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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,149

Why Bill Gates thinks gene editing and artificial intelligence could save the world

Bill-gates-thinks-gene-editing-artificial-intelligence-save-world.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been working to improve the state of global health through his nonprofit foundation for 20 years, and today he told the nation’s premier scientific gathering that advances in artificial intelligence and gene editing could accelerate those improvements exponentially in the years ahead.

“We have an opportunity with the advance of tools like artificial intelligence and gene-based editing technologies to build this new generation of health solutions so that they are available to everyone on the planet. And I’m very excited about this,” Gates said in Seattle during a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Such tools promise to have a dramatic impact on several of the biggest challenges on the agenda for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, created by the tech guru and his wife in 2000.

Coronavirus continues to infect earnings as Tesla, McDonald’s and Boeing highlight busiest day

Coronvirus fears are being raised in earnings calls throughout different sectors as Wall Street looks for any effects from the virus spreading within and outside of China, which should lead to a lot of talk on what could be the busiest single day of the earnings season.

Nearly 10% of the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.18%, 46 components, are scheduled to report on Wednesday, along with four members of the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, −0.09% — Boeing Co. BA, −0.68%, Dow Inc. DOW, +0.68%, McDonald’s Corp. MCD, −0.15% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.89%.

The company on that list most linked to coronavirus fears is McDonald’s, which has had to temporarily shut down some of its stores in China due to fears about the outbreak. During the SARS crisis in the early 2000s, there was a “pronounced but relatively short-lived” impact on restaurant sales in the Greater China region, according to Bernstein analyst Sara Senatore. China accounts for only 2% of McDonald’s earnings and the company has only closed about 1% of its China stores so far, so expect executives to play down any effects when they report before the bell Wednesday.

Eye-tracking data improves prosthetic hands

Prosthetic hands restore only some of the function lost through amputation. But combining electrical signals from forearm muscles with other sources of information, such as eye tracking, promises better prostheses. A study funded by the SNSF gives specialists access to valuable new data.

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The hand is a precious limb. Its 34 muscles and 20 joints enable movements of great precision and complexity which are essential for interacting with the environment and with others on a daily basis. Hand amputation thus has severe physical and psychological repercussions on a person’s life. Myoelectric prosthetic hands, which work by recording electrical muscle signals on the skin, allow amputees to regain some lost function. But dexterity is often limited and the variability of the electrical signals from the forearm alone makes the prosthetics sometimes unreliable. Henning Müller, professor of business informatics, is investigating how combining data from myoelectric signals with other sources of information could lead to better prosthetics. Müller has now made available to the scientific community a dataset that includes eye tracking and computer vision as well as other information (electromyography and acceleration sensor data).

Aging and Stem Cells | Theodore Ho | TEDxMiddlebury

Dr. Theodore Ho talks about the rapidly expanding possibilities of stem cells to be used in reversing or slowing the aging process. He discusses his previous and current work with the brain, including such methods as tissue clearing, multifiber photometry and optogenetics, and single resolution calcium imaging and control. Dr. Ho is a neuroscientist and stem cell biologist studying the mechanisms and causes of biological aging and potential strategies to slow or reverse them, in order to prevent the onset of age

Associated diseases to help us live healthier and longer lives.

He completed a four-year joint bachelor’s/master’s degree program in.

Human developmental and regenerative biology/bioengineering at.

Harvard University, and he received his PhD in Biophysics from the.

University of California San Francisco, studying stem cell aging in the lab of Dr. Emmanuelle Passegue. In college he developed a nanoparticle drug delivery system, in graduate school he discovered previously unknown mechanisms of cellular and molecular aging of stem cells, and now in the Deisseroth lab he is using optical recording and perturbation of neuronal activity to study neural circuit dynamics that control behavior. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Continue reading “Aging and Stem Cells | Theodore Ho | TEDxMiddlebury” | >

7000 Year Old DNA Found in Artsakh Cave Matches Genes of Modern Armenians

AZOKH, Nagorno-Karabakh (People of Ar)—Scholars from Britain, US, Denmark and Armenia led by Professor Levon Yepiskoposyan have been examining prehistoric caves near the village of Azokh in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) and found unique artifacts from different periods, among them a tooth from a human who lived 7000 years ago. Due to the cave’s climate DNA was preserved inside the tooth and was send to Copenhagen University’s genetics department (in Denmark) for examination. The results of this inquiry have revealed that the genetic makeup of the tooth belonging to an individual 7000 years ago perfectly matches with the genetic makeup of modern Armenians.

“This is the conclusion we’ve reached after numerous excavations carried out on the territory of Karabakh, where we examined more than a dozen caves, among them the cave of Azokh and Alexan Uzes,” Yepiskoposyan said.