Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital Leads World’s First Adult Stem Cell Study Using Patient’s Own Fat Tissue

more here ocal heart patient gives her account of taking part in stem cell research i could not find it in montgomerynews but its here and a patient account

New molecular switch for genes

Researchers have created a molecular switch that can reversibly turn any mammalian gene on or off and control its level of expression. The results, published this week in Cell, provide a new level of precision in studying genes involved in biological processes and diseases, the authors say.
more here

Copyright © 2007 Cell Press. All rights reserved.
Cell, Vol 130, 363-372, 27 July 2007
Resource
A Tunable Genetic Switch Based on RNAi and Repressor Proteins for Regulating Gene Expression in Mammalian Cells

Tara L. Deans,1 Charles R. Cantor,1 and James J. Collins1,
more here

Coming Soon: Protein Synthesis Without Amino Acids?

Citation: Huailin Sun, Metal-Catalyzed Copolymerization of Imines and CO: A Non-Amino Acid Route to Polypeptides, Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2007, 46, No. 32, doi: 10.1002/anie.200700646
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New Proteomics Research Promises To Revolutionize Biomedical Discovery

n a research article that will be published in the July 20th issue of the journal Molecular Cell, a research team led by Dr. Benoit Coulombe from the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) describes a powerful proteomics approach that promises to have a profound impact on our current understanding of the human proteome and the function of its individual proteins.

more here

Nanobionics

from Nanowerk

Countdown to a synthetic lifeform

According to George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has devised a complete blueprint for a synthetic cell, an investment of around $10 million would be enough to turn the “bottom-up” dream into reality. “Our approach doesn’t require any super new technology,” he says.
more here

Scientists Build Bacteria-Killing Organisms From Scratch

here
here
and here
and here

my new column out: NBICS and the Convention on Biological diversity (CBD)

see here
a list of all columns can be found here

USA President’s Council on Bioethics Meeting, session on nanotechnology

President’s Council on Bioethics Meeting, session on nanotechnology
When: Friday, June 29, 2007, 8:30 a.m. – 11:45 a.m
Where: Hay-Adams Hotel, 16th & H Streets NW, Washington DC
see also here

Nature stem cell news page

see at source

“SENSOrimotor structuring of Perception and Action for emergent Cognition”

see more at source
“The SENSOPAC project will combine machine learning techniques and modelling of biological systems to develop a machine capable of abstracting cognitive notions from sensorimotor relationships during interactions with its environment, and of generalising this knowledge to novel situations.

Through active sensing and exploratory actions the machine will discover the sensorimotor relationships and consequently learn the intrinsic structure of its interactions with the world and unravel predictive and causal relationships. Together with action policy formulation and decision making, this will underlie the machine’s abilities to create abstractions, to suggest and test hypotheses, and develop self-awareness.

The project will demonstrate how a naïve system can bootstrap its cognitive development by constructing generalization and discovering abstractions with which it can conceptualize its environment and its own self. The continuous developmental approach will combine self-supervised and reinforcement learning with motivational drives to form a truly autonomous artificial system.

Throughout the project, continuous interactions between experimentalists, theoreticians, engineers and roboticists will take place in order to coordinate the most rigorous development and testing of a complete artificial cognitive system.”
from here

Another of my biweekly columns out

New column here
The column is now published by two sources: Innovationwatch.com (every 15th of a month) and Healthwrights (every 30th of a month)

Scientists close in on “cyborg-like” memory chips

Tuesday, May 29, 2007 16:15

Tel Aviv (Israel) - Two scientists from the Tel-Aviv University have
shown that information can be stored in live neurons. The research
results provide a new way to help understand how our brain learns and
store information, but also indicate that a “cyborg-like integration of
living material into memory chips” could become a reality in the
foreseeable future.
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Converging Cognitive Enhancements

Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg have another paper out: Converging Cognitive Enhancements, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1093: 201–227 (2006). It is part of a NY annals volume titled Progress in Convergence: Technologies for Human Wellbeing edited by William Sims Bainbridge and Mihail C. Roco.
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Gene Therapy status

according to figures published by the Journal of Gene Medicine in January 2007, there are 1,260 gene therapy clinical trials in progress. Of these, 27 have reached Phase III and 13 Phase II/III, showing that a number of products are edging close to market.
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Gene mutation linked to cognition is found only in humans

The human and chimpanzee genomes vary by just 1.2 percent, yet there is a considerable difference in the mental and linguistic capabilities between the two species. A new study showed that a certain form of neuropsin, a protein that plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous systems of humans and that it originated less than 5 million years ago. The study, which also demonstrated the molecular mechanism that creates this novel protein, will be published online in Human Mutation, the official journal of the Human Genome Variation Society.
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another of my columns out

Neurodiversity, Neuroenhancement, Neurodisease, and Neurobusiness see here

Is the world ready for cyborg athletes?

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GM mosquito ‘could fight malaria’

A genetically modified (GM) strain of malaria-resistant mosquito has been created that is better able to survive than disease-carrying insects.It gives new impetus to one strategy for controlling the disease: introduce the GM insects into wild populations in the hope that they will take over.

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blood tests for mental health conditions under development

Based on study results from the University of Iowa, blood tests for panic disorder and other mental health conditions are now being developed at UI and will become commercially available in the near future.
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