What’s in a name? A little thought and a good cause, according to Jeff Bezos who was recently pressed about why he named his space company “Blue Origin.”
The Amazon founder recently spoke at the JFK Library for a fireside chat event. During the 50 minute conversation, he was asked about his other company, Blue Origin.
Transistors are now the size of atoms.
Scary but real.
The NSA is working on a computer system that can predict what people are thinking.
Continue reading “The NSA Is Building An Artificial Intelligence System That Can Read Minds” »
RFID in medical research helping researchers with lower error rates = better, more accurate results!
A CDC whistleblower has recently gone on record to expose nefarious government plans which would use the impending US Ebola pandemic as an opportunity to implant RFID technology in American citizens.
Brent Hopskins was a CDC contractor before coming forward with serious allegations against his former employer. Hopskins claims that an Ebola vaccine has been prepared for the general public in the form of disposable, one-use syringes. The downside, however, is that each of these syringes will contain not only the vaccine, but a micro RFID chip as well.
The use of ECMO, the most aggressive form of life support in modern medicine, has skyrocketed — but along with miraculous rescues, it can leave patients in limbo, kept alive with machines but with …
A research team led by the University of Cologne has identified the transcription factor Ets21c as a vital regulator of the regenerative system within the adult intestine of the fruit fly Drosophila. The study highlights the existence of trade-off mechanisms between stress resilience and longevity.
The intestinal epithelium is involved in nutrient absorption and digestion, but also serves as a selective barrier that prevents the intrusion of pathogens and toxic substances. The intestine is renewed over an organism’s lifetime through the function of stem cells that are capable of differentiating to maintain the tissue integrity and function.
On the other hand, stem cell malfunctions have been linked to tissue degeneration or cancer development. The research is shedding new light on the molecular basis of the regenerative processes under both favorable and stressful conditions.
The saying “God doesn’t play dice” is meant to suggest that nothing happens by chance. On the other hand, cancer seems like the ultimate happenstance: Don’t we all have a 43-year-old, vegan, triathlete friend fighting cancer? Does this mean that cancer plays dice? According to the traditional model of how cancer develops, yes: Every time a cell divides, you roll a die, and the more years you roll, the greater your chance of rolling an unfortunate mutation that causes cancer. Some young people get very unlucky and some older people get very lucky, but overall, the longer you live, the more times you roll the die, the greater your risk of developing cancer. It makes perfect sense.
Only, a University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal eLife points out a simple problem with this model: Many cancers require more than one activating mutation. In other words, not only one but multiple unlikely bad things have to happen to cause cancer. Think of this like rolling multiple dice, or perhaps like rolling an unlucky number on a single die, multiple times. Say you’re rolling a 100-sided die with “42” being a cancer-causing mutation. You would expect it to take longer to roll four 42s than it does to roll one 42, right?
But the current study shows that no matter the number of unlucky events needed to cause a specific kind of cancer, cancer risk rises equally with age. On average, it takes only one mutation to cause mesothelioma, eleven mutations to cause colorectal cancer, and four mutations to cause pancreatic cancer. But despite the dramatically different Vegas odds of “rolling” one, four and eleven “42s,” the incidence of these cancers goes up uniformly with age, accelerating from about age 60 to about age 85. In this case, it does not, in fact, take longer to roll eleven 42s than it takes to roll one 42.
