May 23, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – We can report that BrainBridge is not a real company—it’s not incorporated anywhere. The video was made by Hashem Al-Ghaili, a Yemeni science communicator and film director who made a viral video in 2022 called “EctoLife” … Read More
May 22, 2024
(Wired) – The experimental device has given Arbaugh, now 30, a sense of independence. Before, using a mouth-stick required someone to position him upright. If he dropped his mouth-stick, it needed to be picked up for him. And he couldn’t … Read More
May 21, 2024
(Ars Technica) – One of those clinical trials, based at the University of California, San Francisco, has now inadvertently revealed something about how the brain handles language, because one of the patients enrolled in the trial was bilingual, using English … Read More
May 20, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Reid received the device, called ARCex, as part of a 60-person clinical trial. She and the other participants completed two months of physical therapy, followed by two months of physical therapy combined with stimulation. The results, … Read More
May 20, 2024
(Nature) – For more than a decade, researchers have been trying to see whether they can selectively destroy these cells with a variety of drugs. In a pivotal study published in 2015, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, … Read More
May 15, 2024
(Axios) – Lawmakers in the House of Representatives on Wednesday are expected to set in motion a massive reordering of how U.S. pharmaceuticals are developed and made, by advancing a contracting ban on five key Chinese research firms. Why it … Read More
May 15, 2024
(Reuters) – Neuralink’s disclosure last week that tiny wires inside the brain of its first patient had pulled out of position is an issue the Elon Musk company has known about for years, according to five people familiar with the … Read More
May 13, 2024
(Associated Press) – The first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died nearly two months after he underwent the procedure, his family and the hospital that performed the surgery said Saturday. Richard “Rick” Slayman had the transplant … Read More
May 10, 2024
(Nature) – After more than four years of deliberations, US officials have released a policy that outlines how federal funding agencies and research institutions must review and oversee biological experiments that could potentially be misused or spark a pandemic. The … Read More
May 9, 2024
(New York Times) – Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation. It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease. On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, … Read More
May 9, 2024
(Axios) – Biosecurity experts say AI-driven “biosurveillance” could help spot the next pandemic or biological attack. The big picture: An initial surge of concern over the threat from AI-generated superbugs and bioweapons has begun to ebb as AI’s advantages in … Read More
May 8, 2024
(Wired) – The White House has issued new rules aimed at companies that manufacture synthetic DNA after years of warnings that a pathogen made with mail-order genetic material could accidentally or intentionally spark the next pandemic. The rules, released on … Read More
May 8, 2024
(Reuters via Yahoo!) – Google Deepmind has unveiled the third major version of its “AlphaFold” artificial intelligence model, designed to help scientists design drugs and target disease more effectively. In 2020, the company made a significant advance in molecular biology … Read More
May 7, 2024
(Axios) – A new report calls on all levels of government to strengthen U.S. biodefense measures and urges policymakers to codify parts of a national strategy to address an array of biological threats. Why it matters: Threats in the form … Read More
May 7, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – The experiment, at the University of Florida, is an attempt to create a large animal starting only from stem cells—no egg, no sperm, and no conception. A week earlier, “synthetic embryos,” artificial structures created in a … Read More
May 7, 2024
(Vox) – For decades, gene therapy has been defined by both its enormous therapeutic potential, and by the limitations imposed by our imprecise knowledge of human genetics. Even as gene-editing methods, including CRISPR, have become more sophisticated over the years, … Read More
May 2, 2024
(The Atlantic) – It takes a certain amount of confidence to call your biotech company Grail. According to its website, the Menlo Park–based firm got its name because its “co-founders believed a simple blood test could be the ‘holy GRAIL’ … Read More
May 2, 2024
(Nature) – In the never-ending quest to discover previously unknown CRISPR gene-editing systems, researchers have scoured microbes in everything from hot springs and peat bogs to poo and even yogurt. Now, thanks to advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI), they … Read More
April 30, 2024
(NPR) – First, he and his team used skin cells from Timothy syndrome patients to grow neurons in a dish that carried the mutation. Then the team moved on to studying the mutation in brain organoids — living clusters of … Read More
April 30, 2024
(Wired) – China’s brain-computer interface technology is catching up to the US. But it envisions a very different use case: cognitive enhancement. At a tech forum in Beijing last week, a Chinese company unveiled a “homegrown” brain-computer interface that allowed … Read More
April 25, 2024
(The Telegraph via MSN) – But while stem cells have long been regarded as one of the great hopes of regenerative medicine, with long-standing applications in leukaemia and ongoing clinical trials in a whole host of diseases from age-related macular … Read More
April 25, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from … Read More
April 24, 2024
(Associated Press) – Doctors have transplanted a pig kidney into a New Jersey woman who was near death, part of a dramatic pair of surgeries that also stabilized her failing heart. Lisa Pisano’s combination of heart and kidney failure left … Read More
April 23, 2024
(Washington Post via MSN) – Science, a start-up company in Alameda, Calif., has designed a visual prosthesis called the Science Eye which could restore vision, albeit in a limited form, in people with retinitis pigmentosa. Hodak, its CEO, co-founded the … Read More
April 19, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Most of the companies working in this space have the same goal: capturing enough information from the brain to decipher the user’s intention. The idea is to aid communication for people who can’t easily move or … Read More
