Replicator! Yes Captain? Replicate 50 Grams Globamycin Immediately!

Researchers at Scripps and Harvard have taken the early conceptual steps necessary to create an antibiotic replicator, for rapid synthesis of potentially lifesaving drugs.

“This study may signal the start of a new era in how drugs are synthesized,” said Moore, a professor in the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps. “Assembling all the enzymes together in a single reaction vessel is a different way to make a complex molecule.”

While much more work is needed to employ this process on a mass scale, the achievement proves that such synthesis is possible relatively cheaply and easily—without the use of man-made chemicals.... The antibiotic synthesized in Moore’s laboratory, called enterocin, was assembled in approximately two hours. Such a compound would normally take months if not a year to prepare chemically, according to Moore.

Rather than a “eureka” moment that led to the breakthrough, Moore said the process was achieved incrementally. The time-consuming work was spent beforehand identifying and preparing the enzymes that would ultimately catalyze the synthesis, also known as assembling the “biosynthetic pathway.”

“We’ve been preparing for some time now a ‘biological toolbox,’” said Moore. “In this new process the enzymes become the tools to do the synthesis.”

....The new research also carries the potential to combine certain natural enzymes to produce new molecules that typically cannot be found in nature with the goal of developing new drugs. Moore calls these “unnatural natural products.”

Physorg

Medical workers and replicators could be airlifted into remote areas in case of mass casualty epidemics. Rapid testing of body fluids from victims allows the medics to quickly set the necessary enzyme pathways and potential resistances. In short order, lifesaving supplies of exactly the right drug are being replicated from raw material. Backup replicators can be set for auxiliary treatments as needed.

For now, this type of tool will be developed in research labs, to facilitate commercial drug synthesis and other chemical synthesis techniques. Researchers will be able to play with this tool for quite some time.

Introducing the grobyC--the Inverse of a Cyborg

The problem of devising linear actuators for autonomous robots is an interesting one. Several artificial substitutes for muscle have been devised and tested. Scientists from South Korea have decided to avoid the substitutes and go straight to the real thing--using actual living muscle tissue as robot actuators!

A cyborg is the use of machines and artifacts to replace living tissue in a living organism. A grobyc is merely the inverse of a cyborg--the use of living tissue to replace machinery in a machine. The scientists from South Korea have created a grobyc!

According to Chemical Science, Sukho Park of the Nano/Micro System Laboratory at the Seoul National University and his colleagues "made the robot by growing heart muscle tissue from a rat onto tiny robotic skeletons made from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)."

You can see above how the scientists prepared their microrobot: (a) Single heart cells isolated from neonatal rat heart. (b) PDMS structure prepared for culture of cardiomyocytes on its surface. (c) Primary cardiomyocytes on the culture dish containing the PDMS structure. (d) Culture of cardiomyocytes. (e) Transfer of PDMS structure into a new culture dish to observe movement. (f) Schematic image to observe vertical movement. (g) Microscopic image of vertical view. (h) Schematic image to observe lateral movement. (i) Microscopic image of lateral movement. (Credit: Sukho Park and his colleagues)

primidi

Okay, this is not the first grobyc. Back in 2004, scientists used an array of 25,000 rat brain neurons to fly a simulated F-22 fighter jet. The scientists from South Korea have extended the concept to muscle as linear robot actuators. That is quite clever.

Nanotechnologists, if they are smart, borrow shamelessly from biological mechanisms and proofs of concept. It should not surprise us that roboticists would likewise borrow from biology to solve difficult problems in the actuation of autonomous robots.

Muscle is an excellent linear actuator, and is powered by simple nutrients that can be obtained easily. When muscles grow weak or scarred, losing their normal function, a good method of replacing them within living organisms--such as people--would be quite convenient. Fortunately, Pittsburgh scientists have located adult stem cells within the walls of blood vessels that fit the task perfectly. Palliatives for muscular dystrophy or scarred hear walls may be within reach.

Back to the grobyC. How far, do you think, can scientists go in using living tissue and biological ingredients in robots and other machines? The South Korean scientists used cardiomyocytes from the Sprague-Dawley rat. What if they wanted to use the entire heart of the rat as a mechanical pump? Or the digestive system as a way of processing nutrients for the pump and actuators? Or the rat brain as a controller for the grobyc, as the US investigators did in 2004?

At what point does the grobyc become cyborg?

Still Not the Same: Human Genetic Variation on the Rise

In a fascinating collaborative look at Craig Venter's genome, scientists at four institutions looked at SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) and non-SNP DNA variants.

In doing so, the scientists estimate that humans generally share 99% of the genome, rather than the 99.9% of the genome that is traditionally claimed to be held in common. This PLOS Biology study appears to be quite detailed and comprehensive, in terms of what the scientists were looking for.

Comparison of this genome and the National Center for Biotechnology Information human reference assembly revealed more than 4.1 million DNA variants, encompassing 12.3 Mb. These variants (of which 1,288,319 were novel) included 3,213,401 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), 53,823 block substitutions (2–206 bp), 292,102 heterozygous insertion/deletion events (indels)(1–571 bp), 559,473 homozygous indels (1–82,711 bp), 90 inversions, as well as numerous segmental duplications and copy number variation regions. Non-SNP DNA variation accounts for 22% of all events identified in the donor, however they involve 74% of all variant bases. This suggests an important role for non-SNP genetic alterations in defining the diploid genome structure. Moreover, 44% of genes were heterozygous for one or more variants.

Full text here

Previous CNV mapping has suggested that human genomes may vary by as much as 10% (rather than the above estimation of 1% from the PLOS study).

UPDATE: The authors did take a cursory look at CNVs in the assembly. But they were looking for more "micro-variations" rather than CNV variations at a higher level of analysis. This difference in "logical levels" of ways of grouping data can be confusing. Future research should clarify any confusion, however.

Comparing the method behind the 10% estimate with the method behind the 1% estimate is like comparing apples to oranges. But in terms of real world significance in describing behavioural and other phenotypic differences between populations (and within populations), it will almost certainly be fruitful for future research to look at all sources of variation.

Human civilisations and cultures vary significantly from population to population. The underlying reasons for these significant differences are a matter for debate. All of the many conflicting books, articles, theses, etc. seeking to explain the relative prosperity and productivity of different cultures and populations illustrates the huge distances between premises and philosophies of the humans who attempt to explain "why some populations are wealthy and intellectually prodigious, and why some are impoverished and intellectually moribund."

Lily Is Looking at Possible "Prozac" of Antipsychotic Drugs

Drug companies such as Lilly are always looking for the "big score," like Lilly had with Prozac. Prozac was first in its class of the low side effect SSRI antidepressants, that largely replaced the more dangerous tricyclics and MAO inhibitors.

If results of a recent trial hold up, a new Lilly drug LY2140023 may be the prototype, first in its class, new anti-psychotic--without the troubling side effects of current anti-psychotics.

...According to the authors, the trial "provides strong new evidence for the role of glutamate modulation in treating psychosis, and specifically for mGlu2/3 receptor activation as a viable therapeutic approach to treat schizophrenia."

Crucially, LY2140023 has a very different adverse effect (AE) profile than the company's blockbuster antipsychotic Zyprexa (olanzapine), which had 2005 sales of over $4bn (€2.9bn).

Eli Lilly has been hit by a series of lawsuits over the side effects of olanzapine and has agreed to pay at least $1.2bn to 25,000 claimants.


...Most antipsychotic and atypical antipsychotic drugs, including olanzapine, work by affecting the dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter pathways.

In contrast, LY2140023 works as a receptor agonist for the glutamate system, specifically targeting the metabotropic glutamate 2/3 (mGlu2/3) receptor to reduce the presynaptic release of the glutamate neurotransmitter in brain regions where mGlu2/3 receptors are expressed.

LY2140023 is a methionine amide oral pro-drug which is readily hydrolysed to form Eli Lilly's earlier candidate LY404039 which suffered from poor human oral absorption.

The trial, that included 196 patients suffering from schizophrenia, compared the effects of the new drug to placebo, as well as including olanzipine as an active control.

Treatment with LY2140023 was not observed to cause certain common AEs associated with schizophrenia treatments such as increased prolactin elevations, extrapyramidal symptoms and weight that occur with currently approved schizophrenia medications.

Drug Researcher

The target population for this drug would be schizophrenics and other psychotics. It is likely that other psychiatric and neurologic conditions will be amenable to mGlu2/3 receptor agonists, if the side effect profile is truly as advertised.

Only someone who has watched a schizophrenic recover much of his mental function on anti-psychotics, only to suffer from debilitating--even fatal--side effects from treatment, would appreciate the promise of a truly efficacious anti-psychotic with a benign side effect profile. If Lilly truly has come up with the "Prozac" of anti-psychotics, I wish them good fortune for it.

Problem Nations: China and Russia Not Quite Ready for Modern World

In China, problems with toxic food, medicines, clothing, and other products continues.

Since March, exports ranging from contaminated pet food to toothpaste containing an industrial solvent and toys coated in lead paint have been recalled from Britain, America, Australia and Japan.

Under intense pressure to salvage the country's reputation, the government was forced to concede last week that China has "deep-rooted" problems with food and product quality and safety. In response it launched a four-month-long "special war" against shoddy and dangerous products, aimed particularly at the agricultural, pharmaceutical, food and toy sectors.

...Zhou Qing published an exposé of China's poor food quality, What Kind of God, earlier this year.

Mr Zhou's book details an appalling catalogue of abuses: pigs pumped full of steroids, fish farms that use contraceptives as feed, soy sauce made from fermented human hair and pesticide-tainted vegetables all feature in the book, which he says has been suppressed by the authorities.

He believes China's food safety problem is the result of corruption. "The only way food safety is going to be improved is by getting rid of the corrupt officials," he said.

...Nor is it always bribery that makes officials turn a blind eye. Promotion prospects often depend on the economic performance of the regions they run, and some welcome factories that make fake or poor quality goods, so long as they provide jobs and pay taxes.

Telegraph

Poisons from China are giving Chinese exports a bad name. Russia's main export is energy, and Russia's Gazprom is giving the Russian energy industry and energy exports a bad name.

...Western governments have become increasingly wary of Russia's reputation as a reliable energy source as Putin has moved to curb democratic freedoms ahead of next year's elections.

...Britain remains especially wary following the experience of BP, whose TNK-BP joint venture agreed in June to sell its stake in the eastern Siberian gas field of Kovykta to Gazprom for up to £450m, after being accused by Russian officials of breaching the terms of its licence by failing to produce enough gas. This came after Shell and its Japanese partners were forced to hand over a controlling stake to Gazprom in the Sakhalin-II project in the Russian far east, after being accused of violating environmental clauses in the licence.

...because of a combination of inefficiency and a chronic lack of investment, gas production is stagnating while domestic demand is growing, and Gazprom is obliged to meet its profitable export commitments to the West. The company is already having to branch out to the central Asian republic of Turkmenistan to help it meet demand, but that country too is suffering from under-investment problems. At the same time, Gazprom is subsidising prices to Russian consumers, meaning that it can barely cover its costs domestically. It has been ordered to hit its home users with a 15 per cent price rise.

If – or when – push comes to shove, who will Gazprom punish in order to maintain energy security for its lucrative Western customers? In the run-up to parliamentary and presidential elections, there is no question of Gazprom cutting off supplies in Russia.

...Gazprom recognises that it has a problem with its image as the neighbourhood bully. It has suffered from its association with the Kremlin, accused of an over-aggressive foreign policy that has seen Russia plant a flag on the seabed of the Arctic in pursuit of its claim to presumed vast amounts of mineral deposits, prompting talk of a "new Cold War" with the West.

...The company, which owns 17 per cent of the world's known gas reserves, is locked in an embrace with President Vladimir Putin's government. The state holds a stake of just over 50 per cent, and the Gazprom chairman is a deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, tipped as a possible successor to Putin when the President steps down next year. The board, and its chief executive Alexei Miller, one of Putin's former associates from St Petersburg, is totally loyal to Putin. Not for them the fate of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who paid for his independence by losing his company – Yukos, once the largest oil firm in the country – and ending up in a Siberian jail serving a nine-year sentence on charges of tax evasion and fraud.

...With a current market value of more than $300bn (£150bn), Gazprom is the world's third-largest corporation, after Exxon Mobil and General Electric Gazprom's chairman estimates that the company's market value will quadruple in the next 10 years, making it the world's most valuable company.

Independent

Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are quite ready to join the civilised world of developed nations. Overtones and reverberations of their totalitarian pasts prevent the type of governmental and infrastructure reforms that are necessary.

Still--money talks. Governments of both nations carry considerable clout internationally, as a result of natural resources (Russia) and enormous export income (China). But anyone who is brash enough to make long term predictions about the fate of either country should take into account their dark sides--the downside potential.

HiPer Reaction? £500 Million Programme to Construct an Experimental Reactor by EU

Building on work done at the US Livermore lab, a British-led team of scientists has obtained preliminary approval to begin building HiPer, an advanced laser inertial confinement fusion approach.

The British-led team will use lasers to start fusion reactions that generate more energy than they consume and they have won the backing of an influ-ential EU science panel, The Times can disclose. The decision paves the way for a seven-year, £500 million programme to construct an experimental reactor based on a revolutionary technique that could make fusion a commercial reality within two decades.

The prototype for the Hiper (high energy laser fusion research) project is likely to be built in Britain, using the world’s most powerful laser to generate temperatures of millions of degrees at which fusion can occur.

A purely civilian facility, it will build on research at a US military laboratory which is expected within the next five years to use a form of laser fusion to produce more energy than it consumes. Hiper will then develop a slightly different laser technique that is more suitable for commercial use.

Source

For more on this advanced laser/inertial confinement approach to fusion, see the HiPer website and this Wikipedia entry.

For comparison with another huge EU fusion project, see ITER. ITER is a magnetic confinement plasma reactor.

Fusion energy continues to promise an almost limitless power supply for human use. Several approaches to fusion energy production are being pursued. I confess to being prejudiced against laser -pellet designs. They appear inelegant and kludgy, in their "batch operation" approach. After each pellet fuses, another pellet must be fed to the reactor for another laser burst, then another . . . I prefer a continuous reactor design--preferably one with adjustable output.

My aesthetic preference is unimportant. If the new design laser/inertial confinement approach can achieve useful energy output suitable for commercial power generation, it is a good place to start.

In the meantime, national governments need to face the urgent need for the development and deployment of advanced fourth generation nuclear fission reactors to supply an explosive demand for electrical power worldwide.

See also Thorium energy blog, for more information about advanced fission.

Natural Born Cyborg?

Between here and the transhuman, serious obstacles lie. Creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artifacts suitable for downloading human consciousness, both appear quite distant in the future. Several intermediate steps must be taken before humans become posthumans.

Cyborgs, or cybernetic organisms, are part animal, part machine. A human cyborg such as The Bionic Woman or the Six Million Dollar Man, may be created within the next ten years. Such a cyborg would be an adult human who is provided with active prosthetic devices such as artificial legs, artificial arms, a machine heart, prosthetic visual and auditory devices, etc. in order to restore function of original, natural quality or better.

A more ambitious and controversial form of cyborg would be the "natural born cyborg," the cyborg infant who grows into full "cyborghood" without any knowledge of being pre-borg human. The technology for such a "natural born borg" would be understandably much more complex to conceptualize and successfully create, and the experience of such a "born borg" would be virtually incomprehensible to its creators.

While most social analysts and thinkers might recoil from the very idea of such a 'borg, it is quite possible that some governments and wealthy crime/drug/terror conglomerates that finance legitimate research, have looked into this possibility. Certainly someone paid by the US Pentagon has given the idea at least a little thought.

How would one go about creating such a creature?

I will blur over many of the details involved, out of regard for the relative sensitivity of this topic. The following discussion does not imply any moral judgment in favour or against such research. It is a conceptual exploration, a thought experiment, and no more. I am assuming that artificial uteri are being used, and that all embryos are from discarded IVF embryos.

First of all, an intracranial neural interface would be implanted via intra-uterine surgery. The fetus will have been genetically prepared to minimise resistance to the implant, and biological and bio-compatible materials would be used as much as possible in the construction of the trans-cranial transducer and intra-cranial implanted materials.

In vitro cultured micro-neural nets that are programmed to grow to a specific thalamic and other sub-cortical nuclei, and designed to appear on neural imaging for the monitoring of accurate targeting.

The earlier the implant is placed, the more of neural development that could be influenced via Hebbian stimuli, targeted release of neural growth factors, and neo-pathways seeded by the implant itself.

Growth of the borg brain would be monitored via EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET, and other imaging facilitated by the implant.

The borg would not be seen as ethically human, and significant aberrations or failures to develop would result in abortion, unless significant knowledge could be derived from allowing the "failed borg" to develop.

Once a putatively successful fetus has reached maturity, it will be removed from the artificial uterus and observed as it develops in a less confined environment. Its wireless interface will be calibrated and if necessary replaced with improved versions. The neural component of the implant will grow along with the infant, and be monitored closely by its distinctive "imaging signature."

Once the infant is more accessible to behavioural psychologists, conventional behavioural therapies (including extensive neurofeedback) would be combined with the ability to influence growth and development of brain structures themselves. Conventional and unconventional learning methods would be naturally incorporated into behavioural and neuro-shaping techniques.

Virtual reality techniques would create an entire artificial environment--wherever useful, or whenever the necessary lessons cannot be taught within a natural or otherwise augmented environment.

The natural born borg would grow with a concept of itself and its own purpose and desires, which would be distinctly different from the personality development of a pre-borg human.

From the moment the fetal implant was placed and began functioning, the life trajectory of the borg begins to diverge from that of a natural human fetus without implants.

I have omitted for the present any mention of non-neural implants and prosthesis. Suffice it to say that the mental development of the infant borg will be shaped so as to make it highly desirable for it to augment itself effectively and selectively for specific missions.

Image from Lifeboat Foundation

More later.

Is Dumbing Down Schools a Political Issue?

First of all, dumbing down the schools is not a "liberal" vs. "conservative" issue. Leftist (a more accurate term than "liberal") parents love the children they send to public school every bit as much as rightists who send their children to private or religious schools. If they sometimes push their children into poor learning environments, it is not out of a lack of love.

Next, what makes an issue a "political" issue? A political issue is one that is discussed in political campaigns, mentioned often in legislative sessions, and featured prominently in the speeches of elected officials. Political issues are frequently addressed in legislative bills and laws. In that sense of "political", school dumbing down barely moves the detector. While government schools have become mass producing meat grinders for the minds of the young, there are no government or political officials whose mention of government schools ever comes close to describing the problem.

Rather, it is a question of "raising test scores", "achieving higher levels of ethnic diversity", "increasing tolerance", "better orienting girls for careers in science and math", and other overly focused goals that fail to address the underlying problem of failure to prepare young minds for a tumultous future.

The dumbing down of schools in North America goes far beyond left-right politics. It goes to the heart of whether future generations will be able to confront the existential and near-existential threats they will meet. It is a large determinant of the survival of western civilisation. Minimising the importance of the widespread movement to dumb down education, is a form of denial which is equivalent to denying existential risk itself.

Whether dumbed down children are indoctrinated into leftist, rightist, centrist, or uppist or downist political points of view is irrelevant. The salient point is that the children's minds have been stunted--as if they had been chained inside a closet during their formative years and missed numerous developmental windows.

It is true that confirmed, activist leftists are far more likely to deny that there is any such problem as I have mentioned with government schools. Any problems that may exist can be easily solved by budgeting more money for the schools, by providing better financing to the intellectual architects of the present system. Do the same, only more of it. This advocacy by leftist activists, and the opposition to modern trends in government education by many in the center and on the religious right, may well lay the groundwork for this issue to become a public political issue, in campaigns and in legislative action.

But those political activists above are not usually addressing the key concern--the dumbing down, the stunting of minds, the age-isolation away from learning responsibility: leading to psychological neoteny. The abolition of the diversity of ideas--the only kind of diversity that matters in education--from the college and university environment that leads to academic lobotomy. Those issues remain beneath the radar for the most part. They are not political, unless the desire to see humans achieve the most that they can is political.

Stem Cell Lines For Sale--The Market Steps Up

The US President Bush has held firm in his opposition to federal financing of creation of most new embryonic stem cell lines. Without US government financing of new stem cell lines, the task has fallen upon other governments, private foundations, US state governments such as California, and now--private companies are offering new stem cell lines from discarded IVF embryos, for US $10,000.

You would expect this type of company to arise in the US, and particularly in California--where trends tend to begin.

A company in California called StemLifeLine has announced that it will offer a service to generate stem cells from excess frozen embryos stored after in vitro fertilization (IVF). The company promises a huge potential payoff: the cells could one day be used to treat disease in the buyers or in their families. But the service is already garnering criticism from some scientists and ethicists who say that without current medical uses for those cells, there's no point in people paying for them.

...The new service is meant to take advantage of a growing interest in the field of regenerative medicine. Stem cells from adult blood or umbilical-cord blood are already used to treat some diseases, including sickle-cell anemia and several forms of leukemia. But these cells are largely limited to treating blood-related disorders and can't be grown in large numbers. Embryonic stem cells, on the other hand, can be coaxed to form virtually any type of cell in the body and can theoretically be replicated indefinitely. Scientists are developing ways to use them to replenish cells lost or damaged in ailments such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and heart disease.

...Couples who have had children via IVF are often left with extra embryos--and the rather difficult decision of what to do with them. As of 2003, an estimated 400,000 embryos remained in cryopreservation in the United States. Embryos can be donated to research or to other couples, destroyed, or left languishing in frozen storage.

...The technology to derive these cells is not new. Scientists at StemLifeLine use a similar procedure to that employed by research scientists for almost a decade, although the StemLifeLine scientists have refined it so that the resulting cells are fit for human use. For less than $10,000 (actual price depends on the collaborating IVF clinic), clients can send in their excess embryos and, in return, receive a line of stem cells that have been "quality assured," meaning they have been checked for the molecular markers that signify that the cells can be differentiated into multiple cell types. The company received certification as a tissue bank from the state of California last month, and it's in the process of generating cell lines for its first group of clients.

Technology Review

It is good to see some entrepreneurial spirit emerging in stem cell/regenerative medicine. Since regenerative medicine will be one of the most important branches of medical science in the near future, it is refreshing to see that it will not fall completely under the thumb of the US federal government.

In a market economy, the government is not expected to finance every possible need or desire for the public. Most Americans have been rather slow to realize this, but it seems that some of them are slowly waking up. Financing of large new scientific ventures and exploratory areas of science has--since the days of FDR and the Manhattan Project--been ceded to the federal government, in the US. But the US government is operating in a budget deficit, which will only get worse as entitlement spending kicks in for the aging populace.

The US public has been lulled into expecting the federal government to do more and more for them over the decades. This expectation is killing their own self-reliance and enterprise. While the US has not sunk as deeply into this "total government reliance" as most European countries, and some other Anglospheric countries, the trend is clear and almost irrevocable.

The more thoroughly the government attempts to control financing and access to regenerative medicine, the more the grey and black markets will step in to provide the service that governments--with their conflicting goals and crumbling infrastructures--cannot or will not provide.

More background on stem cells here and here.

Building a Brain--One Neuron at a Time

Neuroscientists do not really understand individual neurons very well. They are only now just learning how to culture and study neurons at low density, without contaminating them with serum or blood plasma.

First, the researchers scaled down the size of the fluid-filled chambers used to hold the cells. Chemistry graduate student Matthew Stewart made the small chambers out of a molded gel of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The reduced chamber size also reduced – by several orders of magnitude – the amount of fluid around the cells, said Biotechnology Center director Jonathan Sweedler, an author on the study. This “miniaturization of experimental architectures” will make it easier to identify and measure the substances released by the cells, because these “releasates” are less dilute.

...Second, the researchers increased the purity of the material used to form the chambers. Cell and developmental biology graduate student Larry Millet exposed the PDMS to a series of chemical baths to extract impurities that were killing the cells.

Millet also developed a method for gradually perfusing the neurons with serum-free media, a technique that resupplies depleted nutrients and removes cellular waste products. The perfusion technique also allows the researchers to collect and analyze other cellular secretions – a key to identifying the biochemical contributions of individual cells.


... This combination of techniques enabled the research team to grow postnatal primary hippocampal neurons from rats for up to 11 days at extremely low densities. Prior to this work, cultured neurons in closed-channel devices made of untreated, native PDMS remained viable for two days at best.

The cultured neurons also developed more axons and dendrites, the neural tendrils that communicate with other cells, than those grown at low densities with conventional techniques, Gillette said.

The technique is described this month in the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry – Lab on a Chip.

Source

Neural reductionism at its best, eh? By culturing individual neurons and small groups of neurons, and learning how to supply the needed growth factors and nutrients without potentially contaminating plasmas and serums, neuroscientists can begin to understand these cells at a very basic level. Then they can learn to combine them, along with their support (glial) cells. Eventually they can add capillaries, lymph vessels, etc. and move up from there. By understanding each level of complexity as they develop, neuroscientists can better envision the combinatorial possibilities.

One of the more intriguing uses to which these micro-cultures can be put, is brain-machine interfaces. By learning to develop neurons and small groups of neurone (micro-nets) away from normal biological substrate (brains, blood, and tissue fluid), it is only a short step to micro-channel support chips that can function as interfaces to machines. Neurophilosopher discusses a related development.

This is an important development. Together with improved techniques for manipulating neuronal stem cells and progenitors, this development points directly to better "wet" neural net models of brain, and better nerve-machine interfaces.

Focused Energy Beam Surgery

Remember Dr. McCoy's diatribe against 20th century medicine in Star Trek IV "The Voyage Home(1986)"? Using focused energy beams, some surgeries may avoid the scalpels and suture that McCoy hated so much.

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound - with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging - for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

..."You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy said. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

The findings suggest that ultrasound might replace what is now a painful, invasive procedure. Lung injuries are relatively common because the chest is a big surface that's often exposed to crushing or puncture wounds, said co-author Gregory Jurkovich, chief of trauma at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and a UW professor of surgery. A busy trauma room like Harborview's, he said, admits about two patients with bleeding lungs per day.

...The new research shows that in these difficult cases, high-intensity focused ultrasound applied from outside could stop bleeding and air leaks. Vaezy and colleagues in the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound in the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory have been developing ultrasound for surgery for more than a decade, concentrating on frequencies in the 1000 to 10,000 hertz (cycles per second). The device producing the ultrasound rays, about the size of a golf ball, is inserted into a handle that doctors use to scan the outside of the body. Previous experiments used the tool to seal blood vessels and stop bleeding in the spleen.

..."Doctors will scan the body from the outside, recognize where the injury is, focus the beam on the injury and use the beams to seal the wound," Jurkovich said. The futuristic medical technology's promise is substantial, he said. "It would be non-invasive and it would stop the bleeding from the outside. When it happens, that's going to revolutionize how we would care for some of these injuries."

Source

Not really so far from the scanner wand and medical tricorder, eh?

Puppet Masters

Reminiscent of Robert Heinlein's classic novel, scientists have discovered a parasite that has succeeded in immortalising itself within the genome of its host.

"It didn't seem possible at first," says Werren, professor of biology at the University of Rochester and a world-leading authority on the parasite, called Wolbachia. "This parasite has implanted itself inside the cells of 70 percent of the world's invertebrates, coevolving with them. And now, we've found at least one species where the parasite's entire or nearly entire genome has been absorbed and integrated into the host's. The host's genes actually hold the coding information for a completely separate species."

Wolbachia may be the most prolific parasite in the world—a "pandemic," as Werren calls it. The bacterium invades a member of a species, most often an insect, and eventually makes its way into the host's eggs or sperm. Once there, the Wolbachia is ensured passage to the next generation of its host, and any genetic exchanges between it and the host also are much more likely to be passed on.

Source

It will be fascinating to learn how many hitchhikers the human genome has picked up along the way. How many riders are sleeping in the free seats, waiting for a chance to wake and run amok? How many of our diseases are merely the restless squirming of a misfit stowaway, how many of our moods are stirred by sleepwalking free riders?

Neurofeedback: Will We Have to Wait for Video Games to Bring it to Us?

Will we have to wait for video games that incorporate neurofeedback, before this useful tool becomes commonplace and readily available?

The imaging company Omneuron wants to bring fMRI neurofeedback to the public, to aid in treating chronic pain.

But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.

Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.

A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.

Source

But these companies have to get past government regulatory agencies first. But the government is not the only obstacle to the widespread use of the promising constellation of technologies referred to as neurofeedback. EEG neurofeedback has been around for decades, and the potentials for this therapeutic modality are still being nibbled at around the edges.

It's not unusual to walk into Desney Tan's Microsoft Research office and find him wearing a red and blue electroencephalography (EEG) cap, white wires cascading past his shoulders. Tan spends his days looking at a monitor, inspecting and modifying the mess of squiggles that approximate his brain's electrical activity. He is using algorithms to sort through and make sense of EEG data in hopes of turning electrodes into meaningful input devices for computers, as common as the mouse and keyboard.

The payoff, he says, will be technology that improves productivity in the workplace, enhances video-game play, and simplifies interactions with computers. Ultimately, Tan hopes to develop a mass-market EEG system consisting of a small number of electrodes that, affixed to a person's head, communicate wirelessly with software on a PC.

...Tan expects the technology to be used initially as a controller for video games, since gamers are accustomed to "strapping on new devices," he says. In fact, next year a company called Emotiv Systems, based in San Francisco, plans to offer an EEG product that controls certain aspects of video games. However, the company will not discuss the specifics of its technology, and there isn't widespread consensus on the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.

The true challenge, Tan says, will be to make EEG interfaces simple enough for the masses. He and his team are working on minimizing the number of electrodes, finding a semisolid material as an alternative to the conductive gel, and developing wireless electrodes. A mass-market product could be many years away. But if Tan succeeds, getting a computer to read your thoughts could be as easy as putting on a Bluetooth headset.

Source

To keep up on some of the latest news on neurofeedback, check this link occasionally.

The EEG Spectrum newsletter comes out fairly regularly, and is another place to check for technology upgrades.

This link is another place for good information on neurofeedback.

Electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and real time fMRI, are different technologies that provide fast enough response for feedback purposes. Neurofeedback is vastly underused in Psychiatry, Psychology, Pain Control, recovery from brain injury, and other areas of medicine and mental health. Applications to sports training and personal coaching should be obvious.

A video search on Google Video, etc. will provide a large number of videos dealing with neurofeedback and other biofeedback technologies.

Certainly if you know anyone with disabling migraines, or with a child with ADD/ADHD, you should let them know about neurofeedback.

Sometimes it seems as if videogames and simulated worlds such as Second Life are driving a lot of business and technology in the real world. Neurofeedback may be yet another example of this.

Peak Oil: You Don't Know Jack!

"Jack" is a recently discovered undersea oil field in the Gulf of Mexico that may exceed 15 billion barrels of oil. Given that water covers 2/3 of Earth's surface, it is not unlikely that more oil reserves exist underwater than under dry land.

The mother lode of oil in the deepwater Gulf is so significant that Tahiti and other successful fields in this region are expected to soon produce enough crude to reverse the long-standing decline in US oil production of about 10 percent per year.

Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the "lower tertiary trend" containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market.

...Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. "Predicting peak oil," Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, "is almost like predicting peak technology" — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.

SourceBesides the "Jack" oilfield and other yet to be discovered Gulf fields, there are also many other undersea fields--including Arctic and Antarctic oil fields--currently unexplored. And then, there is all of that oil shale and oil sands that Canada, the US, and other large countries are sitting on.
And don't get me started on all the coal reserves and uranium/thorium reserves spread out across the globe. And please--never! and I mean never!! get me started on all the resources in the solar system, should humans ever grow out of their prolonged, restless, and generally incompetent adolescence.

Peak Oil doesn't know Jack. Peak Oil will soon meet Jack and a lot of other energy resources that will be developed, sooner or later.

Originally published in Al Fin Energy

Planting and Harvesting Trees--The Best Carbon Sequestration?

Freeman Dyson maintains that soil carbon is the most important sequesterer of carbon. Cofounder of Greenpeace Patrick Moore, claims that growing and using trees is the best way of dealing with high CO2 levels.

Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50 per cent carbon by weight. Trees contain about 250 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre.

North Americans are the world's largest per-capita wood consumers and yet our forests cover approximately the same area of land as they did 100 years ago. According to the United Nations, our forests have expanded nearly 100 million acres over the past decade.

...There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon fixed hundreds of years ago.

...Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.

1. Deforestation, primarily in tropical forests, is responsible for about 20 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. This is occurring where forests are permanently cleared and converted to agriculture and urban settlement.
2. In many countries with temperate forests, there has been an increase in carbon stored in trees in recent years. This includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.
3. The most important factors influencing the carbon cycle are deforestation on the negative side, and the use of wood, from sustainably managed forests, as a substitute for non-renewable materials and fuels, on the positive side.

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.

Vancouver Sun

This is rather obvious. If you grow a tree, then use the tree to build a house that stands for hundreds of years, that carbon is effectively sequestered for that period of time at least. Wood is a desirable building material for many things. Rather than preventing responsible forest harvesting and regrowth, intelligent environmentalists who truly believe in the CO2 theory of catastrophic climate change would be pushing for large wood plantations for construction lumber.

Hat tip Lubos Motl

The Washington Dhimmi: When The Washington Post Rejects a Comic Strip

The Washington Post is the premier newspaper of the US capital city, Washington, DC. It is generally willing to run cartoons that are mildly offensive, sometimes much more than mildly. So why are they rejecting this comic strip?

As those who like to stress the importance of accommodating world Islam in various ways point out, there are a billion Muslims out there. But that cuts both ways: A faith that is this important in the world is an important subject of discussion, both in traditional academic and political debate and in that part of social debate that happens through humor and even the comics.

Volokh Conspiracy

Read the comic strip for yourself. The sexual innuendo is explicitly unstated and implicitly understated. It is the reference to radical islamism that appears to be at the heart of the rejection. That would make the Washington Post the Washington Dhimmi. And we know that the BBC and other world class media sources are part of the same Dhimmi congregation.

Perhaps these cowardly media executives have good reason to kowtow to an intolerant and potentially violent religion. But there is no reason the rest of us need to support them.

Hat tip Coyote Blog

Hibernation Weight Loss Diets--The Next Big Thing?

Dr. Cheng Chi Lee at UT Houston Medical School, hopes that patenting this novel weight loss method will bring him good fortune.

The idea comes on the back of his team's discovery that the chemical 5-adenosine monophosphate, or 5-AMP, induces a state of torpor in mice, which do not usually hibernate. Lee says that a capsule or injection of 5-AMP could induce a similar state in humans, and the accompanying metabolic changes could help treat a range of conditions associated with obesity, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and eating disorders.

Impact Lab
Subcutaneous implants of 5-AMP might be priced according to the length of time the person would hibernate, with discount pricing for longer sleeps. A $5,000 sleep (to lose 50#) may last for six months, while to sleep ten years (to lose 500# or more) may cost as little as $30,000 or more. A flexible payment plan would facilitate paying out of pocket. The cost of long term care would be additional, of course.

A loving husband or wife might give a spouse the gift of hibernation--the more the spouse is loved, the longer the hibernation.

Why take the risk of undergoing bariatric surgery, when sleep--the most natural state in the world--will work as well, given time? Losing weight is often referred to as hard work, so many employers may choose to pay a person's regular salary while they are hibernating. In many cases, the employee's work output may not change. Or the employer may choose to pay for hibernation in lieu of fighting a costly wrongful termination lawsuit.

Humans have been curious about hibernating animals ever since becoming aware of the phenomenon. Soon, they may have a good reason to live the experience first hand.

Something Smells: The Unfortunate and Unintended Consequences of Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action appears to be one of those open-ended, never-ending social programs that promises to be impossible to phase out, despite doing more harm than good.

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared.

...Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you--or anyone else--to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.

Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for these data

... While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.

Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true--that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.

... Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences.

...A friend of mine wasted a decade of his life going to law school and working as a hospital orderly while flunking the bar exam nine or ten times before giving up. If he'd become a salesman out of college, he might have been making six figures by then.

For blacks, the 43% of black law students who never pass the bar exam represent a well-above average group who could have used their 20s to do something more productive.

Source

Law school is just one example of this phenomenon. It would be nice if researchers had full access to the data necessary to examine expensive social policies such as affirmative action, and other "diversity" policies. But they are simply too explosive, politically. Which means that the status quo will continue, regardless of efficacy, regardless of unintended consequences.

HSP90, Cancer, and Sepsis

HSP90 is a heat shock protein--proteins in the cell that become more concentrated in reaction to cellular stresses, including heat. HSP90 also has normal, non-stress functions in the cell--particularly chaperone functions. As a chaperone, HSP90 helps to keep proteins from folding in aberrant and dysfunctional conformations.

HSP90 inhibitors have recently come into play for the treatment of malignancies. HSP90 tends to reduce (through re-folding and other pro-degradation processes) the concentration of apoptotic products coming from early cancer cells--allowing the cells to grow longer and become more difficult to treat with conventional cancer treatments. Inhibiting HSP90 leads to more apoptosis of cancer cells, and more effective cancer treatment.Researchers have recently begun to look at HSP90 inhibitors for treating sepsis and other conditions of extreme inflammation in the body.

Studies in an animal model of sepsis, a major cause of ICU patient death, indicate HSP 90 inhibitors help degrade proteins perpetuating inflammation, says Dr. John D. Catravas, director of the Medical College of Georgia Vascular Biology Center.

Results include restored lung function, reduced blood vessel leakage, which can lead to dangerous swelling in the lungs, and fewer byproducts of inflammation such as white blood cells, MCG researchers report in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a journal of the American Thoracic Society.

...These manmade HSP 90 inhibitors work by attaching where the protein pair's energy source, called ATP, should be. The body appears to have an endogenous version, ADP, which has one less phosphate than ATP and binds at the same site, also opening the protein claws and sending the client protein toward degradation.

Source

Getting down to the level of folding and re-folding of proteins is an important step for pharmacologists and protein scientists. This is where the rubber meets the road in cellular function. It should not go unsaid that there are important lessons here for nanotechnologists as well.

By understanding how to lock, unlock, and modify active sites of proteins--and controlling their energetics and shape--protein scientists are in essence bio-nanotechnologists.

Toyota--A Robot Company?

Certainly Toyota has developed and refined the use of robots in heavy industry as much as any company. Why shouldn't Toyota use its acquired expertise to leverage itself into an entirely new and potentially lucrative business?

Toyota is continuing to apply its manufacturing capabilities and cutting-edge technology in the field of robotics with the release of a new Tour Guide Robot that will escort visitors around the Toyota Kaikan Exhibition Hall in Toyota City, Japan, from later this month. The robot’s stand-out attributes include completely autonomous motion, jointed fingers (giving it the ability to sign autographs), image recognition (it can recognize name tags and address visitors directly), plus complex verbal communication skills that enable it to provide explanations of exhibits.

Source

Nor will this robo-tour guide be the end of Toyota's foray into the larger robotics business. Toyota is combining its expertise in transportation with robotics to provide a robot that moves people around.

The "i-unit" is a "personal mobility" concept vehicle based on the revolutionary PM-01 announced by Toyota in 2003 - a cross between a partially enclosed motorcycle, an open wheel racer and a speedy vehicular exoskeleton for single person transport. Specially created for the launch of EXPO 2005 to reflect the environmental theme, the open "i-unit" design is inspired by the leaf that "converts sunlight into life energy, seeks to express the power of the unknown, the logic of living things and the simple beauty of waste-free functionality."

...The driver support system features Intelligent Transport System (ITS) technology, which Toyota hopes to utilise for an accident-free society. The system permits efficient and safe autopilot driving in specially equipped lanes.

The "i-unit" also has a personalised recognition system can provide information and music, and body color can be customised according to the individual's preferences and emotions.

Source

Toyota may be a bit behind schedule with the i-unit, but the idea is good. Giving machine intelligence to personal vehicles, along with anti-collision autopilot capability, may be just what today's more demanding consumers want.

Of course, if one reflects for a few moments on what the military is doing with robotics technology, one's futuristic musings may take a somewhat darker turn. We may eventually be forced to admit that while spinoffs from space technology once drove consumer technology, now it seems to be military technology that is in the driver's seat.