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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,660

Prosthetic Memory System Successful in Humans, Study Finds

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory.

In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements. The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

I Spent a Weekend With Cyborgs, and Now I Have an RFID Implant I Have No Idea What to Do With

Jeffrey Tibbetts prepped for implantation and scrubbed in, methodically sudsing up to his elbows, scraping the dirt from under his fingernails and scouring his hands with a rough brush to render his body sterile before donning a pair of beige latex surgical gloves.

Behind him, a twentysomething tea barista in a black baseball cap waited pensively, his left ring finger exposed from under a surgical drape, a tourniquet wrapped tightly around it. For months, an implanted magnet had been uncomfortably bulging out of the side of Zac Shannon’s finger. Tibbetts picked up a scalpel and began cutting, gently scraping away at the flesh until the incision was deep enough to expose the magnet. With the very steady hands of a practiced surgeon, he pulled out the tiny hunk of metal.

Tibbetts plopped another magnet into the finger, sutured it shut, and removed the tourniquet. The small wound began to gush blood.

E. coli rewired to control growth as experts let them make proteins for medicine

Experts have equipped biotech workhorse bacteria with feedback control mechanism to balance growth with making protein products.

Medicines like insulin and interferon are manufactured using genetically engineered bacteria, such as E. coli. E. coli grow quickly and can be given DNA that instructs them to make proteins used in medicines and other materials.

However, the extra burden of producing new proteins hampers bacterial growth, which slows production. Solving this problem is an area of great interest for biotechnology and synthetic biology.

You Know That Romaine-Linked Outbreak? DNA Tech Is Fixing It

Whole genome sequencing is more precise than other methods, and it just keeps getting faster and cheaper. Joel Sevinsky, head of the Molecular Science Laboratory at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), told the Associated Press his lab can sequence the genome of a suspected pathogen in less than 72 hours.

Whole genome sequencing is already helping researchers address food-borne outbreaks, including a 2017 salmonella outbreak that stretched across 21 states, and the current romaine outbreak.

It’s even identifying contaminated food before it even reaches the public. According to the AP, inspectors used genome sequencing to find pathogens that could have caused outbreaks when they inspected food plants. They were able to recall the tainted products before they ever reached grocery stores or restaurants, preventing countless people from being sickened.

Goldenrod Extract has a Marginal Senolytic Effect in Cell Culture Study

Today, we have a new study showing that a common, plant-based compound could help clear out unwanted senescent cells, which accumulate with age and produce inflammatory signals that drive age-related disease progression.

Taking out the trash

A new study has investigated a natural, plant-based compound for its ability to destroy senescent cells [1]. These cells accumulate with age due to the aging immune system becoming increasingly poor at removing them; this leads to a build-up of these cells and the secretions they produce, which cause chronic inflammation. These proinflammatory secretions are known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP).

CGP Grey: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

CGP Grey has produced a new video, this time an animated version of Prof. Nick Bostrom’s “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant”. The fable is a powerful metaphor for aging and the acceptance mechanisms that have led humans to schedule their entire lives around its diktat.

There’s a good chance that ten or fifteen years from now, we’ll look back at this moment in history and realize that we were living through the beginning of a revolution, the first baby steps of what would eventually become a global movement. Maybe it’ll take longer, but just like it was for human flight, the unmistakable signs of the upcoming paradigm shift are all around us.

If you are paying attention to the field of rejuvenation biotechnology, you’re noticing how more and more experts have dared to “come out” and speak of aging not only as a medical problem to be solved but also one that we might just be able to relegate to medical history books in the relatively near term; you’re noticing the technical progress, big and small; how the topic is moving from fringe to mainstream; how more people join the cause; and how previously dismissive and uninterested people now react to this change, either by disputing the feasibility or desirability of defeating aging.

Scientists Get Their First Look at the Enzyme That Could Help Battle Aging

The enzyme holds clues to a possible cure for aging or potential cancer therapies.

Janet Iwasa

Nothing in your body lasts forever. Every single cell in your body will die eventually, and eventually you’ll run out of replacements. When that happens, various parts of your body will stop working correctly, and at some point the whole thing will shut down. Aging happens to all of us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.