Futurismic

When I was very little, some early-grade teacher lost in the mists of memory told me the story of how Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon spent much of his life searching for the Fountain of Youth. Now that I’m approaching one of those decade birthdays, I can finally relate. Besides, as the leading edge of the baby boom starts retiring, this seems like a good time to take a peek at the science around longevity. Continue reading “We are all Ponce: The Quest for Longevity”

How’s that for counterintuitive, eh? But it’s a genuine problem, as Ars Technica explains:

The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven’t kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for error, the sheer number of tests performed ensures that some of them will produce erroneous results at random.

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The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error. Smaller populations are also more prone to random associations.

In the end, Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there’s a 95 percent chance that you’ll get a significant result at random. And, let’s face it—researchers want to see a significant result, so there’s a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out.

Especially when money and funding gets involved, I’m sure. There’s no conspiracy involved, just the psychic momentum of a human institution trying to maintain the status quo. A sort of collective mental flywheel, if you like; the same thing happens with political parties all the time, but they don’t have the same self-checking instinct that science does.

Between this and the rising efficacy of the placebo effect, I’ll bet it’s a weird time to be a medical practitioner… not to mention a patient.

So, let’s say the zombie plague is sweeping a nation where medical hardware is expensive, hard-to-come by, and hard to maintain. You need a way of testing the population for signs of contagion that’s cheap, portable, fast, and requires no power or mealthcare infrastructure. So what do you do?

You get them to lick the edge of a bit of paper about the size of a postage stamp.

(Non-apocalyptic deployments of this technology are also available. Terms, conditions and patents may apply in some legal theatres; please consult your biosolicitor.)

The idea of printing replacement biological tissue and organs has been around for a while – we mentioned the development the pressure-assisted spinning system back in 2007, in fact – but it looks like it’s finally reached the point where people think they can make a profit from it on a commercial scale. Via io9, The Economist tells us about Organovo and their US$200,000-a-pop commercially-available bio-printer:

To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made, says Keith Murphy, Organovo’s chief executive, and these will be for research purposes. Mr Murphy says, however, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.

I can’t wait to see what uses the street will find for this technology once it gets cheaper…

… no, scratch that. I think maybe I can wait after all.

Lost an ear during the Reservoir Dogs Re-enactment Society meeting? No problems – we’ll just grow you a new one on a nanocellulose framework [via NextBigFuture]:

Previously, Paul Gatenholm and his colleagues [at Chalmers University, Sweden] succeeded, in close co-operation with Sahlgrenska University Hospital, in developing artificial blood vessels using nanocellulose, where small bacteria “spin” the cellulose.

In the new programme, the researchers will build up a three-dimensional nanocellulose network that is an exact copy of the patient’s healthy outer ear and construct an exact mirror image of the ear. It will have sufficient mechanical stability for it to be used as a bioreactor, which means that the patient’s own cartilage and stem cells can be cultivated directly inside the body or on the patient, in this case on the head.

“As yet we do not know if it will work. It is an extremely exciting project that brings together expertise in image analysis, prototype manufacturing, biomechanics, biopolymers and cell biology. If we succeed it will open up a whole range of new and exciting areas of use.”

And while we’re speaking about ears, did you ruin your frequency response curve watching avant-noise bands play dingy bars and lofts in eighties New York*? You’ll be needing a hearing aid, then… but not some ugly uncool thing lodged in your ear canal. We’ve got one that’ll slip over one of your back teeth [via BoingBoing]:

There are other hearing aid devices that utilize bone conduction. Most, however, use a titanium pin drilled into the jaw bone (or skull) to transmit sound to the cochlea. SoundBite seems to be the first non-surgical, non-invasive, easily removable device. While they are likely years from retail production, Sonitus Medical plans on having SoundBite ITMs fitted to each individual’s upper back teeth and fabricated fairly quickly (1 to 2 weeks).

Oh, so all that wide-bandwidth noise and late-night hedonism has burned out some of your brain-meat, eh? Well, we’ve got organic transistors that mimic the function of human synapses [via NextBigFuture again]… though quite how we’d patch them into your existing wetware is a bit of a mystery at this point. But hey, they’re called NOMFETs, so the internet should find plenty of macro jokes to make about ‘em!

A biological synapse transforms a voltage spike (action potential) arriving from a pre-synaptic neuron into a discharge of chemical neurotransmitters that are then detected by a post-synaptic neuron. These are subsequently transformed into new spikes, leading to a succession of pulses that either become larger or diminish in size. This fundamental property of synaptic behaviour is known as short-term plasticity, which is related to a neural network’s ability to learn. It is this plasticity that Vuillaume and colleagues have succeeded in mimicking.

In the NOMFET, the pre-synaptic signal is simply the pulse voltage applied to the device and the output signal is the drain current, explains Vuillaume. The holes – the charge carriers in the p-type organic semiconductor employed – are trapped in the nanoparticles and act like the neurotransmitters. A certain number of holes are trapped for each incoming spike voltage and in the absence of pulses, the holes escape in a matter of seconds

This time delay is carefully adjusted by the researchers by optimizing nanoparticle number and device geometry. “The output of the NOMFET is thus able to reproduce the deceasing or amplifying behaviour typical of a synapse depending on the frequency of spikes,” said Vuillaume.

Er… your health insurance is fully up to date, right? [image by Bistrosavage]

[ * Guess who's been reading a Sonic Youth biography this week... ]