Lifeboat Foundation

By Meg Alrich

Keck Medical Center of USC today announced that a team of doctors became the first in California to inject an experimental treatment made from stem cells, AST-OPC1, into the damaged cervical spine of a recently paralyzed 21-year-old man as part of a multi-center clinical trial.

On March 6, just shy of his 21st birthday, Kristopher (Kris) Boesen of Bakersfield suffered a traumatic injury to his cervical spine when his car fishtailed on a wet road, hit a tree and slammed into a telephone pole.

Continue reading “Paralyzed man regains use of arms and hands after experimental stem cell therapy at Keck Hospital of USC” »

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has published the highest resolution atlas of the human brain to date in a stand-alone issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. This digital human brain atlas allows researchers to investigate the structural basis of human brain function.

“To understand the human brain, we need to have a detailed description of its underlying structure,” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “Human brain atlases have long lagged behind atlases of the brain of worms, flies or mice, both in terms of spatial resolution and in terms of completeness due to technical limitations related to the enormous size and complexity of the human brain. This large-scale focused effort aimed to create a large resource combining different data types at high resolution, and use these data to generate a comprehensive mapping of brain regions.”

Combining neuroimaging with cellular resolution histological analysis and expert structural mapping, “This is the most structurally complete atlas to date and we hope it will serve as a new reference standard for the human brain across different disciplines,” says Lein.

Continue reading “Allen Institute publishes highest resolution map of the entire human brain to date” »

RUSSIAN scientists have taken one small step back in time by using a communist-era gravity machine ahead of their planned mission to the moon.

Putin’s boffins are using the 1970s Selen technology to discover how easy it would be for their cosmonauts to walk on the lunar surface and get out of a rover vehicle.

“Gene drives,” a technology for controlling genetic traits, could revolutionize disease prevention. But nature has a way of thwarting scientific meddling.

In a World View opinion column published in Nature, a Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine researcher calls for animal-human embryo research to proceed — but only with strong animal protections in place. So-called “chimera” research raises the hope of producing human organs in genetically modified large animals, such as pigs and sheep, offering a potential solution to the persistent shortage of human organs for transplantation.

Insoo Hyun, PhD, associate professor of bioethics, urges such research to proceed only after “knowing the right and wrong ways to treat sentient beings according to complexities of their attributes.”

Hyun’s recommendations appear in the journal’s September 15th issue and come a week after the National Institutes of Health closed a month-long public comment period on proposed new regulations, widely expected to be adopted, that would lift a moratorium that currently forbids federal funding for chimera embryo research.

The 1.3 feet long robot was developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who are now selling it for £7,700 ($10,000) a go. It is able to climb fences, jump and even open doors.

Thou shalt not kill: Official guidelines to keep humans safe from robots are published by standards authority…

The science fiction author Isaac Asimov first proposed the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ in a short story published in 1942 as a way of ensuring the machines would not rise up to overthrow humanity.

Continue reading “Official guidelines to keep humans safe from robots published” »

Microsoft has vowed to “solve the problem of cancer” within a decade by using ground-breaking computer science to crack the code of diseased cells so they can be reprogrammed back to a healthy state.

In a dramatic change of direction for the technology giant, the company has assembled a “small army” of the world’s best biologists, programmers and engineers who are tackling cancer as if it were a bug in a computer system.

This summer Microsoft opened its first wet laboratory where it will test out the findings of its computer scientists who are creating huge maps of the internal workings of cell networks.

Continue reading “Microsoft will ‘solve’ cancer within 10 years” »

MyData 2016 was an international conference that focused on human centric personal information management, held in Helsinki Finland from 31st August-2nd September 2016. It was organized by the Open Knowledge Finland, Aalto University Finland and FING — Next-Generation Internet Foundation (FING).

The conference featured international speakers and hands-on sessions — this channel exclusively showcases most of the activities & key talks from the three days.