Lifeboat Foundation

Interestingly enough, although Elon Musk’s Neuralink received a great deal of media attention, early in 2023, Synchron published results from its first-in-human study of four patients with severe paralysis who received its first-generation Stentrode neuroprosthesis implant. The implant allowed participants to create digital switches that controlled daily tasks like sending texts and emails, partaking in online banking, and communicating care needs. The study’s findings were published in a paper in JAMA Neurology in January 2023. Then, before September, the first six US patients had the Synchron BCI implanted. The study’s findings are expected by late 2024.

Let’s return to Upgrade. “One part The Six Million Dollar Man, one part Death Wish revenge fantasy” was how critics described the movie. While Death Wish is a 1974 American vigilante action-thriller movie that is partially based on Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel of the same name, the American sci-fi television series The Six Million Dollar Man from the 1970s, based on Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg, could be considered a landmark in the context of human-AI symbiosis, although in fantasy’s domain. Oscar Goldman’s opening line in The Six Million Dollar Man was, “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man… Better than he was before. Better—stronger—faster.” The term “cyborg” is a portmanteau of the words “cybernetic” and “organism,” which was coined in 1960 by two scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan S Kline.

At the moment, “cyborg” doesn’t seem to be a narrative of a distant future, though. Rather, it’s very much a story of today. We are just inches away from becoming cyborgs, perhaps, thanks to the brain chip implants, although Elon Musk perceives that “we are already a cyborg to some degree,” and he may be right. Cyborgs, however, pose a threat, while the dystopian idea of being ruled by Big Brother also haunts. Around the world, chip implants have already sparked heated discussions on a variety of topics, including privacy, the law, technology, medicine, security, politics, and religion. USA Today published a piece headlined “You will get chipped—eventually” as early as August 2017. And an article published in The Atlantic in September 2018 discussed how (not only brain chips but) microchip implants, in general, are evolving from a tech-geek curiosity to a legitimate health utility and that there may not be as many reasons to say “no.” But numerous concerns about privacy and cybersecurity would keep us haunted. It would be extremely difficult for policymakers to formulate laws pertaining to such sensitive yet quickly developing technology.

Professor Nadeem Sarwar is Corporate Vice President, Co-Founder and Head, Transformational Prevention Unit, Novo Nordisk (https://www.novonordisk.com/partnerin…), Co-Chair UK Dementia Mission (a UK Government Ministerial appointment) and Honorary Professor, University of Edinburgh Medical School.

Professor Sarwar joined Novo Nordisk in June 2023 as Corporate Vice President, Co-Founder and Head of Novo Nordisk’s new Transformational Prevention Unit (TPU) whose mission is to increase obesity-free life years, so people live healthier and longer lives. To achieve this, the TPU is establishing an integrated ecosystem that will deliver science-first, empowering, and scalable commercial solutions that predict and pre-empt obesity and its consequences through innovative partnerships, with solutions intending to push the boundaries of what is possible with drugs, genomics, microbiome, digital health, and behavioral science.

Continue reading “Prof Nadeem Sarwar — Corporate VP, Co-Founder & Head, Transformational Prevention Unit, Novo Nordisk” »

New findings reveal that the body undergoes significant, systematic changes across multiple organs during prolonged periods of fasting. The results demonstrate evidence of health benefits beyond weight loss, but also show that any potentially health-altering changes appear to occur only after three days without food.

The study, published in Nature Metabolism, advances our understanding of what’s happening across the body after prolonged periods without food.

By identifying the potential health benefits from fasting and their underlying molecular basis, researchers from Queen Mary University of London’s Precision Healthcare University Research Institute (PHURI) and the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences provide a road map for future research that could lead to therapeutic interventions—including for people that may benefit from fasting but cannot undergo prolonged fasting or fasting-mimicking diets, such as ketogenic diets.

New research from the University of British Columbia reveals a safe path to overcoming food allergies for older children and others who can’t risk consuming allergens orally to build up their resistance.

It’s called sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), and it involves placing smaller amounts of food allergens under the tongue.

A study conducted by UBC clinical professor and pediatric allergist Dr. Edmond Chan and his team at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute found SLIT to be as safe and effective for high-risk older children and adolescents as oral immunotherapy is for preschoolers.

Review Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Wearable Digital Health Technology for Epilepsy.

MIT ’s ultrasound sticker enables continuous monitoring of organ stiffness, revolutionizing the early detection of diseases such as liver and kidney failure.

MIT engineers have developed a small ultrasound sticker that can monitor the stiffness of organs deep inside the body. The sticker, about the size of a postage stamp, can be worn on the skin and is designed to pick up on signs of disease, such as liver and kidney failure and the progression of solid tumors.

In an open-access study published recently in Science Advances, the team reports that the sensor can send sound waves through the skin and into the body, where the waves reflect off internal organs and back out to the sticker. The pattern of the reflected waves can be read as a signature of organ rigidity, which the sticker can measure and track.

Can smartphones apps be used to monitor a user’s mental health? This is what a recently submitted study scheduled to be presented at the 2024 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems hopes to address as a collaborative team of researchers from Dartmouth College have developed a smartphone app known as MoodCapture capable of evaluating signs of depression from a user with the front-facing camera. This study holds the potential to help scientists, medical professionals, and patients better understand how to identify signs of depression so proper evaluation and treatment can be made.

For the study, the researchers enlisted 177 participants for a 90-day trial designed to use their front-facing camera to capture facial images throughout their daily lives and while the participants answered a survey question with, “I have felt, down, depressed, or hopeless.” All participants consented to the images being taken at random times, not only when they used the camera to unlock their phone. During the study period, the researchers obtained more than 125,000 images and even accounted for the surrounding environment in their final analysis. In the end, the researchers found that MoodCapture exhibited 75 percent accuracy when attempting to identify early signs of depression.

“This is the first time that natural ‘in-the-wild’ images have been used to predict depression,” said Dr. Andrew Campbell, who is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth and a co-author on the study. “There’s been a movement for digital mental-health technology to ultimately come up with a tool that can predict mood in people diagnosed with major depression in a reliable and non-intrusive way.”

Do the impacts of deforestation go beyond the environment? What about human health, specifically the health of children? This is what a recent study published in Economics & Human Biology hopes to address as Dr. Gabriel Fuentes Cordoba, who is an associate professor of economics from Sophia University in Japan, investigated how deforestation in Cambodia effects the health of children around the time of their birth. This study holds the potential to help scientists, conservationists, and the public better understand the health effects of deforestation, specifically with the increasing effects of climate change around the world.

For the study, Dr. Fuentes Cordoba analyzed data obtained from the Cambodian Demographic Health Surveys and forest loss to ascertain the health impacts for pregnant women and children under five years of age who reside in areas of deforestation. In the end, Dr. Fuentes Cordoba discover alarming results that suggest deforestation exposure to women less than one year before pregnancy could lead to development of anemia, which is a precursor to malaria. This could result in significant health impacts on children being born, specifically reductions in birth weight, along with overall height and weight as they age.

“This research shows a negative impact of deforestation on child health,” Dr. Fuentes Cordoba said in a statement. “This negative impact may persist into adulthood and affect other aspects of wellbeing such as education acquisition and even wages. My findings indicate that future research should explore this aspect further.”

There’s some relief for people with food severe allergies. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports the drug Xolair allows people with allergies to tolerate higher doses of allergenic foods before developing a reaction after accidental exposure. Geoff Bennett discussed more with the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Robert Wood of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.