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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,632

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 from the bottom-up – like Lego blocks – to destroy ,” said Assistant Professor Cheemeng Tan, who led the work. The 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.

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.

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.

New pill could see humans live to 150 ‘for the price of a coffee’

An extraordinary new anti-ageing technique could see humans live to 150 years old and allow them to regrow their organs by 2020.

Harvard Professor David Sinclair and researchers from the University of New South Wales developed the new process, which involves reprogramming cells.

Dr Sinclair said the technique could allow people to regenerate organs, and even allow paralysis sufferers to move again, with human trials due within two years.

The man who tried to catalog humanity

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, known simply as “Luca” to generations of human geneticists, died this week at age 96. More than any other human geneticist, Cavalli-Sforza believed in the potential of genes and culture together to trace humanity’s origins. In the course of his work, he pioneered new ideas and models that brought together these two distinct areas of science.

Like most scientists, many of his ideas would turn out to be wrong in the details. But his work helped form the foundation of our current knowledge of human genome variation across the world.

In 1991, Cavalli-Sforza wrote an essay for Scientific American that explained the course of his life’s work to that point. He recollected a time as a young man when he worked in the Cambridge laboratory of Ronald A. Fisher, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory.