Artificial Intelligence May Offer Cancer Cure 

Boston-based Berg has spent the last six years perfecting an artificial intelligence platform that may soon crack the cancer code.

“Berg’s model is based on precision medicine which is getting the right treatment to the right patient at the right time,” Narain said. “In order to truly understand the disease and how to treat it, Berg analyzes the full biological make-up of the cell. This includes the genome, proteome, lipidome, metabolome. We also look at mitochondrial function, oxidative states, and ATP production, to look at how the cell is behaving.”

Analysis of cancer cells typically takes years – but the beauty of artificial intelligence is that it works faster than any human possibly could. 

Could we be just two or three years away from curing some forms of cancer? Niven Narain, the president of Berg, a small Boston-based biotech firm, says that may very well be the case.

The company takes samples of blood, urine and tissue from cancer patients and compares those samples with those from healthy patients. Over 14 trillion data points are created from this process. All of that data is then fed into artificial intelligence systems.

With funding from billionaire real-estate tycoon Carl Berg as well as from Mitch Gray, Narain, a clinical scientist by training, and his small army of scientists, technicians, and programmers, have spent the last six years perfecting and testing an artificial intelligence platform that he believes could soon crack the cancer code, in addition to discovering valuable information about a variety of other terrible diseases, including Parkinson’s.

All that analysis is so complex and broad that it would take humans a lifetime to complete it. With the help of AI, all that data is crunched in the span of days or weeks, buying precious time in the drug creation process. The result is a targeted treatment, tailored to the individual, based on their own body’s makeup.  

Founder Of Synthetic Marijuana

John W. Huffman, now an 83-year-old recluse who lives deep in the Smoky Mountains, discovered the drug compounds that spawned the creation of mass-produced synthetic drugs.
 
The Harvard-educated, Clemson University scientist, who said that he didn’t think anyone would ever recreationally use the compounds. He tinkered with them to study how the human brain works, he said.

Claiming it gives users super-human strength and immunity to pain.

It wasn’t until a German blogger sent Huffman an article in 2008 describing an artificial drug called “Spice” — which uses the active compound JWH-018 — that he realized people were using the stuff recreationally, he said.

 
“I thought it was sort of hilarious at the time.”

Huffman, who earned his doctorate at Harvard University and then worked at Clemson, first started worked to work with synthetic pot in the late 1980s after scientists discovered that marijuana’s active component, THC, stimulates a specific brain receptor, termed cannabinoid receptor. The discovery demystified how pot interacted with the brain.

Chemists then set out to see how man-made compounds would interact with the receptor.
Huffman was fascinated, he said. The receptor was a “puzzle” and he wanted to figure out how it worked.

Backed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he made hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids named for their relationship with the receptor, not because they mimic the high of marijuana.

Last Antibiotic Begins to Fail 

A new gene that makes bacteria highly resistant to a last-resort class of antibiotics has been found in people and pigs in China - including in samples of bacteria with epidemic potential, researchers said on Wednesday.

Researchers from several Chinese, British and US universities announced in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases that they have identified a new form of resistance, to the very last-ditch drug colistin—and that it is present in both meat animals and people, probably comes from agricultural use of that drug, can move easily among bacteria, and may already be spreading across borders.

"All use of polymyxins must be minimized as soon as possible and all unnecessary use stopped," said Laura Piddock, a professor of microbiology at Britain's Birmingham University who was asked to comment on the finding.

To understand why, it’s necessary to know a little bit about colistin. It is an old drug: It was first introduced in 1959. It has been on the shelf, without seeing much use, for most of the years since, because it can be toxic to the kidneys. And precisely because it hasn’t been used much, bacteria have not developed much resistance to it. It remains effective.

(From around that time: Here’s a great story that Jason Gale of Bloomberg wrote about colistin, and one I wrote for Nature about CREs. A long series of posts I wrote for WIRED about the discovery of NDM and the bitter political fights over its apparent origin in India can be found  here. Of note, one of the discoverers of NDM is one of the authors of this new research.)

This suggests "an alarming potential" for it to spread and diversify between bacterial populations, they said.

Which, apparently, is how it is being used in China—but not only in China. From the paper:

China is… one of the world’s highest users of colistin in agriculture. Driven largely by China, the global demand for colistin in agriculture is expected to reach 11,942 tonnes per annum by the end of 2015 (with associated revenues of $229·5 million), rising to 16,500 tonnes by the year 2021, at an average annual growth rate of 4·75%. Of the top ten largest producers of colistin for veterinary use, one is Indian, one is Danish, and eight are Chinese. Asia (including China) makes up 73·1% of colistin production with 28·7% for export including to Europe.

This suggests "the progression from extensive drug resistance to pandrug resistance is inevitable," they said.

"(And) although currently confined to China, mcr-1 is likely to emulate other resistance genes ... and spread worldwide."

Here’s what they found. The gene they discovered, which directs colistin resistance and which they dubbed MCR-1, was present:

• in  78 (15 percent) of 523 samples of raw pork and chicken meat
• in 166 (21 percent) of 804 pigs in slaughterhouses
• and in 16 (1 percent) of 1,322 samples from hospital patients with infections. 

Piddock and others said global surveillance for mcr-1 resistance is now essential to try to prevent the spread of polymyxin-resistant bacteria.

China is one of the world's largest users and producers of colistin for agriculture and veterinary use.

And, of most concern: The MCR-1 gene that creates this resistance is contained on a plasmid, a small piece of DNA that is not part of a bacteria’s chromosome. Plasmids move freely around the bacterial world, hopping from one bacterium to another; in the past, they have transported resistance DNA between bacterial species, facilitating resistance’s rapid movement around the globe. This gene, the authors predict, will be able to do that as well.

In Europe, 80 percent of polymixin sales - mainly colistin - are in Spain, Germany and Italy, according to the European Medicines Agency's Surveillance of Veterinary Antimicrobial Consumption (ESVAC) report.

“Pan-drug resistance,” to be clear, means that nothing at all will work—that infections are untreatable by any known compound.

They found a high prevalence of the mcr-1 gene in E coli samples from animals and raw meat. Worryingly, the proportion of positive samples increased from year to year, they said, and mcr-1 was also found in 16 E.coli and K.pneumoniae samples from 1,322 hospitalized patients.

MCR, this new colistin resistance, different from VRSA is the role that agriculture seems to be playing in its evolution and dispersal. There are two problems here. First, that thousands to millions of animals are getting the drug, which exponentially expands the opportunities that favor resistance. And second, that projects such as the Chinese one that allowed the new gene to be discovered are rare—so colistin resistance could begin moving, from animals and into people, without being noticed. 

"One of the few solutions to uncoupling these connections is limitation or cessation of colistin use in agriculture," they said. "Failure to do so will create a public health problem of major dimensions."

Major Red Blood Cell Discovery

 Major Red Blood Cell Discovery

University of Virginia research team could have big implications for treating numerous serious illnesses.

People with anemia – the most common blood disorder – lack sufficient red blood cells, which transport oxygen. People with anemia often experience fatigue and lack energy because their cells aren’t getting enough oxygen. There are many causes, including iron deficiency, vitamin deficiencies and diseases such as kidney disease and cancer. Anemia is particularly prevalent in older adults. - See more at: https://news.virginia.edu/content/baffling-lab-mystery-leads-major-red-blood-cell-discovery#sthash.SmqJvTZz.dpuf

 People with anemia – the most common blood disorder – lack sufficient red blood cells, which transport oxygen. People with anemia often experience fatigue and lack energy because their cells aren’t getting enough oxygen. There are many causes, including iron deficiency, vitamin deficiencies and diseases such as kidney disease and cancer. Anemia is particularly prevalent in older adults.

The researchers were injecting flu virus and an antibody into mice when the cells they were studying prompted the mice's bodies to create more red blood cells. Braciale says they repeated the test multiple times and got the same results.

After injecting mice with the flu virus and an antibody that blocked a certain molecule expressed by dendritic cells, the researchers discovered that the experiment had an unexpected effect: The mice’s spleens enlarged massively, which indicated they were producing red blood cells. The researchers were baffled, so they repeated the experiment, only to get the same results.
 
"When we do research, we sometimes have a direction but if we're cognizant, if we understand what the importance of the work is, sometimes we can make a finding in a totally unrelated area that's important," he said.

Stress erythropoiesis refers to the body producing red blood cells because of injury or some other stress. In discovering an unexpected molecular trigger for the process, Braciale had found a switch he could flip to prompt red blood cell production.

The research has shifted to focus on this new discovery, which needs to be explored further in human subjects.

Quantum Mechanics Of PI

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in a surprise discovery, have found the same formula in quantum mechanical calculations of the energy levels of a hydrogen atom.

“We didn’t just find pi,” said Tamar Friedmann, a visiting assistant professor of mathematics and a research associate of high energy physics, and co-author of a paper published this week in the Journal of Mathematical Physics. “We found the classic seventeenth century Wallis formula for pi, making us the first to derive it from physics, in general, and quantum mechanics, in particular.”

"It was a complete surprise - I jumped up and down when we got the Wallis formula out of equations for the hydrogen atom," said Friedmann. "The special thing is that it brings out a beautiful connection between physics and math. I find it fascinating that a purely mathematical formula from the 17th century characterizes a physical system that was discovered 300 years later."
 
“The value of pi has taken on a mythical status, in part, because it’s impossible to write it down with 100 percent accuracy,” said Friedmann, “It cannot even be accurately expressed as a ratio of integers, and is, instead, best represented as a formula.”

In quantum mechanics, a technique called the variational approach can be used to approximate the energy states of quantum systems, like molecules, that can't be solved exactly. Hagen was teaching the technique to his students when he decided to apply it to a real-world object: the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is actually one of the rare quantum mechanical systems whose energy levels can be solved exactly, but by applying the variational approach and then comparing the result to the exact solution, students could calculate the error in the approximation.
 
Although applying the variational principle to calculate the ground state of a hydrogen atom is a relatively straightforward problem, its applicability to an excited state is far from obvious. This is because the variational principle cannot ordinarily be applied if there are lower energy levels. However, Friedmann and Hagen were able to get around that by separating the problem into a series of l problems, each of which focused on the lowest energy level for  a given orbital angular momentum quantum number, l.

When Hagen started solving the problem himself, he immediately noticed a trend. The error of the variational approach was about 15 percent for the ground state of hydrogen, 10 percent for the first excited state, and kept getting smaller as the excited states grew larger. This was unusual, since the variational approach normally only gives good approximations for the lowest energy levels.
 
Specifically, the calculation of Friedmann and Hagen resulted in an expression involving special mathematical functions called gamma functions leading to the formula.

 "At the lower energy orbits, the path of the electron is fuzzy and spread out," Hagen explained. "At more excited states, the orbits become more sharply defined and the uncertainty in the radius decreases."

which can be reduced to the classic Wallis formula.

“What surprised me is that the formula occurred in such a natural way in the calculations, with no circles involved in determining the energy states,” said Hagen, the co-author of the paper. “And I am glad I didn’t think about this before Tamar arrived in Rochester, because it would have gone nowhere and we would not have made this discovery.”

The theory of quantum mechanics dates back to the early 20th century and the Wallis formula has been around for hundreds of years, but the connection between the two had remained hidden until now.

The theory of quantum mechanics dates back to the early 20th century and the Wallis formula has been around for hundreds of years, but the connection between the two had remained hidden until now.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-derivation-pi-links-quantum-physics.html#jC

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in a surprise discovery, have found the same formula in quantum mechanical calculations of the energy levels of a hydrogen atom.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-derivation-pi-links-quantum-physics.html#jCp

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in a surprise discovery, have found the same formula in quantum mechanical calculations of the energy levels of a hydrogen atom.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-derivation-pi-links-quantum-physics.html#jCp

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in a surprise discovery, have found the same formula in quantum mechanical calculations of the energy levels of a hydrogen atom.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-derivation-pi-links-quantum-physics.html#jCp

World's First Sexiest Robot

We all love robots - but could we one day actually fall in love with one? 

Named Geminoid F, the robot has amassed a legion of fans, with some even describing her as 'the world's sexiest robot'.

Created by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory at Osaka University, Geminoid F was the star attraction as people crowded round her to have their picture taken and speak to the android.

The 5ft 6 inch android is capable of eye movements, response to eye-to-eye contact and can recognise body language.

She previously found fame after becoming the first android film star - she co-starred in Japanese movie Sayonara, about the fall-out from a nuclear power plant meltdown.

She is designed act like a human with rubber 'skin' and a woman's face - but can't walk and has to be wheeled around.

The robot was created by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory at Osaka University who plan on creating a better model in the future.

With her realistic appearance, good looks and acting talent, you might think Geminoid F had it all - but some people, in particular her creators, are picky.

'Our final goal is creating some artificial intelligence by using this robot,' Kohei Ogawa, assistant professor said.

'In the future we're going to create some perfect AI system by using this robot.'

Super Plane Fly's Anywhere In Four Hours 

It almost sounds like a dream: a new kind of hypersonic space-kissing jet that can take you anywhere in the world in just four hours. But the Skylon super plane being developed by UK aerospace firm Reaction Engines is very real.

The UK government has invested £60 million into a next-generation engine that -- its makers claim -- will make low-cost space travel possible for commercial customers.

Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines got the grant to help it develop its Skylon super-plane, which could eventually make make low-cost space travel possible for commercial customers.

The project took a big step forward this week with Reaction Engines announcing a new partnership with defence and aerospace giant BAE Systems, whose financial backing, along with a considerable investment from the UK government, will help Reaction develop its new class of aerospace engine dubbed SABRE (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine) by as early as 2020, with test flights possible just five years later.

'Sabre' engine is a hybrid rocket and jet propulsion system, which theoretically enables travel anywhere on Earth in four hours or less. It could also slash the cost of launching satellites into orbit, once it gets off the ground.

The super-plane will rely on cooling an incoming airstream from 1,000 degrees C to minus 150 C almost instantly, at close to 1/100th of a second.

It will double the technical limits of a jet engine, and allow the craft to reach, up to five times the speed of sound, before switching to a rocket engine to reach orbit.

SABRE operates in two modes to enable aircraft to directly access space in one step, called single stage to orbit. In its air-breathing mode, the engine sucks in oxygen from atmospheric air, to burn with liquid hydrogen fuel in the rocket combustion chamber. Once outside Earth’s atmosphere, the engine transitions to a conventional rocket mode, switching to on-board liquid oxygen.

Based at Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire, the company has been called a "potential game-changer" by ministers since at least 2012, following a positive appraisal by the UK Space Agency in 2010.