6/30/2011 PERMALINK
Pigs genetically altered so that their organs can be used to replace your aging organs. Researchers show that altering or overexpressing the human programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) molecule in the endothelial cells of pig arteries reduces the conditions that lead to rejection. This strongly suggests that humans could receive altered porcine organs with fewer complications. 'Genetically engineered pigs may someday overcome the severe donor organ shortage, and save human lives,' said Qing Ding, Ph.D., co-study author from the Shanghai Institute of Immunology at the Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China.

6/29/2011 PERMALINK
Drug reverses 'Accelerated Aging Disease' in human cells. Kan Cao, an associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics and colleagues at the University of Maryland, have found that the drug rapamycin can reverse the effects in human cells of the rapid aging disease known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection of transplanted organs, has already been shown to extend life span in healthy mice. The compound appears to enhance the ability of human cells to prevent the accumulates of proteins that cause cells to lose function over time.

6/24/2011 PERMALINK
In what country are net-savvy people the most desperate and willing to do work for the least money? To find out The Daily Beast (formerly Newsweek) offered a job on Mechanical Turk, an online work contracting site that allows you to specify the labor you'd like to hire by country. In the experiment, they went country by country, lowering the price offered until they could no longer find at least three takers for the job at that price. Digital workers in Italy, the Netherlands and Egypt demanded the highest pay at $5/hour. Germans wanted at least $3/hour. Pakistan $2.50/hour. The Philippines $2.25/hour. Both Australia and the U.K. came in at $2/hour, while Canadians would do the job for only $1.25/hour. Workers in India and Romania tied for second lowest at $1/hour. While the lowest hourly wage demanded, only 25 cents an hour, was found among digital workers in the good old USA. The Mechanical Turk wouldn't tell them who the individual workers were, but my guess is that the three Americans willing to do an hour's work online for just 25 cents were probably recently college graduates.
Poor and desperate people exist everywhere, but only American college kids start off their work life saddled with a massive $1 trillion in student loan debt. This is more than all Americans owe collectively on our credit cards. Moreover, student loan debt is the only debt in the civilized world, which can NEVER be discharged in bankruptcy. By piling all that inescapable student loan debt onto their backs. The bankrupt old order has reduced America's college grads to the most desperate debt slaves to be found today anywhere on the planet. After gorging itself on American taxpayers for the last few years, the American political/financial Leviathan has now begun to eat our kids.

6/24/2011 PERMALINK
Biologists discover a gene that can be turned on late in life to reverse aging and double lifespan. MIT biologists have found a gene in yeast cells that they can turn on in aged yeast cells to double their usual lifespan. Like yeast cells, human cells also normally have a finite lifespan. They can only divide a certain number of times before they die. But just like yeast cells, human cells must also have a gene like the one MIT scientists just found in yeast. A gene that if switched on late in life is capable of restoring human cells to their youth. Such a gene is known to exist in humans, because lifespan is naturally reset when human reproductive cells are formed. Otherwise the children of a 80-year-old man would not have a similar life expectancy to those of an 20-year-old man. The gene responsible for resetting human cells is not yet known, but having now found that gene in yeast. Discovery of the human equivalent seems only a matter of time. And since when the yeast gene is switched on in ordinary yeast cells it doubles their lifespan. Presumably then, when the similar gene that human cells must carry is discovered, a genetic mod can be found to switch it on in all our cells. Just as it is natural switched on in human reproductive cells.

6/23/2011 PERMALINK
Mod allows your gene expression to be controlled with light. Using a protein from the human retina, researchers in Switzerland have developed a method to control the expression of target genes with light. The scientists say the technology could be employed in the near term to boost the production of biological drugs, such as those for cancer, by enabling precise control over protein production. In the long term, cells engineered to carry the light-sensitive switch could be implanted into patients to produce a missing hormone, such as insulin, on demand.

6/20/2011 PERMALINK
The financial catastrophe isn't default, it's 'extend and pretend. Unwelcome crises are a normal part of life. What turns a crisis into a financial debacle is pretending that life should be nothing but a smooth, uninterrupted rise in consumption, and trying to maintain this fantasy using freshly printed money and newly issuing public debt to maintain unnaturally high consumption levels.

6/18/2011 PERMALINK
Restoring memory, repairing brains damaged by aging or injury. Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off - literally with the flip of a switch. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. "Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, who holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering and is director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering. Berger is the lead author of "A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory," which will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. His team worked with scientists from Wake Forest University in the study, building on recent advances in our understanding of the brain area known as the hippocampus and its role in learning.

6/14/2011 PERMALINK
You are a mutant - first direct whole-genome measure of human mutation predicts 60 new mutations in each of us. For the first time, researchers have been able to answer the questions: how many new mutations does a child have and did most of them come from mum or dad? The researchers measured directly the numbers of mutations in two families, using whole genome sequences from the 1000 Genomes Project. The results also reveal that human genomes, like all genomes, are changed by the forces of mutation: our DNA is altered by differences in its code from that of our parents. Mutations that occur in sperm or egg cells will be 'new' mutations not seen in our parents.

6/12/2011 PERMALINK
Modding your cells to emit laser beams? A laser based on living cells has been created by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. They were motivated to overcome one of the fundamental limitations on biological imaging: it's very difficult to get visible and infrared light in and out of the body. Like any laser, the cell laser needs an energy source to "pump" it and increase the power of the light it can emit. The researchers pumped the living lasers by pulsing the cells with light through a microscope.

6/06/2011 PERMALINK
Modding your skin cells into neurons. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, cell fusion, or expression of lineage-specific factors have been shown to induce cell-fate changes in diverse somatic cell types. We recently observed that forced expression of a combination of three transcription factors, Brn2 (also known as Pou3f2), Ascl1 and Myt1l, can efficiently convert mouse fibroblasts into functional induced neuronal (iN) cells. Here we show that the same three factors can generate functional neurons from human pluripotent stem cells as early as 6 days after transgene activation.

6/06/2011 PERMALINK
Inhalable gene therapy made possible. Very small circular therapeutic DNA molecules can survive the stress of aerosolization (being forced into suspension in air) to carry gene therapy deep into the lungs. , Developed in the laboratory of Dr. Lynn Zechiedrich at Baylor College of Medicine and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, unlike existing vectors that are typically modified viruses. These new circular DNA strands survive longer than plasmids (large DNA circles containing bacterial sequences that can be turned off in human cells) and continue to work longer than small interfering RNAs, which are used now to turn off genes in the laboratory setting. The ability to get deep in the lungs means that the DNA could be used to rejuvenate aging or damaged lungs.

6/06/2011 PERMALINK
Stem cell treatment causes broken bones to heal 3 to 4 times stronger. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown in an animal study that transplantation of adult stem cells enriched with a bone-regenerating hormone can help mend bone fractures that are not healing properly. The UNC study team led by Anna Spagnoli, MD, associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering, demonstrated that stem cells manufactured with the regenerative hormone insulin-like growth factor (IGF-I) become bone cells and also help the cells within broken bones repair the fracture, thereby speeding the healing. A deficiency of fracture healing is a common problem affecting an estimated 600,000 people annually in North America. "This problem is even more serious in children with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, and in elderly adults with osteoporosis, because their fragile bones can easily and repeatedly break, and bone graft surgical treatment is often not successful or feasible," Spagnoli said. Using an animal model of a non-union fracture, a "knockout" mouse that lacks the ability to heal broken bones, Spagnoli and her colleagues studied the effects of transplanting adult stem cells enriched with IGF-I. They took mesenchymal stem cells (adult stem cells from bone marrow) of mice and engineered the cells to express IGF-I. Then they transplanted the treated cells into knockout mice with a fracture of the tibia, the long bone of the leg. Using computed tomography (CT) scanning, the researchers showed that the treated mice had better fracture healing than did mice either left untreated or treated only with stem cells. Compared with controls left to heal on their own or recipients of stem cells only, treated mice had more bone bridging the fracture gap, and the new bone was three to four times stronger, according to Spagnoli. "More excitingly, we found that stem cells empowered with IGF-I restored the formation of new bone in a mouse lacking the ability to repair broken bones. This is the first evidence that stem cell therapy can address a deficiency of fracture repair," she said.