You know those stories about clueless old people who get to their Gmail account by typing “Google” into Bing, clicking on Google in the Bing search results, typing “Gmail” into Google, and then clicking on Gmail in the Google search results?
I am reading about serotonin transmission now, and everything in the human brain works on this principle. If your brain needs to downregulate a neurotransmitter, it’ll start by upregulating a completely different neurotransmitter, which upregulates the first neurotransmitter, which hits autoreceptors that downregulate the first neurotransmitter, which then cancel the upregulation, and eventually the neurotransmitter gets downregulated.
Meanwhile, my patients are all like “How come this drug that was supposed to cure my depression is giving me vision problems?” and at least on some level the answer is “how come when Bing is down your grandfather can’t access Gmail?”
if someone had explained it this way to me in college i probably wouldn’t have gotten a C in behavioral neuroscience II
Scientists invented fabric that makes
electricity from motion and sunlight.
To create the fabric, researchers at
Georgia Tech wove together solar
cell fibers with materials that generate
power from movement. It could be
used in “tents, curtains, or wearable
garments,” meaning we’d virtually
never be without power. Source
There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system.
We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are getting ready to launch three satellites the size of coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone apps.
Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck.
In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on your phone, because this is the present time and these things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.
That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.
Use the rear view mirror for its true purpose. If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash. Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of its identification. I’m not even touching the web, wifi, mobile broadband, cloud computing, electronic cigarettes…
Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.
To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.
Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.
Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.
YOOOOOOO!!!! THIS IS A MASSIVE FUCKING BREAKTHROUGH!!! BIG UPS TO SCIENCE YO!
GOOD LOOKING OUT CHEMIST!
🌹
From the University of Illinois-Chicago press release:
In the new procedure, patients receive immunosuppressive drugs just before the transplant, along with a very low dose of total body irradiation — a treatment much less harsh and with fewer potentially serious side effects than chemotherapy.
Next, donor cells from a healthy and tissue-matched sibling are transfused into the patient. Stem cells from the donor produce healthy new blood cells in the patient, eventually in sufficient quantity to eliminate symptoms. In many cases, sickle cells can no longer be detected. Patients must continue to take immunosuppressant drugs for at least a year.
Julius and Desmond Means were cured of sickle cell disease at UI Health through a chemotherapy-free stem cell transplant in 2013. Their older brother, Clifford (center), was the donor.
In the reported trial, the researchers transplanted 13 patients, 17 to 40 years of age, with a stem cell preparation from the blood of a tissue-matched sibling. Healthy sibling donor-candidates and patients were tested for human leukocyte antigen, a set of markers found on cells in the body. Ten of these HLA markers must match between the donor and the recipient for the transplant to have the best chance of evading rejection.
In a further advance of the NIH procedure, physicians at UI Health successfully transplanted two patients with cells from siblings who matched for HLA but had a different blood type.
In all 13 patients, the transplanted cells successfully took up residence in the marrow and produced healthy red blood cells. One patient who failed to follow the post-transplant therapy regimen reverted to the original sickle cell condition.
None of the patients experienced graft-versus-host disease, a condition where immune cells originating from the donor attack the recipient’s body.
One year after transplantation, the 12 successfully transplanted patients had normal hemoglobin concentrations in their blood and better cardiopulmonary function. They reported less pain and improved health and vitality.
Four of the patients were able to stop post-transplantation immunotherapy without transplant rejection or other complications.
“Adults with sickle cell disease can be cured without chemotherapy – the main barrier that has stood in the way for them for so long,” Rondelli said. “Our data provide more support that this therapy is safe and effective and prevents patients from living shortened lives, condemned to pain and progressive complications.”
A graduate student has created the first man-made biological leaf. It absorbs water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen just like a plant. He did this by suspending chloroplasts in a mixture made out of silk protein. He believed it can be used for many things but the most striking one is the thought that it could be used for long distance space travel. Plants do not grow in space, but this synthetic material can be used to produce oxygen in a hostile environment. (Video)
If you don’t think this is cool, you are very wrong.
“I THINK WE’VE GOT A BIOLOGICAL LIFE-FORM HERE.” Kit Parker, Bio-Engineer at Harvard University told Popular Mechanics.
Robots have advanced an enormous amount over the past few years, in both hardware and software, and the next few years promise even more advancements. It’s exciting, but we’re nowhere close to the efficiency and capability of animals, and it’s going to be a while before humans are able to create anything to match their level of elegance, especially when it comes to powered motion.
One way to avoid playing catch-up with animals all of the time is to simply steal everything you can from them as directly as possible.
Ref: Phototactic guidance of a tissue-engineered soft-robotic ray. Science (8 July 2016) |DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf4292 | PDF (Open Access)
ABSTRACT
Inspired by the relatively simple morphological blueprint provided by batoid fish such as stingrays and skates, we created a biohybrid system that enables an artificial animal—a tissue-engineered ray—to swim and phototactically follow a light cue. By patterning dissociated rat cardiomyocytes on an elastomeric body enclosing a microfabricated gold skeleton, we replicated fish morphology at Embedded Image scale and captured basic fin deflection patterns of batoid fish. Optogenetics allows for phototactic guidance, steering, and turning maneuvers. Optical stimulation induced sequential muscle activation via serpentine-patterned muscle circuits, leading to coordinated undulatory swimming. The speed and direction of the ray was controlled by modulating light frequency and by independently eliciting right and left fins, allowing the biohybrid machine to maneuver through an obstacle course.
