Everyone’s Heard Of The Ice Bucket Challenge For ALS, But We’re Just Beginning To Understand What Causes It.
Publicised in the recent ‘ice bucket challenge’, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a crippling, degenerative condition — but what actually causes it? It may be a transport breakdown, created by blocked nuclear pores.
The human being — especially in so-called “advanced civilizations” — is the animal that molds itself into its own pet.
Peter Sloterdijk is Germany’s most controversial thinker and media theorist. He has dared to challenge long-established divisions in traditional philosophy of body and soul, subject and object, culture and nature. His 1999 lecture on “Regulations for the Human Park,” in which he argued that genetic engineering was a continuation of human striving for self-creation, stirred up a tempest in a country known for Nazi eugenics. At the same time, he himself has concluded that “the taming of man has failed” as civilization’s potential for barbarism has grown ever greater. His seminal books include “Critique of Cynical Reason” and his trilogy, “Spheres.”
At a recent Berggruen Center on Philosophy and Culture symposium on humans and technology at Cambridge University’s St. John’s School of Divinity, The WorldPost discussed with Sloterdijk the end of borders between humans and technology, the cloud, singularity and identity in the age of globalization.
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Checkout the latest Longevity Reporter Newsletter (05th September, 2015), covering this week’s top news in health, aging, longevity.
This week: Dramatic Advances In Super-Resolution Imaging; This Stunning 3-D Model Provides A Fresh Perspective On Cancer; Want A Long Lifespan? You Need Stable Gene Networks; The Future Of Health: Precision Medicine; And more.
Your DNA contains a huge amount of information, and it’s getting cheaper and easier to sequence it every day. The problem now is not the sequencing, but what you can actually learn from the information — if you can at all. We’re pretty good at reading off the code nowadays, but the vast majority of it is still a mystery. While there are many companies that will sequence your DNA for a relatively cheap fee, there’s no unified platform directing you to companies who can actually make sense of the code for you; after all there’s not much use having information if you have no idea what it means. Starting with a $100 million investment and partners including Illumina (a world leader in sequencing), new company Helix aims to change this by building a sort of genome ‘App store’ — putting you in touch with your DNA.
Helix wants to act like a hub, connecting you with the right companies and enabling you to find out information you want on your very own genome. As sequencing expands, buoyed by the precision medicine drive, we’re learning more and more about our DNA. This platform hopes to bring all these developments together so that discoveries can trickle through to individuals at home trying to decipher their own genomes.
”Genomics is reaching an inflection point in cost, volumes, and knowledge, creating a significant opportunity to unlock information that is currently not widely accessible to individuals”
Imagine if things like undersea cables or medical implants could simply heal themselves back together if severed – it would certainly be easier than having to go in and fix them. Well, scientists at Pennsylvania State University are bringing such a possibility closer to reality. They’ve created a moldable polymer that heals itself when exposed to water – and it’s based on squid sucker ring teeth.
Led by Prof. Melik Demirel, the researchers started by studying sucker ring teeth collected from squid in various locations around the world. Although the exact composition of the teeth varied between species, it was found that the same proteins which allow them to self-heal were always present.
Intel today announced plans to invest $50 million over the next ten years as part of a quantum computing push to help solve problems such as “large-scale financial analysis and more effective drug development.”
But despite the ambitions and huge cost of the project, company vice president Mike Mayberry admits that “a fully functioning quantum computer is at least a dozen years away.”
The money will be channeled through QuTech, the quantum research institute of Delft University of Technology, and TNO, with Intel additionally pledging to commit its own “engineering resources” to the collaborative effort.
Auricyte LLC, an Indiana University startup that aims to cure hearing loss by growing human stem cells into functioning hearing cells, is among five companies being honored Thursday for being named “Best in Show” at the recent Innovation Showcase 2015.
Auricyte, an Indiana University startup that aims to cure hearing loss by growing human stem cells into functioning hearing cells, was named among the five top companies at Innovation Showcase 2015.
You may have heard of precision medicine in the news, but what actually is it, and what could it mean for the future of healthcare?
In the past, medicine was geared for the masses and was applied to large numbers of people, on the basis of average effectiveness. If a particular substance was ineffective on 10% of the population, it could still pass through and be prescribed anyway. Before genomics, it was tricky to understand or postulate why people had such varied responses to medication, but now we have the right tools — things are changing.
While all humans have extremely similar genes in percentage terms, there are distinct differences in each of us that create our particular vulnerabilities and characteristics. We also respond differently to many treatments; a cure for one might be mediocre for another. This is particularly true for cancer. With the Precision Medicine Initiative taking off, taking into account genetics, lifestyle and environment is beginning to give us an edge — making medicine more accurate and effective.
Nanotechnology and 3-D printing are two fields that have huge potential in general, but manipulating this technology and using it in biology also has tremendous and exciting prospects. In a promising prototype, scientists have created micro-robots shaped like fish which are thinner than a human hair, and can be used to remove toxins, sense environments or deliver drugs to specific tissue.
These tiny fish were formed using a high resolution 3-D printing technology directed with UV light, and are essentially aquatic themed sensing, delivery packages. Platinum particles that react with hydrogen peroxide push the fish forward, and iron oxide at the head of the fish can be steered by magnets; both enabling control of where they ‘swim’ off to. And there you have it — a simple, tiny machine that can be customised for various medical tasks.
In a test of concept, researchers attached polydiacetylene (PDA) nanoparticles to the body, which binds with certain toxins and fluoresces in the red spectrum. When these fish entered an environment containing these toxins, they did indeed fluoresce and neutralised the compounds.
