Via Jeremy Tolbert and various other sources, the headline pretty much says it all. The discovery of virophages – a “newly discovered type of virus that spreads at the expense of other viruses” – offers a potential new alternative to antibiotics in fighting viral infections. [image by Nils Geylen]
Tag Archives: medicine
Translating genetic information into music to diagnose disease
Computers are very useful for analyzing large quantities of data, but presenting that data to humans in a useful form is an ongoing challenge. (A challenge that predates computers, actually: that’s why graphs were invented.)
Here’s an intriguing new way to examine data: turn it into music. Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, is developing a computer program that translates protein and gene expression into music: harmony represents good health, and discord indicates disease:
The first step in the gene-to-sound conversion was to pare down multiple measurements to a few fundamental signals, each of which could be represented by a different note. Together, the notes would form a harmonic chord in normal, healthy states and become increasingly out of tune as key physiological signs go awry, signaling disease.
He found, for example, that “when set to music, colon cancer sounds kind of eerie.” You can listen to some samples online. (Via KurzweilAI.net)
Alterovitz hopes the system could be tuned to identify other diseases, and might have applications outside medicine: it could be used to simplify information for air-traffic controllers or in other situations where large data sets have to be analyzed.
Not only that, a DJ in the Boston area is apparently interested in playing Alterovitz’s “music” in local bars.
Perhaps he could call it “Forever in Blue Genes.”
(Ouch, a Neil Diamond reference. I’m showing my age, aren’t I?)
(Image by Gil Alterovitz.)
[tags]genetics,medicine,music,computers[/tags]
Testing Drugs on Troubled Veterans
Sounds like science fiction, or maybe soon-to-be-an-episode-of Law ‘n’ Order.
Somebody’s thinking went like this: Let’s test Chantix, a stop-smoking drug with possible side effects that include suicide and “neuropsychiatric behavior,” on Iraq war vets already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. What could possibly go wrong? Former US Army sniper James Elliott “snapped” months after he began taking the drug for $30 a month, left home with a loaded gun, and was stopped by police responding to a 911 call before he could do any harm.
It wasn’t until three weeks later that the Veterans Administration advised the veterans in the Chantix study that the drug may cause serious side effects, including “anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide.”
[Image: Mike Licht]
Bionic vision based on cat’s brain
One of the hardest things about this eye-on-the-future blogging gig is finding a story like this, where the headline – “Cat brain could provide bionic eye firmware” – says everything you can say about it without going into the technical detail. [image by fazen]
So I guess I’ll just use a pull-quote:
“To try and develop a more sophisticated model [of the way brains respond to visual input], the team recorded the responses of 49 individual neurons in a part of a cat’s brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). The LGN receives and processes visual information from the retina, via the optic nerve, before sending it on to the cerebral cortex.
Using a mixture of simple stimuli, like dots and bars, and building up to more complex moving artificial scenes, the team tried to work out the basics of the LGN’s response to visual features.”
The end-goal here is to provide prosthetic vision for persons whose ocular nerve has degenerated from lack of use, but I’m thinking that model will have a lot of other applications as well.
Keep Bluetooth close to your heart
Research is being carried out in my home town to see whether Bluetooth wireless technology is actually good for something more practical than spamming strangers at the pub with crude LOLcat pictures. [image by kalshassan]
In fact, the UK communications watchdog organisation Ofcom predicts Bluetooth and similar wireless technologies could save lives. For example, heart attack patients could be fitted with in-body sensors which would remind them when to take their medications (if it noticed they hadn’t already), or put in a call to a doctor or the ambulance service if it detected the patient had collapsed.
Hardly an unfamiliar idea to science fiction habitués – but it’s interesting to note how real-world experience with these sorts of technologies has shown us the potential flaws that the fiction missed. I mean, if I was relying on wireless technology to keep me alive, I’d want a much more reliable uptime rate from my ISP’s DNS servers.
[Hat tip to Ed Ashby]