In this episode, Daniel Walters sits down with Dr. Cristina LePort, a cardiologist with 45 years in medicine, co-founder of the biotech company Genescient, and author of the new medical and political thriller Defrosted. This past June, AARP ran her essay “I’m a Cardiologist and I Plan to Be Cryogenically Frozen,” putting cryonics in front of one of the largest readerships in America. Cristina talks about arriving in New York with almost no English, switching specialties in her late 40s, the fruit flies in her garage that live six times longer than normal, and why after decades of keeping patients alive, she decided cryonics was the only rational response to death.
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When humans disappear, biodiversity takes a surprising turn
For decades, conservation has worried about the risks of too many people. In some places, depopulation is the real threat.
The zeptoverse: what is it and how will it transform physics?
Researchers have detected signals from the smallest distances ever probed.
Most solar systems look nothing like ours. Here’s why
Looking into the origins of life itself, scientists are looking into the story of our solar system, including Earth’s.
📺 Seiko Put a TV on Your Wrist in 1982
Long before smartwatches, Seiko released the T001 TV Watch. It showed live television on a tiny wrist display, while a separate receiver handled the signal…
Exclusive-Google extends voluntary buyout offers to employees in several countries
ZURICH, Nov 4 : Alphabet’s Google has expanded employee buyout offers to several countries this year as it looks to rein in rising costs amid heavy spending on artificial intelligence.
The search engine company confirmed to Reuters that it began offering voluntary exit packages in June to some employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland.
Reuters could not determine how many employees have accepted the latest round of offers, which had not previously been reported.
How a gut virus hijacks mucus production to slip past the body’s protective barrier
Among the various viruses that sicken your gut, some at least leave behind a tiny path of cellular destruction as they replicate, implicating the guilty pathogen. Both rotavirus and norovirus invade the small intestine, multiply there and can break through the organ’s outer lining as one way of proliferating in the body.
Astroviruses, which infect the same organ and cause pediatric diarrhea worldwide, have a slicker strategy that avoids tissue damage. In a recent study published in the PLOS Pathogens, a team of cell biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reports the astrovirus’s exit strategy. In a few words, it can be summed up as “follow the mucus.”
The team discovered that astrovirus relies on mucus secretion from goblet cells as the coordinated path to completing its replication cycle. The finding reveals potentially new targets for strategies to treat pediatric diarrhea, according to the paper’s senior author, Valerie Cortez, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz.
The daring idea that time is an illusion and how we could prove it
The way time ticks forward in our universe has long stumped physicists. Now, a new set of tools from entangled atoms to black holes promises to reveal time’s true nature
ANO6-mediated trogocytosis of cancer-associated fibroblasts promotes pancreatic cancer cell growth and immune suppression
et al. uncover that cancer-associated fibroblasts fuel pancreatic tumor growth and immune suppression by transferring membrane lipids to cancer cells through anoctamin 6-dependent trogocytosis.
Michael Levin: Memory and intelligence do not require a brain
For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.
Alasdair Craig: Could you give us a brief overview of what you’re aiming to do in regenerative medicine and cancer treatment?
Michael Levin: Imagine that you had a way of communicating goals, anatomical goals, to groups of cells, to ask them to build whatever structure you wanted them to build. Then birth defects, traumatic injury, degenerative disease, aging, cancer, all of these things could be solved. This is the major unsolved problem of regenerative medicine. So this is what we do in my group: we work on ways to communicate anatomical goals to groups of cells.