Lifeboat Foundation

Cancer is a mysterious disease for many reasons. Chief among the unknowns are how and why tumors form.

Two University of Iowa studies offer key insights by recording in real time, and in 3-D, the movements of cancerous human breast tissue cells. It’s believed to be the first time cancer cells’ motion and accretion into tumors has been continuously tracked. (See accompanying videos.)

The team discovered that cancerous cells actively recruit healthy cells into tumors by extending a cable of sorts to grab their neighbors—both cancerous and healthy—and reel them in. Moreover, the Iowa researchers report that as little as five percent of cancerous cells are needed to form the tumors, a ratio that heretofore had been unknown.

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An international team of researchers has developed a new algorithm that could one day help scientists reprogram cells to plug any kind of gap in the human body. The computer code model, called Mogrify, is designed to make the process of creating pluripotent stem cells much quicker and more straightforward than ever before.

A pluripotent stem cell is one that has the potential to become any type of specialised cell in the body: eye tissue, or a neural cell, or cells to build a heart. In theory, that would open up the potential for doctors to regrow limbs, make organs to order, and patch up the human body in all kinds of ways that aren’t currently possible.

It was Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka who first reprogrammed cells in this way back in 2007 — it later earned him a Nobel Prize — but Yamanaka’s work involved a lot of labourious trial and error, and the process he followed is not an easy one to reproduce. Mogrify aims to compute the required set of factors to change cells instead, and it’s passed its early tests with flying colours.

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Scientists hope to create a computer that can interpret, analyze, and process information with the same efficiency as a human.

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It’s a brave new world friends.

If you thought vintage arcades and arcade bars made for an eventful afternoon in L.A, how about a trip into the limitless worlds of virtual reality?

That’s exactly what you may able to do in just a few months with the announcement that virtual reality studio Starbreeze plans to create a VR arcade somewhere in Los Angeles later this year.

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As recently as 50 years ago, psychiatry lacked a scientific foundation, the medical community considered mental illness a disorder of the mind, and mental patients were literally written off as “sick in the head.” A fortunate turn in progress has yielded today’s modern imaging devices, which allow neuroscientists and psychiatrists to examine the brain of an individual suffering from a mental disorder and provide the best treatment options. In a recent interview, Columbia University Psychiatry Chair Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman stated that new research into understanding the mind is growing at an accelerated pace.

(iStock)

Lieberman noted that, just as Galileo couldn’t prove heliocentrism until he had a telescope, psychiatry lacked the technological sophistication, tools, and instruments necessary to get an understanding of the brain until the 1950s. It wasn’t until the advent of psychopharmacology and neuroimaging, he said, that researchers could look inside the so-called black box that is the brain.

“(It began with) the CAT scan, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, positron emission tomography (PET scans) and then molecular genetics. Most recently, the burgeoning discipline of neuroscience and all of the methods within, beginning with molecular biology and progressing to optogenetics, this capacity has given researchers the ability to deconstruct the brain, understand its integral components, its mechanisms of action and how they underpin mental function and behavior,” Lieberman said. “The momentum that has built is almost like Moore’s law with computer chips, (and) you see this increasing power occurring with exponential sort of growth.”

Continue reading “How Technology Changes the Way We Diagnose and Treat Mental Illness” »

Now this is impressive! Game Revenue could hit in less than 4 yrs $115 billion.

Virtual reality games could see revenue start in the millions and end in the billions by 2020.

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Truly sad; and will indeed happen. Lower skill jobs have been replaced in the past and will continue to happen on a broader scale with AI. This has been the warning from Gates, Musk, and Hawkings.

Automation and the march of the robots will prove most disruptive to the world’s poorest nations, with 85 per cent of all jobs in Ethiopia in danger of being lost, according to new analysis. Nepal, Cambodia, China, Bangladesh and Guatemala are among.

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If you are a VR or AR expert Google wants YOU!

Recent job postings reveal that Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is getting serious about Virtual Reality with related vacancies popping up on its careers page.

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We have Disney & Universal; and China has Transformers.

Hasbro’s iconic “Transformers” are poised to become a major live entertainment attraction in China from next year.

A custom-built theater seating 4,500 will host a live show combining shape-shifting robots, aerial stunts and large-scale special effects.

Continue reading “Transformers theme park set to open in China” »