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Category: biotech/medical – Page 3,113

Bioelectricity is a new weapon to fight dangerous infection

By Kim Thurler, Tufts University

(MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass.) — Changing the natural electrical signaling that exists in cells outside the nervous system can improve resistance to life-threatening bacterial infections, according to new research from Tufts University biologists. The researchers found that administering drugs, including those already used in humans for other purposes, to make the cell interior more negatively charged strengthens tadpoles’ innate immune response to E. coli infection and injury. This reveals a novel aspect of the immune system – regulation by non-neural bioelectricity – and suggests a new approach for clinical applications in human medicine. The study is published online May 26, 2017, in npj Regenerative Medicine, a Nature Research journal.

“All cells, not just nerve cells, naturally generate and receive electrical signals. Being able to regulate such non-neural bioelectricity with the many ion channel and neurotransmitter drugs that are already human-approved gives us an amazing new toolkit to augment the immune system’s ability to resist infections,” said the paper’s corresponding author Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology and Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences. Levin is also an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

For The First Time Ever, CRISPR Gene Editing Was Used in Humans. So What’s Next?

  • With Chinese scientists announcing that they have tested CRISPR on a human for the first time, the U.S. must decide soon whether it will be a leader or a follower in advancing the tech.
  • While gene editing technology could be used in nefarious ways, it could also cure diseases and improve millions of lives, but we won’t know how effective it is until we begin human trials.

While the middle part of the 20th century saw the world’s superpowers racing to explore space, the first global competition of this century is being set in a much smaller arena: our DNA.

Now Artificial Intelligence Is Inventing Sounds That Have Never Been Heard Before

As well as beating us at board games, driving cars, and spotting cancer, artificial intelligence is now generating brand new sounds that have never been heard before, thanks to some advanced maths combined with samples from real instruments.

Before long, you might hear some of these fresh sounds pumping out of your radio, as the researchers responsible say they’re hoping to give musicians an almost limitless new range of computer-generated instruments to work with.

The new system is called NSynth, and it’s been developed by an engineering team called Google Magenta, a small part of Google’s larger push into artificial intelligence.

5 Emerging Biomedical Engineering Trends to Watch

Biomedical engineering has long been a driver of advances in healthcare. From new technologies to diagnose and treat some of the most complex disease to advances that improve quality of life for everyone, the work taking place in labs around the world right now is likely to change the face of healthcare in both the short- and long-term future.

Although there are literally thousands of different projects taking place at this very moment, there are some definite trends taking place in biomedical engineering.

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