Longevity science

Computer chips and silicon micromachines are ready for your body. It’s time to decide how you’ll take them: implantable, ingestible, or intimate contact. Every flavor now exists. Some have FDA approval and some are seeking it. Others are moving quickly out of the research lab stage. With the round one Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize entries due in one year, we’re soon to see a heavy dose of sensors tied to the mobile wireless health revolution.

With these sensors comes a heavy dose of information about your health, data about what medication you are taking and when you took it. The sensors are available to protect your health, but choosing how to use them and how to protect the privacy of your data will be a matter of personal responsibility.

Anyone wanting to live longer and cut their risk of suffering from heart disease might want to consider getting a pet.

The American Heart Association (AHA) issued a scientific statement on Thursday saying owning a pet may help to decrease a person's risk of suffering from heart disease and is linked with lower levels of obesity, blood pressure and cholesterol.

Just like other parts of the body, the retina needs oxygen in order to survive. If it doesn’t receive enough – should its blood supply be restricted, for instance – permanent blindness can result.

The sooner that doctors know if a patient’s retina is receiving insufficient oxygen, the better the chances that they can take action in time. Soon, they may be able to use tiny injectable robots to get them the information they need.

A newly developed network of nanoscale particles can maintain normal blood sugar levels for more than a week by releasing insulin when blood-sugar levels rise.

This system could help type I diabetics replace insulin injections and monitoring.

While prosthetic limbs continue to improve, tactile feedback is one feature that many are keen to incorporate into the prosthetics but it remains a very difficult technology to develop. But now scientists have developed a new device so packed with sensors it is about as sensitive as human skin. Just as Moore’s Law continues to benefit the integrated circuit, packing ever more sensors into a smaller area will allow such devices to one day be built into everything we touch.

Some areas of our skin, like the lips and fingertips, are more sensitive to the touch because of a greater density of receptors that translate mechanical force into neuronal signals. The sensory device built by scientists at Georgia Tech is a new kind of transistor that converts mechanical force into electricity. The force bends nanoscale wires made of zinc oxide. When the wires bend back, zinc and oxide ions create an electrical potential that is converted to electrical current of a few millivolts. Converting mechanical energy to electrical energy is known as the piezoelectric effect.

Researchers at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital is working on developing human organs by building body cells layer by layer using a 3D printer.

The team has used the 3D printer to make body cells, including muscle cells, nervous systems cells and cartilage. Professor Mark Cook, director of neurosciences at St Vincent's Hospital, said 3D body part printing was like 'bubble jet printers'.

For years now, scientists across the globe have strived to find a method that gives robots an accurate sense of touch, and with good reason. A robot with an improved ability to feel would be better equipped to identify objects, judge its movements with greater care, and perform more tasks overall. In the latest step towards that goal, researchers at Georgia Tech have crafted a new type of touch-reactive material that's sensitive enough to read fingerprints and could provide robots with a sense of touch that resembles our own.

But processed has its upside (easy and cheap), while produce and grains have their downside (prep-heavy and expensive).

Right?

Not so, says Allison Sosna, a local chef and founder of MicroGreens, a group dedicated to teaching families — in particular children — how to prepare healthful meals on a teeny budget (as little as $3.50 per meal for a family of four).

Right now about 10 percent of ICU beds in the US are monitored in part from an off-hospital site. And the number of sites using remote monitoring are on the rise, increasing exponentially over the past 5 to 7 years.

Tele-ICU monitoring involves satellite-linked video and communications links to electronic records so that the distant intensivists – doctors that specialize in intensive care – can watch over the patient in real-time, 24 hours a day. A video camera operates on-demand to observe the patient and communicate with them via a microphone and speakers. Through this two-way communication tele-intensivists can aid local intensivists by helping to enforce the patient’s daily goals, review their performance with them and respond to alarms if the local doctor has been called away.

Scientists from the Manchester Collaborative Center for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) have discovered why a particular cancer drug is so effective at killing cells. Their findings could be used to aid the design of future cancer treatments.

Professor Daniel Davis and his team used high quality video imaging to investigate why the drug rituximab is so effective at killing cancerous B cells. It is widely used in the treatment of B cell malignancies, such as lymphoma and leukaemia — as well as in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

What causes a cell to metastasize into a cancerous tumor?

To find out, Corey Neu, an assistant professor in Purdue University‘s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, and colleagues have combined an atomic force microscope (AFM) and a nuclear magnetic resonance system.

An AFM uses a tiny vibrating probe called a cantilever with a tip that travels over the surface of a cell to yield information about materials and surfaces at the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.

The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

(Reuters) - Patent expirations on big-name drugs such as Lipitor and Plavix has resulted in modestly less spending on medicines in the United States for the first time in at least 55 years, according to...

Patient-specific bone substitutes from skin cells for repair of large bone defects are now possible, thanks to research by a team of New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute scientists.

The study represents a major advance in personalized reconstructive treatments for patients with bone defects resulting from disease or trauma. It promises to lead to customizable, three-dimensional bone grafts on-demand, matched to fit the exact needs and immune profile of a patient.

Scientists from the University of Iowa are now claiming that by playing a specific video game, test subjects aged 50 and over were able to stop and even reverse the trend.

In fact, those that played a particular game showed as much as seven year's worth of cognitive improvement when retested one year after the study.

Epilepsy seizures can range from something as subtle as a passing localized numbness to something as noticeable and potentially dangerous as wild involuntary thrashing. While some people experience symptoms before a seizure that indicate one is about to occur, others have no warning at all.

A new device designed to be implanted between the skull and the brain surface has been found to accurately predict epilepsy seizures in humans and can indicate the risk of a seizure occurring in the coming hours.

Scientists discover how to slow down aging in mice and increase longevity
Blocking a specific protein complex in the hypothalamus and injecting a hormone slow aging and cognitive decline

Their discovery of a specific age-related signaling pathway opens up new strategies for combating diseases of old age and extending lifespan.

One of the things that makes heart disease so problematic is the fact that after a heart attack occurs, the scar tissue that replaces the damaged heart tissue isn’t capable of expanding and contracting – it doesn’t “beat,” in other words. This leaves the heart permanently weakened. Now, however, scientists from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed artificial heart tissue that may ultimately provide a solution to that problem.

At the base of the material is a rubbery gel known as MeTro. It’s made from tropoelastin, which is the protein that gives human tissues their elasticity.

Researchers said on Tuesday they planned to enroll patients into two new clinical trials using Mydicar, a gene therapy treatment made by privately held U.S. biotech company Celladon.

After more than 20 years of research, the ground-breaking method for fixing faulty genes is starting to deliver, with European authorities approving the first gene therapy for an rare metabolic disease last November.

In the case of heart failure, the aim is to insert a gene called SERCA2a directly into heart cells using a modified virus, delivered via a catheter infusion. Lack of SERCA2a leads to ever weaker pumping in people with heart failure.

More than two-thirds of people with non-melanoma skin cancer underwent surgery to treat the condition, according to a new study - including patients who were at least 85 years old or had multiple other chronic diseases.

Researchers found 43 percent of those patients with limited life expectancies died within five years of their diagnosis - but none from skin cancer. Many of them reported poor wound healing after skin surgery or other treatment-related complications including pain, numbness and itching.

With one in five Japanese citizens now aged 65 or older, various robotics technologies are being developed to prolong independent living and improve quality of life at home.

The main alternative to nursing homes and hospitals would be smart homes designed around the needs of the elderly. Earlier this week, Honda announced that it will test some of its life support robots in a mock household environment at the Future Life Showroom, in Sekisui House's brand new SUMUFUMU Lab.