Aubrey de Grey Explains ALT cancer at the DNA Conference earlier this year. Support their cancer research at: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-control-alt-delete-cancer/
Help Aubrey and the SENS Foundation fight ALT-Cancer here, https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-control-alt-delete-cancer/
Baterias comestível feita com melanina e materiais absorvíveis.
Baterias de melanina é baixa em relação ao de iões de lítio, seria suficientemente elevada para alimentar um dispositivo de libertação de fármaco ou de detecção ingerível. Por exemplo, Bettinger prevê usando a bateria do seu grupo para detectar mudanças intestino microbioma e respondendo com um comunicado da medicina, ou para a entrega de rajadas de uma vacina durante várias horas antes de degradar.
More info. on some research that I came across a few weeks ago on a new bioimaging technique to help map and understand the nervous system which is one of the hardest areas of the brain to map and monitor — this is truly groundbreaking on so many fronts such as precision meds. research, computer mapping of the brain and neuro pathways, etc. If will be very impressive to see how much this accelerates the efforts in finding a cure for diseases such as Dystonia.
MUNICH, Germany, Aug. 22 (UPI) — Scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University have developed a technique for turning the body of a deceased rodent entirely transparent, revealing the central nervous system in unprecedented clarity.
Researchers are hopeful the new and improved view will help scientists understand how traumatic brain injuries, strokes and aging yield chronic disorders like dementia and epilepsy.
I’ve been reading Ramez Naam’s fantastic book “Nexus,” which is set in a near-future where a powerful nano-drug allows human minds to connect together. In the story, a group of enterprising neuroscientists and engineers discover they can use the drug in a new way — to run a computer operating system inside their brains. Naam’s characters telepathically communicate with each other using a mental chat app and even manipulate other people’s bodies by gaining control of their brains’ operating systems.
Sounds far-fetched, right?
It might not be as far-fetched as you think. From connecting a human brain to a basic tablet to help a paralyzed patient communicate with the outside world to memory-boosting brain implants and a prototype computer chip that runs on live neurons — the real world progress we’re seeing today is nearly as strange as fiction.
The new BMI stentrode came from the research on sheep; nice to know for the next Trivia night at the local pub.
A group of Australian and American researchers have used sheep to develop and test a new device (original paper) – the stentrode – for recording electrical signals from inside the brain. The research was published in Nature Biotechnology. This new technology removes one of the main obstacles to developing efficient brain-computer interfaces: the need for invasive surgery.
The “stentrode” is a group of small (750 µm) recording electrodes attached to an intracranial endovascular stent, which allows implantation of the electrodes inside the brain without invasive surgery. This allows high quality recording or stimulation of specific areas of the brain, without many of the risks associated with invasive brain surgery.
Watching DNA self-repair itself.
After 2015’s Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for advancements in our understanding of DNA repair, a recent Nature report characterises the mechanism in molecular detail. The implications for cancer research are vast.
Researchers in Paris, France, and Bristol, England, have leveraged recent advances in microscopy and fluorescent imaging to characterise the entire process of DNA repair at the molecular level. They were able to observe RNA polymerase, which ‘reads’ DNA and initiates its replication, as it moved along the DNA strand.
When it encountered damage inflicted by UV radiation, the enzyme stalled, and a number of proteins descended on the site. The team followed them as they acted in an ordered step-wise fashion and elucidated the critical steps of the DNA repair process: first, a protein called Mfd coordinates to RNA polymerase, then it directs a sort of relay team of UvrA, UvrB and UvrC. This deeper understanding of the mechanism could bolster efforts towards treatments for a variety of conditions.
A few weeks ago, up to 40 people from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia were hospitalized after a heatwave thawed permafrost, releasing a “zombie outbreak” of anthrax. Now, the Siberian Times reports that experts fear the thawing could spell the return of the eradicated smallpox virus.
During the 1800s, there were repeated outbreaks of smallpox in a small Siberian town, with hundreds of bodies buried near the banks of the Kolyma River. Some 120 years later, this summer’s heatwave has been melting the permafrost surrounding the town at a rate three times faster than usual. This has increased water levels in the river and is subsequently eroding away its banks where the bodies are buried.
While the risk at the moment is low, and with scientists aware of the issue for some time now, the current troubles of permafrost around the site and the Kolyma River are ringing alarms.
How will we interact with the intelligent machines of the future? If you’re asking Bryan Johnson, founder of startup Kernel, he’ll tell you those machines should be implanted inside our brains.
His team is working with top neuroscientists to build a tiny brain chip—also known as a neuroprosthetic —to help people with disease-related brain damage. In the long term, though, Johnson sees the product applicable to anyone who wants a bit of a brain boost.
Yes, some might flag this technology as yet another invention leading us toward a future where technology just helps the privileged get further in life.
A team of Harvard Medical School scientists, which includes genetics professor George Church, have designed a bacterial genome that has been rewritten on a massive scale, with changes in more than 62,000 spots.
They haven’t used it to make living E. coli yet, but the findings, reported today in Science, mark progress towards genetically engineered bacteria that could make new materials without risk of exchanging genes with organisms in the wild.
“It‘s an important step forward for demonstrating the malleability of the genetic code and how entirely new types of biological functions and properties can be extracted from organisms through genomes that have been recoded,” Farren Isaacs of Yale University, who has worked with the team in the past, told Nature.
