A far better approach, then, is the middle course. Rather than prejudge the products of biotechnology, regulators should screen new plants and single out those that might need special monitoring or restrictions. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration does something similar on a voluntary basis for foods made from plants with engineered proteins. Companies submit data about their new products, and if the FDA decides it has no further questions, they can claim their foods are “generally recognized as safe.”

Europe and the U.S. should avoid an all-or-nothing approach to regulating plants made with Crispr.

Sep 2
2018

New therapy spurs nerve fibers to regrow through scar tissue, transmit signals after spinal cord injury in rodents

Findings from the UCLA study could lead to new treatments for patients.

Sep 2
2018

The Potential of Deep Learning Technology to Transform Health Care

In this Viewpoint, Geoffrey Hinton of Google’s Brain Team discusses the basics of neural networks: their underlying data structures, how they can be trained and combined to process complex health data sets, and future prospects for harnessing their unsupervised learning to clinical challenges.

Sep 2
2018

Watch This Robot Spider Come to Life

This robot spider could one day be used in medical procedures.

Sep 2
2018

Neuralink: How The Human Brain Will Download Directly From a Computer

As an immediate application, Neural Lace could potentially help patients suffering from brain injuries and certain illnesses. However, the utimate goal and mission of Neuralink are to successfully merge the human brain with machine, fusing human intelligence with Artificial Intelligence. As a result, this is expected to bring humanity up to a higher level of cognitive reasoning.

Neural Lace: How it works

At some point, Neural Lace is going to enable humans to upload and download information directly from a computer. Just in a similar way how Neo from the Matrix does in order to learn new skills and acquire new information.