[TECH NEWS] Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies in the Western world, and is often diagnosed only after metastatic tumors have formed in other organs. In three percent of cases, these metastases are lethal. A research team led by PD Dr. Beatrice Bachmeier at LMU Munich has been studying the mode of action of a natural product… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Although tumor metastasis causes about 90 percent of cancer deaths, the exact mechanism that allows cancer cells to spread from one part of the body to another is not well understood. One key question is how tumor cells detach from the structural elements that normally hold tissues in place, then reattach themselves in a new site. A new… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] This summer Google set a new landmark in the field of artificial intelligence with software that learned how to recognize cats, people, and other things simply by watching YouTube videos (see “Self-Taught Software“). That technology, modeled on how brain cells operate, is now being put to work making Google’s products smarter, with speech recognition being the first service to benefit, Technology… Read more »
On March 22, 2012, Alcor co-founder Fred Chamberlain III was cryopreserved. The July-August issue of Cryonics magazine features the cryopreservation case report, an older Cryonics article by Fred about making cryonics arrangements, and a poem from the vintage 1971 cryonics publication The Hourglass. Alcor member, economist, and writer of Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, July-August 2012 By Chana de Wolf There are few people in the world who blaze a trail through life like Todd Huffman does. Whether he is assisting in a cryonics case, developing new microscope technologies, or helping to stabilize technology infrastructure in conflicted environments, there is nothing run-of-the-mill about anything he is involved with. And since he… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, July-August 2012 By James D. Miller, Ph.D. I came to Alcor through contemplating the Singularity. Previously, I had heard of cryonics but didn’t have enough trust in human innovation to believe that a frozen body could ever be revived. What I didn’t take into account was the likelihood that artificial intelligence (AI) would soon supercharge scientific progress…. Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS, Progeria), is a rare, fatal, “rapid-aging” childhood disease that is linked to the normal aging process. Results of the first-ever clinical drug trial for children with the disease demonstrate the efficacy of a treatment using a farnesyltransferase inhibitor (FTI), a drug originally developed to treat cancer. The clinical trial results, completed only six years… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] One of the greatest challenges in neuroscience is to identify the map of synaptic connections between neurons. Called the “connectome,” it is the holy grail that will explain how information flows in the brain. In a landmark paper, published the week of 17th of September in PNAS, the EPFL’s Blue Brain Project (BBP) has identified key principles that determine… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned. Leo Gross was lead author of the study, which appeared in Science. The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Ben W. Strowbridge and Robert A. Hyde of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have discovered how to store diverse forms of artificial short-term memories in isolated brain tissue. “This is the first time anyone has found a way to store information over seconds about both temporal sequences and stimulus patterns directly in brain tissue,” says Dr…. Read more »
