Lifeboat Foundation

A tiny implant offers a new weight loss option, and a gastric bypass alternative, for people suffering from obesity.

The device uses light to stimulate the nerve responsible for regulating food intake. A tiny glow from the implant and users don’t feel as hungry — instead, they feel full.

Researchers at Texas A&M say that this dime-sized device could provide a far less invasive surgical option than the so-called stomach stapling surgery — which is currently a last resort surgery for obese patients. This could be a viable option for a gastric bypass alternative.

Automation ‘to keep people safe’

Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics said four models, including Sophia will start to be mass produced in the first half of 2021.

Continue reading “Sophia Robot Makers’ Mass Rollout Plan Signals Rise in Robotics” »

Circa 2012

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Continue reading “Worm Regeneration May Lend A Hand in Human Healing” »

Circa 2018

Frogs partly regrew their hind legs after a dose of the female sex hormone progesterone was applied to the wound site for just one day.

Circa 2018

Biologists are keen to understand how a type of flatworm known as a planarian uses powerful stem cells to regenerate an entire body from a headless sliver of itself.

Continue reading “These Flatworms Can Regrow A Body From A Fragment. How Do They Do It And Could We?” »

HOUSTON — (Jan. 252021) — Wireless communication directly between brains is one step closer to reality thanks to $8 million in Department of Defense follow-up funding for Rice University neuroengineers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the team’s proof-of-principle research toward a wireless brain link in 2018, has asked for a preclinical demonstration of the technology that could set the stage for human tests as early as 2022.

Continue reading “Brain-to-brain communication demo receives DARPA funding” »

Interesting.

Gamers of the future should be prepared! 😃

NZ’s newest resident billionaire says BCIs could be used to change a person’s mood, help them fall asleep, and to create incredibly immersive games.

Continue reading “Gabe Newell says brain-computer interface tech will allow video games far beyond what human ‘meat peripherals’ can comprehend” »

Using CRISPR technology, researchers are tracking the lineage of individual cancer cells as they proliferate and metastasize in real-time.

When cancer is confined to one spot in the body, doctors can often treat it with surgery or other therapies. Much of the mortality associated with cancer, however, is due to its tendency to metastasize, sending out seeds of itself that may take root throughout the body. The exact moment of metastasis is fleeting, lost in the millions of divisions that take place in a tumor. “These events are typically impossible to monitor in real time,” says Jonathan Weissman, MIT professor of biology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research member.

Now, researchers led by Weissman, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have turned a CRISPR tool into a way to do just that. In a paper published on January 212021, in Science, Weissman’s lab, in collaboration with Nir Yosef, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and Trever Bivona, a cancer biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, treats cancer cells the way evolutionary biologists might look at species, mapping out an intricately detailed family tree. By examining the branches, they can track the cell’s lineage to find when a single tumor cell went rogue, spreading its progeny to the rest of the body.