Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers from Germany have developed what could become a revolutionary treatment for male infertility — they build spermbots. The key is a tiny metal helix that attaches to individual sperm cells, allowing them to move more effectively. You can think of it like a prosthetic tail for sperm.

Male fertility issues are usually not related to having an unusually low sperm count, but to having sperm with low motility. That is, they don’t get around very well. Each sperm has a copy of half of a man’s genome in the “head” portion. The tail is actually a flagella with banks of energy-producing mitochondria to power its movement. If either the tail or power source don’t work correctly, a sperm cell will have trouble reaching and fertilizing an egg.

Read more

Awesome; this will be wonderful for these brave children of St. Jude.

The St. Jude Medical OPTIS Mobile System combines OCT, FFR and angiography to provide hospitals in Europe and Japan with multiple cath labs the technology for more accurate PCI guidance.

St. Jude Medical, Inc.

Read more

New therapy for cancer.

Read more

A new method of closing wounds has been discovered by researchers from University of St. Andrews and Harvard Medical School.

In the future, your wounds might not be closed by stitches or staples. Instead, they will be fixed with lasers.

Continue reading “Now, Scientists Can Suture Wounds with Lasers” »

Cool new story and video on transhumanism:

SANTA CLARA (CBS SF) –During Super Bowl 50, the world saw the Denver Broncos throttle the Carolina Panthers. The game’s MVP Von Miller dominated Cam Newton in a display of super human strength and skill.

You may not know it, but a growing number of engineers, biohackers and entrepreneurs hopes one day we’ll all be super human as well.

Continue reading “Engineers, Entrepreneurs Hoping To Re-Engineer Humans For Skill, Strength” »

A DARPA-funded research team has created a novel neural-recording device that can be implanted into the brain through blood vessels, reducing the need for invasive surgery and the risks associated with breaching the blood-brain barrier. The technology was developed under DARPA’s Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) program, and offers new potential for safely expanding the use of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to treat physical disabilities and neurological disorders.

In an article published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers in the Vascular Bionics Laboratory at the University of Melbourne led by neurologist Thomas Oxley, M.D., describe proof-of-concept results from a study conducted in sheep that demonstrate high-fidelity measurements taken from the motor cortex—the region of the brain responsible for controlling voluntary movement—using a novel device the size of a small paperclip.

This new device, which Oxley’s team dubbed the “stentrode,” was adapted from off-the-shelf stent technology—a familiar therapeutic tool for clearing and repairing blood vessels—to include an array of electrodes. The researchers also addressed the dual challenge of making the device flexible enough to safely pass through curving blood vessels, yet stiff enough that the array can emerge from the delivery tube at its destination.

Read more

Australian scientists hope that a tiny device just 3cm long and a few millimetres wide will enable paralysed patients to walk again by allowing them to control bionic limbs with the power of subconscious thought.

The new device, dubbed the “bionic spine”, is the size of a small paperclip and will be implanted in three patients at the Royal Melbourne hospital in Victoria next year. The participants will be selected from the Austin Health spinal cord unit, and will be the first humans to trial the device, which so far has only been tested in sheep.

Doctors will make a tiny cut in the neck of the patients and feed a catheter containing the bionic spine up through the blood vessels leading into the brain, until it rests on top of the motor cortex, the part of the brain where nerve impulses that initiate voluntary muscle movements come from. The catheter will then be removed, leaving the bionic spine behind.

Read more

Danaher’s Instruments of Change — If you feel like your industry that has always been on a slow & stable growth curve is now under greater pressure to change; you’re not alone. Recent indicators are showing with the latest changes in tech and consumers (namely the millennials as the largest consumers today); industries have been shaken up to perform at new levels like never before or companies in those industries will cease to be relevant.

Doing well by doing good is now expected for businesses, and moral leadership is at a premium for CEOs. For today’s companies to maintain their license to operate, they need to take into account a range of elements in their decision making: managing their supply chains, applying new ways of measuring their business performance that include indicators for social as well as commercial returns, and controlling the full life cycle of their products’ usage as well as disposal. This new reality is demonstrated by the launch last September of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which call on businesses to address sustainability challenges such as poverty, gender equality, and climate change in new and creative ways. The new expectations for business also are at the heart of the Change the World list, launched by Fortune Magazine in August 2015, which is designed to identify and celebrate companies that have made significant progress in addressing major social problems as a part of their core business strategy.

Technology and millennials seem to be driving much of this change. Socially conscious customers and idealistic employees are applauding companies’ ability to do good as part of their profit-making strategy. With social media capable of reaching millions instantly, companies want to be on the right side of capitalism’s power. This is good news for society. Corporate venturing activities are emerging, and companies are increasingly leveraging people, ideas, technology, and business assets to achieve social and environmental priorities together with financial profit. These new venturing strategies are focusing more and more on areas where new partnerships and investments can lead to positive outcomes for all: the shareholders, the workers, the environment, and the local community.

Continue reading “Technology and Millennials Are Driving Business Strategy and Social Change” »

Carnegie Mellon University is embarking on a five-year, $12 million research effort to reverse-engineer the brain and “make computers think more like humans,” funded by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The research is led by Tai Sing Lee, a professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC).

The research effort, through IARPA’s Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) research program, is part of the U.S. BRAIN Initiative to revolutionize the understanding of the human brain.

Continue reading “CMU announces research project to reverse-engineer brain algorithms, funded by IARPA” »