The vision: medical nanobots racing through your bloodstream to the site of bacterial or viral infection… or cancer… or even injury. Once at the site of the dysfunction, the nanobot dumps its medicine cargo. The effectiveness of the drug is increased because its delivered exactly where its needed. Side effects are cut because the medicine […]
With Tuesday’s podcast looming, the idea of human enhancements is very much on my mind. On the show, we’ll be talking about future upgrades to the human architecture that will make life radically different. But what about things we can do now? Here are a couple of ideas. 1. Run 20 miles an hour. In […]
it’s the biggest science news of the year, right? OBAMA SIGNS ORDER LIFTING STEM-CELL BAN WASHINGTON — Before an East Room audience of doctors, scientists, lawmakers and religious leaders President Obama signed an executive order Monday lifting the ban on federal funding for stem cell research, fulfilling a promise he made on the campaign trail. […]
This could be the engine of the next economic boom: UPDATE:Paul Rothemund has pioneered the field of DNA origami. He uses special CAD software to come up with a design: He then orders long DNA strands with short “staple” DNA strands. He mixes it together and they self-assemble: The result – 50 Billion smileys floating […]
New Scientist reports: Red blood cells travel through the bloodstream delivering vital oxygen to body tissues and taking away unwanted carbon dioxide – and they have to squeeze through blood vessels as thin as 3 micrometres across to do it. But in some diseases, such as malaria and sickle cell disease, red blood cells lose […]
We talked a little about the risks associated with genetic modification of crops on the most recent FastForward Radio. Where the danger exists, it is not so much a matter of crops being deliberately modified to do some kind of harm — Stephen pointed out that there are probably easier, more direct, and harder to […]
One of the wonderful oddities of the Epic of Gilgamesh is that our Mesopotamian hero is described as being two-thirds divine and one-third human. That’s a breakdown you don’t see every day. Hercules and other Greek demigods were generally described as having a mathematically comprehensible 50-50 split between human and divine parents. One possible explanation […]
Scientists have been excited about the possibilities of embryonic stem cells at least since they were isolated in 1998. These cells are the root of the tree. We start as a handful of these cells and grow into a full individual. These cells can – and do – differentiate to become all parts of the […]
South Korean researchers at Chonnam National University have created a tiny robot that is capable of traveling through the bloodstream to clear arteries. This is not a nanobot. It operates at a much larger scale – it is slightly less than a millimeter in size. Perhaps it should be called a micro-cyborg. The bot’s locomotion […]
“Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by […]