Scientists have created an AI system that categorizes volcanic ash by shape, which can help researchers determine the type of eruption that caused it.
Read more
“I believe gene therapy will become a mainstay in treating, and maybe curing, many of our most devastating and intractable illnesses,” said FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb after Luxturna’s approval.
As innovative gene and cell therapies continue to make the transition from the laboratory to the clinic, they are bringing with them the promise of truly personalised medicine. The last few years have seen the regulatory approval of the first gene therapies that take a patient’s own immune cells and genetically engineer them to target cancer cells more effectively.
These chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies now represent a rapidly growing field, with Novartis’s Kymriah, the first CAR-T therapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August 2017 for the treatment of a rare blood cancer, seen as the tip of the iceberg for this treatment class’ potential. Approval of Kite Pharma’s Yescarta, a CAR-T treatment for certain forms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, followed just a few months later.
Read more
Scientists have designed a special type of drug that helps the body eat and destroy cancerous cells.
The treatment boosts the action of white blood cells, called macrophages, that the immune system uses to gobble up unwanted invaders.
Tests in mice showed the therapy worked for aggressive breast and skin tumours, Nature Biomedical Engineering journal reports.
Read more
The advantages of flow batteries include easy scalability and long cycle life. Among its disadvantages are relatively low energy density and high component cost.
Form Energy’s use of sulfur, which is both cheap and abundant, lowers those costs dramatically.
As described in PV-Magazine, the battery uses sulfur in the anode and aerated liquid salt in the cathode. Oxygen flowing in and out of the cathode makes the battery discharge and charge.
Read more
The next phase of a NASA sponsored mission to 3D print human organs and tissues in space will launch in February 2019. A 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) developed by nScrypt and Techshot and destined for the International Space Station (ISS) will form part of the cargo of SpaceX CRS-17.
3D printing in zero gravity
nScrypt is based in Orlando, Florida and is a manufacturer of industrial micro-dispensing and 3D printing systems. The company is spin out of Sciperio Inc who, under a DARPA contact, developed an award winning bioprinter in 2003.
Read more
Edge Of The Universe
Posted in space
Nascent planet seen carving a path through the disc of gas and dust surrounding the very young star PDS70.
Read more
China’s anti-air and water pollution plan has 2020 targets:
* ‘good-air days’ reach over 80 percent annually * Over 70% of the surface water to be drinkable * around 70 percent of the country’s offshore area water should be of good quality.
Currently about 60% of China’s water is not safe for human contact.
Read more
Too healthy for your own good?
Posted in business, life extension
Why on Earth would you ever want to be less than completely healthy?
Recently, Reason of Fight Aging! pointed out psychological research revealing a certain conservatism in terms of what people consider to be the “ideal” levels of happiness, intelligence, longevity, and even health.
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that significant numbers of people in the studies weren’t too keen on the idea of living much longer than the average (around 90 years), and even under the assumption of eternal youth, their preference didn’t go past 120 on average; after all, LEAF wouldn’t be in business if the idea of healthy life extension wasn’t so inexplicably frowned upon. What’s really flabbergasting, though, is that even health—health!—is apparently something you can have too much of; on a scale from 0 (“completely unhealthy”) to 100 (“completely healthy”), the average preference gravitated somewhere between 80 and 90. These results provide us with an occasion for reflection.
(Il)logical conclusions