Human ‘mini brains’ grown in labs may help solve cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s
| Video Source: CNN
Read the full story CNN…
My presidential campaign and health care ideas gets a nice mention in this popular article by Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein, considered a top political journalist in America. It’s nice to see young people like Ezra challenging the entire system. We must move beyond old, dysfunctional ways.
The most important problem in health care, in other words, is health.
If the health-care system got much better at delivering health, then it might make sense to spend what we do now — or to spend even more than that. So long as the system isn’t delivering good value for the money, then yes, cutting costs makes sense. But it’s important not to lose sight of the real goal: more health, not less health spending. Washington’s myopic focus on costs risks doing just that.
More: 8 facts that explain what’s wrong with American health care.
“Solve is a cross-disciplinary program led by MIT to convene the people and organizations that are addressing the world’s most pressing challenges in healthcare, energy, the environment, education, food & water, civil infrastructure and the economy.”
Scientists funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative hope to diagram all of the circuits in the brain. One group will attempt to identify all of the connections among the retina’s ganglion cells (red), which transmit visual information from bipolar cells (green) and photoreceptors (purple) to the brain. (credit: Josh Morgan, Ph. D. and Rachel Wong, Ph. D./University of Washington)
The National Institutes of Health and the Kavli Foundation separately announced today (Oct. 1, 2015) commitments totaling $185 million in new funds supporting the BRAIN Initiative — research aimed at deepening our understanding of the brain and brain-related disorders, such as traumatic brain injuries (TBI), Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.
We all know that self-driving cars are cute and tend to be safer — at least according to Google’s self-released reports to date — but this new report has the self-driving revolution holding massive potential as one of the greatest things to happen to public health in the 21st century.
As The Atlantic reports, automated cars could save up to 300,000 lives per decade in the United States. Their reporting is based on this research paper by consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which is filled with fascinating ways that self-driving cars will help us accident-prone humans by midcentury.
From the McKinsey report (bold added by us to highlight the mind-blowing data):
Sensors and robotics are two exponential technologies that will disrupt a multitude of billion-dollar industries.
This post (part 3 of 4) is a quick look at how three industries — transportation, agriculture, and healthcare/elder care — will change this decade.
Before I dive into each of these industries, it’s important I mention that it’s the explosion of sensors that is fundamentally enabling much of what I describe below.
Aubrey de Grey wants to save lives. He wants to save as many as he possibly can, as soon as he can, and to do it he is going to fix ageing.
The prominent scientist and futurologist is on a crusade to beat ageing and when he does it will mean that we stay healthy and live longer – possibly for up to hundreds of years.
But, as de Grey emphasises, his primary goal is not just making people live longer; he wants us to live healthily, he wants to restore us to a state of health that is “fully functional in every way”. The ability to live for hundreds of years is just a side effect.
Not everyone wants to sleep in. A growing transhumanism community wants to sleep less, and better, and they’re going to great lengths to make it happen.
For those unaware, transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that aims to improve the human condition, to push beyond our biological limitations, largely through technological advancements. They’re particularly focused on extreme longevity. But with treatments for an extended healthy life still works in progress (and playing out on a very long timeline), some transhumanists have turned their attention to sleep.
The average well-rested person sleeps eight hours a day. The average American lives 79 years. That’s a little more than just 50 years being awake. Life is much shorter than you realized — at least if you agree with your typical sleep-hacker that sleeping is wasted downtime.
Our gut and the microbiome play a crucial role in our health, but could better understanding of that role help us avoid disease and live longer?
The microbiome weighs 2–3 pounds and contains 10 times more cells than our own, but we’ve neglected our microbial tenants for a long time. These little denizens help us break down food, provide key nutrients and even play a role in inflammation and the integrity of our intestinal tract. It’s no surprise then that fermented foods and probiotics are gaining popularity as we become more aware of how important our gut is. Recent evidence even links poor digestive health to chronic inflammation and Parkinson’s disease.
New research suggests that both gut integrity, and the amount and type of bacteria that reside within it, can actually predict an individual’s health. They may even quicken or slow the pace of aging.