My Immortality Bus trip and transhumanist presidential campaign is the subject of the first chapter (40 pages long). Grab a copy of this excellent book and read about radical personalities attempting to change the world: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radicals-Jamie-Bartlett-ebook/dp/B0…sr=8-1
Even the most exciting breakthrough medical treatment can be rendered obsolete by a particularly insurmountable obstacle: time.
If a treatment only works temporarily, it has little chance of making a significant difference in the lives of patients, which is why the latest news from the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institute is so exciting.
A year after transplanting insulin-producing islet cells into the omentum of a woman with a particularly unwieldy form of type 1 diabetes, the cells continue to operate as hoped.
Brain balls sound like something straight out of a Tim Burton movie: starting as stem cells harvested from patients, they eventually develop into masses of living neurons, jumbled together in misshapen blobs.
Just like the developing brain, these neurons stretch and grow, reaching out skinny branches that grab onto others to form synapses—junctions where one neuron talks with the next.
And they do talk: previous attempts at growing these “brain organoids” found that they spark with electrical activity, much like the webs of neurons inside our heads that lead to thoughts and memories.
Bioprinting new organs and tissues could make transplants available and affordable for all, but is still decades away. In the meantime, scientists have re-purposed the technology to 3D print biocompatible high-precision silicone implants instead.
Soft materials like biological material or silicone are difficult to 3D print because they can’t support themselves like the more rigid plastics typically used by 3D printers. In 2015, Tommy Angelini’s lab at the University of Florida developed a new way of 3D printing soft materials by injecting them into a granular gel similar to hand sanitizer that supports them as they are deposited.
IBM announced today it has successfully built and tested its most powerful universal quantum computing processors. The first new prototype processor will be the core for the first IBM Q early-access commercial systems. The first upgraded processor will be available for use by developers, researchers, and programmers to explore quantum computing using a real quantum processor at no cost via the IBM Cloud. The second is a new prototype of a commercial processor, which will be the core for the first IBM Q early-access commercial systems.
Launched in March 2017, IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems for business and science applications. IBM Q systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform. IBM first opened public access to its quantum processors one year ago, to serve as an enablement tool for scientific research, a resource for university classrooms, and a catalyst of enthusiasm for the field. To date users have run more than 300,000 quantum experiments on the IBM Cloud.
With the introduction of two new processors today for IBM Q, the company is building the foundation for solving practical problems in business and science that are intractable even with today’s most powerful classical computing systems. The two new IBM-developed processors include:
Researchers have come up with yet another candidate for a male contraceptive — this time in the form of a chemical found in certain traditional arthritis remedies.
The team identified molecules that stop sperm from reaching the necessary speed to charge into the egg cell, opening the way for both a new kind of emergency contraceptive and prophylactic that anybody could use.
The target of these molecules is a small gate found throughout the sperm’s tail called Catsper (a combination of cation channel and sperm), which was identified in 2001 by researchers studying male infertility.
