Lifeboat Foundation

“[Using DNA,] you could fit all the knowledge in the whole world inside the trunk of your car,” Twist Bioscience CEO Emily Leproust told TechCrunch.

Twist Bioscience, a startup making and using synthetic DNA to store digital data, just struck a contract with Microsoft and the University of Washington to encode vast amounts of information on synthetic genes.

Big data means business and the company able to gather a lot of it is very valuable to investors and stockholders. But that data needs to be stored somewhere and can cost a lot for the upkeep.

Continue reading “Genetics startup Twist Bioscience is working with Microsoft to store the world’s data in DNA” »

Supercomputer facing problems?

In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), supercomputers represent the peak of capability, with performance measured in petaFLOPs (10¹⁵ operations per second). They play a key role in climate research, drug research, oil and gas exploration, cryptanalysis, and nuclear weapons development. But after decades of steady improvement, changes are coming as old technologies start to run into fundamental problems.

When you’re talking about supercomputers, a good place to start is the TOP500 list. Published twice a year, it ranks the world’s fastest machines based on their performance on the Linpack benchmark, which solves a dense system of linear equations using double precision (64 bit) arithmetic.

Looking down the list, you soon run into some numbers that boggle the mind. The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), a system deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, is the number one system as of November 2015, a position it’s held since 2013. Running Linpack, it clocks in at 33.86 × 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second (33.86 PFLOPS).

We definitely need precision medicine. If you don’t believe it is worth that; then I have a few widows & widowers who you should speak to; I have parents that you should speak with; I have a list of sisters & brothers that you should speak with; and I have many many friends (including me) that you should speak with about how we miss those we love because things like precision medicine wasn’t available and could have saved their lives.

Precision medicine is the theme for the 10th annual symposium of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Nano Biotechnology, Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9 a.m. in the Owens Auditorium at the School of Medicine. This year’s event is cohosted by Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative (also known as Hopkins in Health) and features several in Health affiliated speakers.

By developing treatments that overcome the limitations of the one-size-fits-all mindset, precision medicine will more effectively prevent and thwart disease. Driven by data provided from sources such as electronic medical records, public health investigations, clinical studies, and from patients themselves through new point-of-care assays, wearable sensors and smartphone apps, precision medicine will become the gold standard of care in the not-so-distant future. Before long, we will be able to treat and also prevent diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and cancer with regimes that are tailor-made for the individual.

Continue reading “Why precision medicine is important for our future” »

Is AR your new diet plan?

The future of dining is here, and it’s all about molecular gastronomy, augmented reality headsets and multi-textured algae — and it’s virtually no calories.

Researchers at Project Nourished have found a way to merge the taste, feel and smell of food using atomizers, virtual reality headsets, a device that mimics chewing sounds, a glass with built-in sensors, a specialized utensil, and a 3D-printed food cube. The goal is to trick the user’s mind and palate into thinking they’re experiencing something entirely different than what they’re actually eating.

Continue reading “Virtual Dining Experience Allows You To Taste Food Without The Calories” »

This device could save thousands of lives from heart failure.

Nano-particles to treat Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.

A new therapeutic strategy for treating Acute Myeloid Leukaemia could involve using nano-particles to deliver a genetic molecule to fight the disease.

The nanoparticles carrying microRNA miR-22, (a small non-coding RNA molecule that regulates gene expression), showed therapeutic potential in mouse models of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML).

Continue reading “Nanoparticles may help treat blood cancer” »

Could we use this for colon scopes? I know many who would like to stop drining the speciality milk shake from their local drug stores prior to the date with the GI.

A minimally invasive screening for ulcerative colitis, a debilitating gastrointestinal tract disorder, using emerging infrared technology could be a rapid and cost-effective method for detecting disease that eliminates the need for biopsies and intrusive testing of the human body, according to researchers at Georgia State University.

The technique involves testing serum, the clear liquid that can be separated from clotted blood, for the increased presence of mannose, a sugar that is a marker for colitis, using Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy. This technology is sensitive to vibrations in the chemical bonds of the serum sample’s molecules and requires minimal sample preparation, making it a rapid diagnostic alternative.

Continue reading “Minimally invasive colitis screening using infrared technology could offer fast, simple test” »

Experts say listing cannabis among the world’s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist it have met with decades of bureaucratic inertia and political distortion.

By David Downs on April 19, 2016.

Lesson in Vitamin D.

Low levels of vitamin D in black teens correlates with low activity of a major mechanism for controlling gene expression that may increase their risk of cancer and other disease, researchers report.

Their study measured vitamin D levels as well as levels of global DNA methylation in 454 healthy individuals age 14–18. In this group, 99 percent of the white teens had adequate vitamin D levels, 66 percent of the black teens were vitamin D-deficient and all the black teens had lower levels of methylation compared to their white peers, said Dr. Haidong Zhu, molecular geneticist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

Continue reading “Low levels of vitamin D, methylation in black teens may increase cancer risk” »