Tag Archives: biotech

“Forces of nature: Biomimicry in robotics” by Stuart Nathan

featured at theengineer.co.uk

“(…) robotics, possibly the most important field where engineers try to copy the abilities of living beings, is providing fruitful ground for bioinspired technologies. Investigating nature’s solutions is the preserve of biologists, but their insights into the often surprising and even seemingly perverse ways that organisms achieve what might seem impossible — such as climbing a sheer, smooth surface — can often  give engineers ideas for how to solve completely different problems. (…) .

(…)

Systems based on nature are attractive to engineers for several reasons, Whitesides said. “They tend to work well with humans because their functional parts are frequently soft, so they aren’t as hazardous as heavy industrial machinery with fast-moving metal components. Also, they tend to be simpler, because a lot of the time we replace complex electronic or mechanical control systems by simply making use of the properties of the materials of construction and how we actuate them. That often means they’re relatively cheap, so they can be built for a single use. …” read full article

“Ancestry Moves Further into Consumer Genetics” by Anna Nowogrodzki

article featured in MIT Tech covering new service by Ancestry.

“Ancestry entered the field of consumer DNA analysis in 2012 with the launch of AncestryDNA, a $99 spit test that will analyze your DNA – five years after 23andMe began to offer similar DNA-testing kits.

… Ancestry has an advantage over 23andMe in that it already has millions of users’ family trees. AncestryHealth capitalizes on this: the free service will import both family tree data from Ancestry and genetic data…

…family history is often the first thing doctors ask for to assess health risks, and AncestryHealth is betting that people would rather print out that history from a free website than dredge their memories for half-forgotten details in the five minutes before their doctor’s appointment.

And Ancestry is hoping to sell that data for medical research purposes. …

…“With the blessing of the FDA and regulators, we would like to communicate with that consumer, whether that is through a physician or a genetic counselor,” says Chahine.” read full article

“The spiritual use of an orchard or garden of fruit trees” by Ralph Austen

Published first in 1653 as a companion to the book  A Treatise on Fruit-trees, showing the manner of grafting, setting, pruning, and ordering of them in all respects. this book is a testament to the fact that love for trees and the recognition of the benefits of human contact with trees is far from a XYZ generation fad.

Brain interconnected as an intranet

In “Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains” researchers Miguel Pais-Vieira, Gabriela Chiuffa, Mikhail Lebedev, Amol Yadav, and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis introduces application of brain-to-brain interfaces.

Such interfaces are ways to receive from and send stimuli directly to animal’s brains.  In this papers experiments, rats.

Applications such as animal social behavior, sensorial phenomena and other insight into animal cognitive process are in the prospect of such – rather invasive – techniques.

Indirectly, it may be very intersting to use such neurological logs in reverse: how should our own, A.I. neural systems benefit from interconnectivity?

Experiments bring light to near-sleep brain dynamic.

“Co-activated yet disconnected—Neural correlates of eye closures when trying to stay awake” by
Ju Lynn Onga, Danyang Konga, Tiffany T.Y. Chiaa, Jesisca Tandia, B.T. Thomas Yeoa, b, Michael W.L. Chee published at Neuro Image studies brains activity related to sleep-deprived participants in the experiments.

Of course it’s no news that when sleep-deprived and approaching sleep with spontaneous eye closures we have a somewhat less connected and aware brain.  But this borderline state brings hurdles to collecting data and this paper bring new scientific data on the table.

Injectable Nanowire mesh to stimulate and study neuron activity

“Syringe-injectable electronics” a paper published in nature nanotechnology describes a new technique that allow scientists to introduce a nanoparticle mesh into the brain.

The structure could allow not only to register, transmit and record neural activity but also eventually be used to stimulate neurons with a precision beyond our current skills.   It’s low degree of invasiveness and rejection makes the possibility of applying such studies in normal, functional beings during usual activities.

“Mind reading viable as scientists reconstruct speech from brain activity” By Matthew Humphries

Article from GEEK

“…speech is produced using the cerebral cortex of the brain, meaning with the right electrodes and system in place we should be able to reconstruct speech just from brain waves.

This is what a team from Cognitive Systems Lab at KIT and the Wadsworth Center in New York has managed to do. Using 7 epileptic patients who volunteered for the study, they each had an electrode array attached to the surface of their cerebral cortex in order to monitor brain waves related to speech. A combination of this information combined with machine learning and linguistic knowledge allowed a system to be created that can reconstruct what is being spoken.

The video below shows the speech decoding system in action.” read full article

“The Pentagon’s gamble on brain implants, bionic limbs and combat exoskeletons” by Sara Reardon

Article featured in Nature:

“DARPA is making a big push into biological research — but some scientists question whether its high-risk approach can work.

(…) the first biology funding office to operate within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s avant-garde research arm. The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), which opened in April 2014, aims to support extremely ambitious — some say fantastical — technologies ranging from powered exoskeletons for soldiers to brain implants that can control mental disorders.

DARPA’s plan for tackling such projects is being carried out in the same frenetic style that has defined the agency’s research in other fields. Ever since it was created in 1958, a year after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by launching the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, the agency’s mission has been to prevent any more such surprises by getting there first. So DARPA’s programme managers at the BTO are free to pour tens of millions of dollars into ambitious projects without waiting around for niceties such as peer review. And by working closely with its contractors as they develop their technology, the agency aims to drive discoveries across the often-deadly gap between basic research and commercialization… read more.

“What Happens When We Upload Our Minds?” by MADDIE STONE

Article from Motherboard:

“Since the dawn of computer science, humans have dreamt of building machines that can carry our memories and preserve our minds after our fleshy bodies decay. Whole brain emulation, or mind uploading, still has the ring of science fiction. And yet, some of the world’s leading neuroscientists believe the technology to transfer our brains to computers is not far off.

But if we could upload our minds, should we? Some see uploading as the next chapter in human evolution. Others fear the promise of immortality has been oversold, and that sending our brains off to the cloud without carefully weighing the consequences could be disastrous.

(…)

“The mind is based on the brain, and the brain, like all biology, is a kind of machinery,” (,,,) “Which means we’re talking about information processing in a machine.”

read full story

CELLSEQ – Brazilian Startup

CELLSEQ develops tolls to test agriculture, cosmetics, food and pharmaceutical products for safety and toxicity.
CELLSEQ technology allows for reudced dependency on animal experimentation by use of cells derived from juman stem cells.

Accelerated by Techmall SA

Microbiotic readings

As we read in recently issued by TED Books “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes” 
by Rob Knight, our understanding of the multitude of living forms in our bodys grow quickly.

In such a way that it should be no surprise, as Shaunacy Ferro hints at The Microbiome Could Be the New Fingerprint, that ‘one’ may start seeing itslef as a whole environmental cluster, rather than an individual.  Even if the first step is just for security identification.

 

 

I knew you were wondering when this would come up…

in “Why Brain-to-Brain Communication Is No Longer Unthinkable”, published at Smithsonian.com, Jerry Adler guides you to the amazing ways science is throttling towards new ways brains can communicate with each other.
That is, on top of the already ingenious solutions humans developed over time, such as body, oral an then written languages to mention the most popular.
As in other developments, we rely greatly on our brains to find out how.  Only it seems we may the skipping the instensive use of senses in the near future.