Lifeboat Foundation

It’s not always talked about in polite company, but your body produces a lot of gases scientists know little about.

A new smart pill, designed at Melbourne’s RMIT University, could help us learn more and may eventually assist in customising what we eat to suit our bodies.

Researchers from the Centre for Advanced Electronics and Sensors have developed the pill, which can measure intestinal gases, and they have now undertaken the first animal tests using the technology to examine the impact of fibre on the gut.

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I could see the value of AI in helping with a whole host of addictions, compulsive disorders, etc. AI at the core is often looking at patterns and predicting outcomes, or the next steps to make, or predicting what you or I will want to do or react to something, etc. So, leveraging AI as a tool to help in finding or innovating new solutions for things like OCD or addictions does truly make sense.

New York-based AiCure, which holds 12 patents for artificially intelligent software platforms that aim to improve patient outcomes by targeting medication adherence, announced the closing of a $12.25 million funding round Monday.

The company’s software was built with help from $7 million in competitive grants from four National Institutes of Health organizations, awarded in order to spur tech developments that would have a significant impact on drug research and therapy. The National Institute of Drug Abuse awarded AiCure $1 million in 2014 to help launch a major study into the efficacy of using the company’s platform to monitor and intervene with patients receiving medication as maintenance therapy for addiction.

Adherence to such therapies is associated with improved recovery, but often patients take improper doses or sell the drugs to others. To address this, AiCure’s platform connects patients with artificial intelligence software via their devices that determines whether a medication is being taken as prescribed. The platform has shown to be feasible for use across various patient populations, including elderly patients and study participants in schizophrenia and HIV prevention trials, according to a news release.

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In the early days of the space race of the 1960s, NASA used satellites to map the geography of the moon. A better understanding of its geology, however, came when men actually walked on the moon, culminating with Astronaut and Geologist Harrison Schmitt exploring the moon’s surface during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Image credit: Scientific American

In the modern era, Dr. Gregory Hickock is one neuroscientist who believes the field of neuroscience is pursuing comparable advances. While scientists have historically developed a geographic map of the brain’s functional systems, Hickock says computational neuroanatomy is digging deeper into the geology of the brain to help provide an understanding of how the different regions interact computationally to give rise to complex behaviors.

“Computational neuroanatomy is kind of working towards that level of description from the brain map perspective. The typical function maps you see in textbooks are cartoon-like. We’re trying to take those mountain areas and, instead of relating them to labels for functions like language, we’re trying to map them on — and relate them to — stuff that the computational neuroscientists are doing.”

Continue reading “Where Will Advanced Brain Mapping Lead Us?” »

Vietnam-Germany Hospital, considered Vietnam’s largest surgical center, is looking forward to being able to carry out the head transplant, deputy director Trinh Hong Son told a seminar on Tuesday morning.

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Robots aren’t going to replace us, but by working hand in hand with us they will redefine what it means to be human.

The year is 2025. You’re sitting in a surgery watching your doctor carefully insert the tips of her fingertips into black thimble-like actuators.

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CRISPR, CRISPR, CRISPR. We’ve all heard about it’s gene editing capability, but it has potential to do so much more — controlling genes and offering a precise delivery system.

More than an editing platform

The CRISPR-Cas9 system does a wonderful job, partly because it targets genes so specifically. It’s not the only system that does this, but it’s the cheapest and easiest to create so far. For those with imagination however, this targeting quality means it could do so much more than simply snip away at sequences. Targeting promoter sequences, delivering a payload to a specific region of DNA…the platform has enormous potential.

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Last week at CES, South San Francisco based Profusa showed off an upcoming injectable sensor that can be used to continuously monitor oxygen levels in tissue. Measuring only five millimeters long and a tiny 250 microns in diameter, the biosensor can be injected into tissue with just a hypodermic needle. It consists of a soft hydrogel scaffold that allows it to be biologically compatible with the surrounding tissue without any foreign body response. The sensor also contains a special chemical marker that changes fluorescence depending on the amount of oxygen that reacts with it. An optical reader placed on the skin measures the fluorescence and relays the data to a smartphone. The biosensor can last as long as two years (at which point the chemical marker begins to lose its potency), and because it contains no electronics and is completely biocompatible there’s no need to remove it.

On stage at the CES Digital Health Summit, Profusa CEO Dr. Ben Hwang gave a live demonstration of how the sensor works in action. As two of his colleagues with the sensors implanted and using a blood pressure cuffs performed stretches to simulate changes in blood flow, a graph displayed the live view of the changing tissue oxygen levels at the site of the sensors.

Continue reading “Medgadget @ CES 2016: Profusa Unveils Long-Term Implanatable Biosensor” »

Anyone offended by the prospect of drinking fine whiskey inside sealed space packs with straws after Suntory sent its finest variety to the ISS for testing? Don’t worry: Ballantine’s got your back. The liquor company has commissioned Open Space Agency’s James Parr — who also created a Lumia-powered 3D-printed telescope in the past — to design a high-tech whiskey glass especially for zero-G environments. He tested a number of designs before settling on a rounded glass with a spiral convex stainless steel base plated in rose gold that can create the surface tension necessary to hold the liquor down. The liquid then passes through channels on the sides of the glass all the way up to the golden mouthpiece.

The “glass” part itself is actually 3D-printed medical-grade PLA plastic, the same kind used for heart valves. Since everything tends to float in microgravity, the base hides a 22-pound magnet that can be used to stick the glass on magnetic surfaces. Plus, it has a one way valve where a customized whiskey bottle nozzle can be inserted to pour out a shot. Parr and Ballantine published more details about the design process on Medium, if you’d like to read more about how the “space glass” was created. Sure, it could be nothing but a marketing stunt, but it’s amazing how much thought went into designing a whiskey glass. It’s unfortunate that most of us might never get to use it in its intended environment; good thing the final product at least looks fancy enough to display.

Continue reading “Ballantine designs ‘space glass’ for drinking whiskey in microgravity” »

Early detection by Grail (leveraging illumina’s gene sequencing technology) looks promising. This truly will be beneficial for early detection. And, I will be very interested in seeing how it benefits those who are genetically pre-disposed to cancer related gene mutations especially around Esaphogus, Glioblastoma, and Pancreatic cancers since these are often hard to detect in their earliest stages.

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