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Dr. Peter J. Hotez — Baylor College of Medicine — Scientist, Researcher, Author, Science Explainer

Coming off multiple country approvals for his “patent free” Covid vaccine, Scientist, Researcher, Author, Science Explainer, Dr. Peter Hotez, MD, Ph.D. Baylor College of Medicine, drops by for an episode of Progress, Potential, And Possibilities.

Dr. Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. (https://peterhotez.org/), is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine (https://www.bcm.edu/people-search/peter-hotez-23229), where he is also Chief of the Section of Pediatric Tropical Medicine and the Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics (https://www.texaschildrens.org/find-a-doctor/peter-jay-hotez-md-phd).

Dr. Hotez is also Rice University’s Baker Institute fellow in disease and poverty (https://www.bakerinstitute.org/experts/peter-j-hotez/) and Co-Director of Parasites Without Borders (https://parasiteswithoutborders.com/), a global nonprofit organization with a focus on those suffering from parasitic diseases in subtropical environments.

Dr. Hotez is an internationally recognized physician-scientist with expertise in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development. He leads the only product development partnership for developing new vaccines for hookworm, schistosomiasis and Chagas disease, and is just coming off a major win for emergency use approval of his team’s Corbevax protein sub-unit COVID-19 vaccine, of which he, and previous guest to the show, Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, were recently nominated for a Nobel Prize.

Dr. Hotez is the author of more than 400 original papers, as well as the books Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases — The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development, Blue Marble Health — An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad, and Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-science.

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Amazon and Johns Hopkins announce new AI institute

Today Amazon and The Johns Hopkins University announced the creation of the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI (AI2AI). The collaboration will focus on … See more.

Amazon and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) today announced the creation of the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI (AI2AI).

The Amazon-JHU collaboration will focus on driving ground-breaking AI advances with an emphasis on machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech processing. Sanjeev Khudanpur, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will serve as the founding director of the initiative.

Amazon’s sponsorship of AI2AI, which will be housed in JHU’s Whiting School of Engineering, underscores its commitment to partnering with academia to address the most complex challenges in Al, democratizing access to the benefits of Al innovations, and broadening participation in research from diverse, interdisciplinary scholars, and other innovators.

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Michael Fossel | Aging: Understanding it, Reversing it

Dr Fossel talking about dementia, telomeres, and clarifying some experimental myths.

Foresight Biotech & Health Extension Meeting sponsored by 100 Plus Capital.
Program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/biotech-health-extension-program/

Michael Fossel, Telocyte.
Aging: Understanding it, Reversing it.

Michael Fossel is Founder and President of Telocyte. He served as the executive director of the American Aging Association, has published more than 100 articles, books, and chapters on age-related disease and the potential for effective intervention via gene therapy, as well as have served as both an advisor to and board member for several biotechnology companies prior to Telocyte.

Join us:

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Humans could live up to 150 years, new study claims

Humans could live until the ripe old age of 150 years according to recent research – and scientists are racing to work out how.

Harvard geniuses, biohackers and internet billionaires are all looking for ways that humans can crack the code on aging.

WaitButWhy blogger Tim Urban writes “the human body seems programmed to shut itself down somewhere around the century mark, if it hasn’t already”.

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Engineered crystals could help computers run on less power

Computers may be growing smaller and more powerful, but they require a great deal of energy to operate. The total amount of energy the U.S. dedicates to computing has risen dramatically over the last decade and is quickly approaching that of other major sectors, like transportation.

In a study published online this week the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, engineers describe a major breakthrough in the design of a component of transistors—the tiny electrical switches that form the building blocks of computers—that could significantly reduce their without sacrificing speed, size or performance. The component, called the gate oxide, plays a key role in switching the transistor on and off.

“We have been able to show that our gate-oxide technology is better than commercially available transistors: What the trillion-dollar semiconductor industry can do today—we can essentially beat them,” said study senior author Sayeef Salahuddin, the TSMC Distinguished professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.

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Blue Brain builds neurons with mathematics

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish physician from the turn of the 19th century, is considered by most to be the father of modern neuroscience. He stared down a microscope day and night for years, fascinated by chemically stained neurons he found in slices of human brain tissue. By hand, he painstakingly drew virtually every new type of neuron he came across using nothing more than pen and paper. As the Charles Darwin for the brain, he mapped every detail of the forest of neurons that make up the brain, calling them the “butterflies of the brain”. Today, 200 years later, Blue Brain has found a way to dispense with the human eye, pen and paper, and use only mathematics to automatically draw neurons in 3D as digital twins. Math can now be used to capture all the “butterflies of the brain”, which allows us to use computers to build any and all the billons of neurons that make up the brain. And that means we are getting closer to being able to build digital twins of brains.

These billions of neurons form trillions of synapses – where neurons communicate with each other. Such complexity needs comprehensive neuron models and accurately reconstructed detailed brain networks in order to replicate the healthy and disease states of the brain. Efforts to build such models and networks have historically been hampered by the lack of experimental data available. But now, scientists at the EPFL Blue Brain Project using algebraic topology, a field of Math, have created an algorithm that requires only a few examples to generate large numbers of unique cells. Using this algorithm – the Topological Neuronal Synthesis (TNS), they can efficiently synthesize millions of unique neuronal morphologies.

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