From Rockefeller University via Kurzweil AI.Net:
“The human brain is made up of 100 billion neurons — live wires that must be kept in delicate balance to stabilize the world’s most magnificent computing organ. Too much excitement and the network will slip into an apoplectic, uncomprehending chaos. Too much inhibition and it will flatline. A new [...]

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That was the headline in a NYT article today. The reality is that scientific respect for life-extending research has been there for quite a while, it’s just that the NYT recently noticed. In any case, here’s an interesting prediction that was made at Harvard Medical School:
““In five or six or seven years,” [...]

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This is one way.
Dr. Samuel Preston (after whom the Preston curve is named) says that the US health care system isn’t the reason for the longevity divide between the US (78 years) and countries like Japan (83 years). Instead, he says, other factors like obesity and the formerly heavy smoking rate among [...]

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The father of the “Green Revolution,” Norman Borlaug, died yesterday. If you didn’t know about him, you should. By creating new types of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat, he saved millions from starvation. This is a good story about him, and you can also read about him here. The WSJ said this about him: [...]

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This is great news from the Economist:
“More children are surviving beyond their fifth birthday, according to a new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). The child mortality rate—the number of under-fives dying per thousand live births—declined from 90 in 1990 to 65 in 2008, a drop of over a quarter. The number of [...]

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14 genomes were sequenced for about $4000. That’s down from the $250,000 that it used to cost. Pretty cool.
From the Mercury news:
“Complete Genomics, a Mountain View startup, announced Tuesday that it had deciphered 14 full human genomes for customers that include pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and leading medical research institutes, a significant step for [...]

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From Science Daily:
“When bees sting, they pump poison into their victims. Now the toxin in bee venom has been harnessed to kill tumor cells by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers attached the major component of bee venom to nano-sized spheres that they call nanobees.
In mice, nanobees delivered the [...]

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From MIT Technology Review:
“Lung cancer is a brutal disease, often not caught until it’s too late for treatment to do much good. Now researchers are building an electronic nose that could help physicians detect the disease during its initial stages. Using gold nanoparticles, scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have created sensors [...]

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