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Oct 10, 2015

Veritas Genetics Breaks $1,000 Whole Genome Barrier

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health

BOSTON, Sept. 29, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Veritas Genetics today announced that the company is making it possible for participants in the Personal Genome Project (PGP) to be among the first to get their whole genome sequenced and interpreted for less than a $1,000.

Led by Veritas Genetics Co-Founder Dr. George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Personal Genome Project, PGP is a long-term effort to sequence thousands of complete genomes to enable research into personal genomics and personalized medicine. PGP has more than 16,000 participants worldwide.

The “$1,000 Genome” has long been considered the tipping point when sequencing and interpreting the human genome becomes commonplace and begins to rapidly increase what is known and to dramatically impact healthcare. The catchphrase underscores how far science has come since the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion spent over a decade.

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Oct 10, 2015

The Future of Health and Medicine: In Your Pocket, Continuous, and Connected to the Cloud

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xU8kDSTzYd4

This short video (with some fun integrated graphics) is from an interview I did with El País (the largest newspaper in Spain). It highlights some of the emerging technologies and approaches which have the potential to shift health, medicine and biopharma from an intermittent and reactive physician-centric mode, to an era of more continuous data and a proactive approach in which the individual is increasingly empowered and integrated into personalized wellness, diagnosis and therapy.

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Oct 10, 2015

Researchers Say They’ve Recreated Part of a Rat Brain Digitally

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/science/rat-brain-digital-…oject.html


The research was partly supported by a more than $1 billion program that aims to eventually reconstruct the human brain in a computer.

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Oct 10, 2015

A Stand-Up Comedian Tries to Cope with a World Where People Are Becoming Transhuman

Posted by in categories: entertainment, health, transhumanism

In the near future of the short film Enhanced, people can undergo a procedure that blends their bodies with technology, becoming smarter, healthier, and less anxious. But one stand-up comic finds he’s uneasy with the promise of perfection.

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Oct 10, 2015

Elon Musk: We need to leave Earth as soon as possible

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, existential risks, space

He believes in a good backup plan.

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Oct 10, 2015

Physicists say energy can be teleported ‘without a limit of distance’

Posted by in categories: cosmology, energy, particle physics, quantum physics

A team of physicists has proposed a way of teleporting energy over long distances. The technique, which is purely theoretical at this point, takes advantage of the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement where two particles share the same existence.

The researchers, who work out of Tohoku University in Japan, and led by Masahiro Hotta,describe their proposal in the latest edition of Physical Review A. Their system exploits properties of squeezed light or vacuum states that should allow for the teleportation of information about an energy state. In turn, this teleported quantum energy could be made useable.

Unlike teleportation schemes as portrayed in Star Trek or The Fly, this type of teleportation describes entanglement experiments in which two entangled particles are joined despite no apparent connection between them. When a change happens to one particle, the same change happens to the other. Hence, the impression of teleportation. Physicists have conducted experiments using light, matter, and now, energy.

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Oct 10, 2015

Our Aging World: The Striking Statistics About Cancer

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Many people may not know it but the most important risk factor for cancer is growing older. Most cancers occur in people over the age of 65.


Many people may not see cancer as an age-related disease, but it’s a major hurdle we’ll have to overcome in the pursuit of longer lives.

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Oct 10, 2015

h+ Magazine: Synthetic Biology — The True Savior of Mankind

Posted by in categories: biological, biotech/medical, disruptive technology, DNA, environmental, ethics, futurism, genetics, health, innovation, science, sustainability, transhumanism

Encapsulation Pictures

Fear of scientists “playing god” is at the centre of many a plot line in science fiction stories. Perhaps the latest popular iteration of the story we all love is Jurassic World (2015), a film I find interesting only for the tribute it paid to the original Michael Crichton novel and movie Jurassic Park.

Full op-ed from h+ Magazine on 7 October 2015 http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/10/07/opinion-synthetic-biolog…f-mankind/

john hammond jurrasic parkIn Jurassic Park, a novel devoted to the scare of genetic engineering when biotech was new in the 1990s, the character of John Hammond says:

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Oct 10, 2015

These Mysterious Blazing-Fast Ripples Racing Around a Star Defy Explanation

Posted by in category: space

Scientists were looking for planets forming in the large disk of dust surrounding a young star when they encountered a surprise: fast-moving, wavelike arches racing across the disk like ripples in water.

The team first spotted the five structures in data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile while searching for lumps and bumps that might indicate planets forming around the young star. When the researchers looked back at images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 and 2011, they managed to spot the same features — but in new locations. A new video of the mysterious ripples, describes the strange features as seen by ESO scientists.

“Our observations have shown something unexpected,” Anthony Boccaletti, a researcher from LESIA (Observatoire de Paris/CNRS/UPMC/Paris-Diderot) in France and lead author on the paper, said in a statement. “The images from [the Very Large Telescope instrument] SPHERE show a set of unexplained features in the disk, which have an archlike or wavelike structure unlike anything that has ever been observed before.” [The Top 10 Strangest Things in Space]

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Oct 9, 2015

This HIV breakthrough could lead to a cure, scientists say

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, innovation

Scientists in the UK and Australia have identified three biomarkers, which when they attached to T-cells (part of the immune system) in high numbers prior to anti-retroviral therapy, increase the chance of early rebound.

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