Published in July 17th, 2008
Researchers at UCLA have teamed up with Singapore-based company AWAK Technologies Pte. Ltd. to develop a commercial wearable kidney based on the design by Martin Roberts, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at UCLA. Here’s the press release.
continue reading.....
Published in July 11th, 2008
More than 200 scientists and longevity activists gathered at UCLA recently to discuss advancements in repairing humans. New technology is making it possible to imagine a world with ever greater life spans, but old world issues pervaded the discussions.
The Methuselah Foundation’s Aubrey de Grey organized the event and kicked it off with a theoretical explanation [...]
continue reading.....
Published in June 29th, 2008
Today was the first day of the science part of the M Foundation’s aging conference at UCLA. There were many impressive speakers and academics, but the most impressive was Zheng Cui from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has discovered that white blood cells in cancer resistant mice can be used to [...]
continue reading.....
Published in June 3rd, 2008
CMU researchers may be creating technology that speeds up the progress of medical advances that can help us live longer. From Bio IT world:
“The researchers published their findings in a paper last month (“Graphical Models for Structured Classification, with an Application to Interpreting Images of Protein Subcellular Location Patterns,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, [...]
continue reading.....
Published in May 12th, 2008
From the UK Times: “THE British doctor who pioneered test-tube babies has forecast that within decades stem-cell technology will make it possible to grow replacements for virtually any part of the human body.
Robert Edwards, 82, said the emerging field of regenerative medicine would enable a patient’s own cells to be used to build hearts, livers [...]
continue reading.....
Published in April 28th, 2008
This is good news, not only for those with the Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis disease, but also for the entire field of gene therapy which had suffered setbacks when a a teenager named Jesse Gelsinger died of organ failure just days after receiving a gene therapy treatment at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.
continue reading.....
Published in April 8th, 2008
As baby boomers are repainting the aging landscape, new products dedicated to fighting aging are cropping up. However, these products aren’t only for older generations — younger groups could also utilize them to detect problems early on.
Read more here.
continue reading.....
Published in March 24th, 2008
This is amazing and shows the power of regenerative medicine.
continue reading.....
Published in March 24th, 2008
The Alzheimer’s Association recently reported that one out of eight baby boomers is expected to get Alzheimer’s disease, creating a total of 10 million victims. This staggering prediction underscores the need for brain health and augmentation, a new market that tech players are fortunately beginning to enter.
Just as it is possible to go to work [...]
continue reading.....
Published in March 13th, 2008
The Allen Institute for Brain Science is launching a four-year, $55 million project to build an atlas of genes’ activity in the brain. From the WSJ:
“Jones and his colleagues will take about a half dozen brains from recently dead people who were neurologically and psychiatrically healthy. Then they’ll divide each brain into somewhere between 500 [...]
continue reading.....
Published in March 7th, 2008
What do these two things have in common? According to MIT’s Technology review, a new material inspired by sea cucumbers “switches rapidly between rigid and flexible states.” This is important because “such a material may be useful in the design of implantable electrodes able to record brain activity over long stretches of time, [...]
continue reading.....
Published in March 7th, 2008
Google’s recent announcement that it is creating a home for personal health records online is a natural outgrowth of Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 consumer Internet focus. The question this raises is whether a market-driven system is better for keeping health records than one run by the government.
Groups like the World Privacy Forum worry that initiatives [...]
continue reading.....
Published in January 8th, 2008
I spoke at Command College today on future tech issues. Below is a list of links for the people in the room who want to read more on the issue areas.
Command College Links 2008
Virtual Reality and Intellectual property
Club Penguin: http://play.clubpenguin.com/
FlowPlay: http://world.flowplay.com/v10/teaser.jsp
Second life (trailer): http://secondlife.com/showcase/trailercontest_2006.php
How something is built in Second Life: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorials#Content_creation
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mVSzh_QTE00&feature=related
DEMO
Not just a game – [...]
continue reading.....
Published in October 12th, 2007
Last weekend, 150 people attended the Alcor life extension conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. The main subject was cryonics, the use of technology to cool and preserve the human body with the aim of future revival. The technology, still speculative, raises many present-world issues. In 2003, a daughter of Ted Williams attempted to stop the cryonic [...]
continue reading.....
Published in October 6th, 2007
So far the morning has been interesting, learning about how cryopreservation works. One thing that strikes me, however, is how much time we are spending talking about death at this life extension conference. I suppose that it is natural given that the conference is organized by a company whose purpose is to freeze [...]
continue reading.....
Published in October 4th, 2007
Here’s the NYT piece on it. At first glance, this seems like a pretty cool idea to me.
continue reading.....
Published in August 29th, 2007
This is a pretty cool story from my homeland. Doctors implanted an artificial heart in a 15 year old girl while they waited for a replacement human heart to transplant. In the meantime, the girl’s own heart regenerated.
continue reading.....
Published in August 17th, 2007
News via Eureka Alert
Draining away brain’s toxic protein to stop Alzheimer’s
Scientists are trying a plumber’s approach to rid the brain of the amyloid buildup that plagues Alzheimer’s patients: Simply drain the toxic protein away.
That’s the method outlined in a paper published online August 12 by Nature Medicine. Scientists from the University of Rochester Medical [...]
continue reading.....
Published in June 3rd, 2007
UK aging expert Professor Peter Piper recently spoke out against what he believes is a major health problem. It seems that the sodium benzoate used to preserve soft drinks may also be responsible for DNA damage. When Piper applied the chemical to yeast cells, it damaged an important area of DNA in the [...]
continue reading.....
Published in May 6th, 2007
Researchers in La Jolla, CA recently announced that they have “identified a critical gene that specifically links calorie restriction (CR) to longevity.” We already know that massively limiting the amount of calories one eats (caloric restriction) can extend life, but we can’t yet exactly explain why.
The gene, which encodes a protein called PHA-4, amplified [...]
continue reading.....
RSS 2.0
