Tag Archives: Tech

A more electric language for biology

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DDN

Bioelectricity is a potent lever for controlling health. What would it look like to treat the body electrically, rather than chemically?

When Kevin Tracey met 11-month-old Janice at New York Hospital, she was recovering from multiple bouts of sepsis after her grandmother accidentally spilled a pot of scalding water on her. Janice suffered severe burns to more than 90 percent of her body and, subsequently, septic shock — a life-threatening immune response to infection. Tracey, back in 1987, was a neurosurgery resident working the burn unit at what’s now the Weill Cornell Medical Center.

After three and a half weeks, Janice was ready to be discharged from the hospital. The day prior to being sent home, Tracey watched from a doorway as a nurse gave Janice a bottle, swaying with her gently in a rocking chair. Then, Janice’s eyes rolled back, and she died. Tracey attempted CPR for an hour — all efforts failed.

“As overwhelmingly sad as this was, it was even worse because I couldn’t answer her family’s questions about what happened,” Tracey recalled in a 2015 DARPA symposium keynote address.

Read the full story in the December issue of Drug Discovery News

New CRISPR Phase 1 trial hints at a first-of-its-kind heart treatment on horizon

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Drug Discovery News

A gene therapy targeting ANTIGPTL3 reduced cholesterol and triglyceride levels simultaneously.

Elevated low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and high triglycerides each affect about one in four adults worldwide. But a new CRISPR-Cas9 therapy may reduce the risk of major heart events caused by cholesterol and triglycerides.

LDL and triglycerides are risk factors for plaque buildup in heart disease. On Saturday morning, a team of researchers from Cleveland Clinic, CRISPR Therapeutics, Victorian Heart Institute, New Zealand Clinical Research, and Royal Adelaide Hospital published results in the New England Journal of Medicine from a 15-person Phase 1 trial of CTX310, which cut levels of both by about half.

Read the full story in Drug Discovery News

The covert project to (finally) measure hellish subway heat

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SEQUENCER MAG

Meet Jack Klein, the guy who stealthily collects data about New York’s hottest days underground.

At 181st street in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, an August heat wave broils the asphalt, concrete, and any inch of skin exposed to the sun. Shade offers some relief, with one major exception: the underground. Washington Heights resides several hundred feet above lower Manhattan, so its subway stops are buried deeper underground. “People tell me, you’ve gotta go to the elevator inside 181st, it’s an inferno,” said Jack Klein, founder of NewYorkLab, a guerilla project to study environmental conditions at subway stations.

Read the full story at Sequencer Magazine

What AI can actually do to your critical thinking skills

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SEQUENCER

Chatbots won’t obliterate everyone’s critical thinking. Lessons from the past tech revolutions and today’s experts signal how to protect your mind.

A couple months ago, while I was thumbing through old magazines at a record shop, I landed on a gem. “Learning To Love the Computer” emblazoned the cover of Nutshell magazine, a now-defunct periodical for college students. This 1981 issue showed a desk littered with books about Shakespeare, some chips, a Coke can, a boxy PC displaying the start of a homework assignment, and a college student grinning widely. I grinned back. Then I bought the issue.

“You’d better hurry up and learn to love them, because they’re rapidly reshaping our world,” the story said of PCs. Computers changed how we worked and socialized as they swallowed steadily larger bites of tasks previously reserved for typewriters, pens, and minds. That momentum has not stopped. And as generative AI gobbles up internet functions from research to retail, our professional and personal lives also invariably shift.

Read the full story in Sequencer Magazine

With ‘Digital Twins,’ The Doctor Will See You Now

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Quanta Magazine

By creating a digital twin of your circulatory system, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.

Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.

Read the full story in Quanta Magazine

Florida’s War With Invasive Pythons Has a New Twist

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WIRED

It may not be possible to eradicate the state’s tens of thousands of Burmese pythons. But the local wildlife is biting back—and humans wielding new tech can help.

WHILE DRIVING IN the swamplands some 40 miles west of Miami, Mike Kirkland noticed a log lying in the road ahead, so he and his colleague stepped out of their white GMC work truck. This was no log. “As we got closer, we realized it was a python,” he says. “It was so big, it looked like a fallen tree.” Kirkland asked the colleague to hang back, then crept to within five feet of the predator as it basked on the warm pavement.

“She saw me,” he says. “I’m 5’11”. And she picked herself up and practically looked me in the eye.” The snake’s sheer size gave him pause—but not for long. She stretched open her mouth, revealing dozens of curved teeth as sharp as daggers, then launched her head at Kirkland. He dodged a couple of strikes before spotting an opening to grab the snake’s head. The nonvenomous 17-foot constrictor then tried to wrap herself around the sweating Kirkland, who slipped through coil after coil. About 20 minutes later, the exhausted snake gave in, and Kirkland euthanized the animal.

Read the full story in WIRED

A Hair Loss Study Raises New Questions About Aging Cells

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WIRED

A protein secreted by seemingly dormant cells in skin moles causes hair to grow again. That’s a big—and potentially useful—surprise.

MAKSIM PLIKUS loves talking about hair. The cell biologist from the University of California, Irvine rattles off obscure facts: Sloth hair has a green tinge thanks to symbiotic algae; African crested rats evolved hollow hairs, which they slather with a pasty bark-derived toxin to defend themselves; his last name comes from a Latvian word for “bald.” Growing up in Eastern Europe (he’s neither Latvian nor bald, despite his name), Plikus aspired to do biomedical research. He joined a lab that had him dissecting rat whiskers under a microscope. It was hard, and his hands would shake. But eventually he got the hang of it. “I started to appreciate just the beauty of the follicle,” he says.

Read the full story in WIRED

This Artificial Muscle Moves Stuff on Its Own

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WIRED

Actuators inspired by cucumber plants could make robots move more naturally in response to their environments, or be used for devices in inhospitable places.

IN THE PRODUCE section of a grocery store, the cucumber is mundane. But in the nursery section of a hardware store, says Shazed Aziz, the cucumber plant is a marvel.

A couple of years ago, Aziz strode through Bunnings Warehouse, an Australian hardware chain, making a beeline for a particular cucumber plant. The day before, he had noticed its peculiar tendrils—thin stems that jut out from the plant in coils of various sizes and that cucumber vines use to reach toward surfaces and pull themselves up to access more sunlight. On his first visit, those helix-like curls were long and loose. “When I returned to the store the next day, they were contracted,” says Aziz, a materials engineering postdoc at the University of Queensland.

Read the full story in WIRED

For AI to Know What Something Is, It Must Know What Something Isn’t

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Quanta Magazine

Today’s language models are more sophisticated than ever, but challenges with negation persist.

Nora Kassner suspected her computer wasn’t as smart as people thought. In October 2018, Google released a language model algorithm called BERT, which Kassner, a researcher in the same field, quickly loaded on her laptop. It was Google’s first language model that was self-taught on a massive volume of online data. Like her peers, Kassner was impressed that BERT could complete users’ sentences and answer simple questions. It seemed as if the large language model (LLM) could read text like a human (or better).

But Kassner, at the time a graduate student at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, remained skeptical. She felt LLMs should understand what their answers mean — and what they don’t mean. It’s one thing to know that a bird can fly. “A model should automatically also know that the negated statement — ‘a bird cannot fly’ — is false,” she said. But when she and her adviser, Hinrich Schütze, tested BERT and two other LLMs in 2019, they found that the models behaved as if words like “not” were invisible.

Read the full story in Quanta Magazine