A US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded prosthetic arm will be released for commercial use beginning in late 2016.
The LUKE arm, one of the world’s most advanced prosthetics, was designed by Segway creator Dean Kamen and has been under development for close to a decade.
The LUKE arm is named after Luke Skywalker’s advanced prosthetic from the Star Wars films, and its banner feature is its control system.
Posted in biotech/medical, futurism
A fairly recent video where Aubrey de Grey talks about the future of regenerative medicine and how we will treat age related diseases.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation gives a lecture and answers questions in Spain, April 2016.
Help end aging by donating to SENS http://www.sens.org/
Telomerase, an enzyme naturally found in the human organism, is the closest of all known substances to a “cellular elixir of youth.” In a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Brazilian and US researchers show that sex hormones can stimulate production of this enzyme.
The strategy was tested in patients with genetic diseases associated with mutations in the gene that codes for telomerase, such as aplastic anemia and pulmonary fibrosis.
A new story with lots of transhumanism in it:
Zoltan Istvan is in the running for President of the United States. You may not have heard of him, but if elected, he hopes to put an end to death. All of it. (Yes, seriously).
There are people right now walking around with artificial hearts – something that many people believed would not happen for another decade (or even longer). There are quadriplegics no longer bound to a wheelchair, but walk with exoskeleton technology. There are hundreds of thousands of people with brain implants that help them with various ailments. In short, recent technological breakthroughs like these open up the possibility for humans to enhance themselves and their health—and perhaps to even become immortal (someday).
As you can imagine, such radical developments demand strong, intelligent and science-focused political leadership. That is why Zoltan Istvan, of the Transhumanist Party, says that he is running for U.S. President this year, as the #ScienceCandidate.
He thinks that, by encouraging America to embrace science and technology, we could transform our lives and the planet by overcoming poverty, aging, and even death…and all in the coming generation.
NANOG. I just like the sound of it.
In the biology lab-based equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, researchers from the University at Buffalo have uncovered the human body’s internal fountain of eternal youth, in the form of a gene called NANOG. When expressing this gene in aged stem cells, the team found that it reactivated certain processes that had become exhausted, restoring their ability to develop into fully functioning muscle cells.
As we go about our lives, wear and tear causes the body’s cells to die via a process called senescence. When this occurs, new cells are created from stem cells in order to replace those that have become senescent, although when we hit old age our stem cells become depleted or unable to develop.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), for example, normally develop into smooth muscle cells (SMCs). However, once we reach a certain age, these MSCs lose their efficacy and start generating SMCs that lack a protein called actin, rendering them unable to contract like healthy muscle tissue should.
A new method for medicine.
Imagine a cross between one of those multi-color retractable pens and an epi-pen. But instead of colors, the device would have different medications. Now combine this with a tiny, droplet-sized sweatshop full of obedient single-celled organisms genetically engineered to produce those medications, and you’ve got what a team from MIT just published in Nature Communications: A new project, with funding from DARPA, that has demonstrated the ability to synthesize multiple medications on-demand and as-needed using yeast. The discovery could soon revolutionize our ability to deliver medicine after natural disasters or to remote locations.
Let’s stick with the metaphor of an epi-pen. First, the user presses the actuator, which mixes a chemical trigger into a culture of engineered Pichia pastoris cells. Upon exposure to certain chemical triggers, the cells are programmed to produce a protein: in the report, the team used estrogen β-estradiol, which caused the cells to express recombinant human growth hormone (rHGH), and also methanol, which induced the same culture of yeast to make interferon. By controlling the concentration of the chemical trigger and the population of P. pastoris, the team demonstrated that they could make their device produce a dose of either interferon or rHGH on command. To switch between products, they just pushed another button on the microbioreactor, which flushes out the cell culture with clean, sterile fluid.
“…rapid and switchable production of two biologics from a single yeast strain as specified by the operator.” –Lu, Ram et al
Posted in biotech/medical
Should all new technologies be used?
At the head of all this you will hear about the latest technology from the biotech world, such as CRISPR, that allows scientists to edit the very genome of a plant or animal, but not all technologies that can be used should be used.
While learning to grow massive quantities of organic food in urban landscapes without pesticides is great news, taking away human oversight from farming isn’t necessarily going to make our food better.
