BioDecoded

“A New Theory Linking Sleep and Creativity” | The Atlantic

It is commonly accepted that sleep promotes creative problem-solving. A new theory suggests that rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep), and non-REM sleep facilitate creativity in different ways. Memory replay mechanisms in non-REM can abstract rules from corpuses of learned information, while replay in REM may promote novel associations. The iterative interleaving of REM and non-REM across a night boosts the formation of complex knowledge frameworks, and allows these frameworks to be restructured, thus facilitating creative thought.

Original article | Research paper

 

“The shape-shifting robot that evolves by falling down” | Wired

Dyret the robot learns to walk on a certain surface, say carpet or ice, through trial and error. It adapts to its environment, not with lots of explicitly coded instructions like in traditional robots, but with special algorithms and limbs that automatically shorten and lengthen to adjust the robot’s center of gravity. It’s called evolutionary robotics, and it’s a potentially powerful way to get machines to master novel terrain on their own, no hand-holding required.

Original article

 

“A-to-I RNA Editing Contributes to Proteomic Diversity in Cancer” | Cancer Cell

Understanding the molecular mechanisms contributing to protein variation and diversity is a fundamental question in biology and has significant clinical implications in cancer treatment. Through an integrated analysis of TCGA genomic data and CPTAC proteomic data, a study provides large-scale direct evidence that A-to-I (Adenosine to inosine) RNA editing is a source of proteomic diversity in cancer cells. Thus, RNA editing represents an exciting paradigm for understanding the molecular basis of human cancer and developing the strategies for precision cancer medicine.

Research paper

 

“Synthetic yeast genome reveals its versatility” | Nature News

A redesigned yeast genome is being constructed to allow it to be extensively rearranged on demand. A suite of studies reveals the versatility of the genome-shuffling system, and shows how it could be used for biotechnology applications.

Original article

 

“How gut microbes are joining the fight against cancer” | Nature

Over the past few decades, scientists have linked the gut’s composition of microbes to dozens of seemingly unrelated conditions — from depression to obesity. Cancer has some provocative connections as well: inflammation is a contributing factor to some tumours and a few types of cancer have infectious origins. But with the explosive growth of a new class of drug — cancer immunotherapies — scientists have been taking a closer look at how the gut microbiome might interact with treatment and how these interactions might be harnessed.

Original article

 

“This company hopes its cryptocurrency can help the internet of things reach its true potential” | MIT Technology Review

Helium’s first product is a hardware system that uses a homegrown wireless standard to provide long-range, low-power wireless coverage for devices like sensors that track and monitor medicine or food supply chains. Miners connect to the network using devices called gateways, which are something like wi-fi routers, only they use less power and provide better range. They get paid to take data from connected devices and transport it to its destination through the internet. For example, if a vial of medicine were to enter your coverage zone, it would send its location and temperature data to your gateway, which would then send it to its proper destination in return for a previously agreed upon cryptocurrency fee. These steps would then be cryptographically verified and recorded in the distributed ledger.

Original article

 

“Routine DNA Screening Moves Into Primary Care” | NPR

Starting in the next month or so, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania will offer DNA sequencing to 1,000 patients, with the goal of eventually extending the offer to all 3 million Geisinger patients. The health system’s test will look for mutations in at least 77 genes. Many have been associated with medical conditions — dozens of them, ranging from heart disease to cancer. Others have been linked to variability in how people respond to certain medicines based on heredity. The new clinical program will be based on “whole exome” sequencing, analyzing the roughly 1 percent of the genome that provides instructions for making proteins, where most known disease-causing mutations occur.

Original article

 

“Annual Report to the Nation: overall cancer mortality continues to decline, prostate cancer mortality has stabilized” | National Cancer Institute

The latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer finds that overall cancer death rates continue to decline in men, women, and children in the United States in all major racial and ethnic groups. Overall cancer incidence, or rates of new cancers, decreased in men and were stable in women from 1999 to 2014. In a companion study, researchers reported that there has been an increase in incidence of late-stage prostate cancer and that after decades of decline, prostate cancer mortality has stabilized.

Original article

 

“Code to Joy” | 1843 Magazine

Is learning to code in middle age a fool’s errand or a committed act of digital citizenship? Journalist Andrew Smith shares his journey of learning to code. “More powerful than any of this is a feeling of enfranchisement that comes through beginning to comprehend the fascinating but profoundly alien principles by which software works.” Wittgenstein wrote that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’

Original article

 

“What Happens When You Put 500,000 People’s DNA Online” | The Atlantic

UK Biobank aims to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses — including cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, eye disorders, depression and forms of dementia. UK Biobank recruited 500,000 volunteers aged between 40-69 years, who have undergone measures, provided blood, urine and saliva samples for future analysis, detailed information about themselves and agreed to have their health followed. Genotyping has been undertaken on all 500,000 participants and these data are being used in health research. UK Biobank is open to bona fide researchers anywhere in the world, including those funded by academia and industry.

Original article

 

“Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer” | arXiv

Text attribute transfer refers to transforming a sentence to alter a specific attribute (e.g., sentiment) while preserving its attribute-independent content (e.g., changing “screen is just the right size” to “screen is too small”). The training data in this study includes only sentences labeled with their attribute (e.g., positive or negative), but not pairs of sentences that differ only in their attributes. The method extracts content words by deleting phrases associated with the sentence’s original attribute value, retrieves new phrases associated with the target attribute, and uses a neural model to fluently combine these into a final output.

Research paper

 

“Microsoft acquires Semantic Machines, advancing the state of conversational AI” | Microsoft Blog

Microsoft acquires Semantic Machines Inc., a Berkeley, California-based company that has developed a revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI. Their work uses the power of machine learning to enable users to discover, access and interact with information and services in a much more natural way, and with significantly less effort. The company is led by many pioneers in conversational AI, including technology entrepreneur Dan Roth and two of the most prominent and innovative natural language AI researchers in the world, UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and Stanford University professor Percy Liang, as well as former Apple chief speech scientist Larry Gillick.

Original blogpost

“Apple and Its Rivals Bet Their Futures on These Men’s Dreams” | Bloomberg

An oral history of artificial intelligence, as told by Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, Dr. Yann LeCun, Dr. Yoshua Bengio, Dr. Richard Sutton, Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, Cade Metz (a technology correspondent with The New York Times) and Justin Trudeau (Canadian prime minister).

Original article

 

“Genome-wide association study in 176,678 Europeans reveals genetic loci for tanning response to sun exposure” | Nature Communications

The skin’s tendency to sunburn rather than tan is a major risk factor for skin cancer. In a large genome-wide association study of ease of skin tanning in 176,678 subjects of European ancestry, researchers identify significant association with tanning ability at 20 loci. The results also suggest that variants at the AHR/AGR3 locus, previously associated with cutaneous malignant melanoma, might act on disease risk through modulation of tanning ability.

Research paper

 

“How accurately can a person’s appearance be reconstructed from a sample of their DNA?” | Quora

There are a variety of things you can predict fairly accurately from DNA: sex, ancestry, freckles, and (natural) skin, hair, and eye color. Any attempt to extrapolate beyond basic physical attributes requires making a lot of assumptions. Gaps in knowledge are filled in with averages, taken from people who volunteered to have their faces and DNA recorded in a database.

Quora | Research commentary | github

 

“Could a Dose of Sunshine Make You Smarter?” | The Scientist

Sunlight exposure is known to affect mood, learning, and cognition. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms remain elusive. Researchers have discovered that, in mice, moderate exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light activates a molecular pathway that increases production of the neurotransmitter glutamate, heightening the animals’ ability to learn and remember.

News article | Research paper

 

“Learning Beyond Human Expertise with Generative Models for Dental Restorations” | arXiv

In the dental industry, it takes a technician years of training to design synthetic crowns that restore the function and integrity of missing teeth. Each crown must be customized to individual patients, and it requires human expertise in a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, even with computer-assisted design software. Built upon a Generative Adversarial Network architecture (GAN), a deep learning model predicts the customized crown-filled depth scan from the crown-missing depth scan and opposing depth scan. The automatic designs exceed human technicians’ standards for good morphology and functionality.

Research paper

 

“A longtime Google investor draws this simple chart on a napkin to explain health tech to company founders” | CNBC

Four quadrants of health tech companies: (1) Low medical/low social needs: virtual doctor apps, concierge primary care, wellness tests (23andMe, Forward, One Medical). (2) High medical/low social needs: cancer tests, expensive therapies and medical devices (ZappRx, Turing Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Pfizer, Medtronic). (3) High social/ low medical needs: services to treat depression in homeless vets, home monitoring tools for seniors that are starting to “age in place,” transportation services to help people get to appointments (PatientPing, Circulation Health, Pear Therapeutics). (4) High social/high medical needs: programs for Medicaid patients to treat diabetes, services to help people without insurance access the medications they need (Cityblock Health, GoodRx, Aledade, CareMore, Iora Health).

Original article

 

“New Drug Offers Hope to Millions With Severe Migraines” | The New York Times

The first medicine designed to prevent migraines was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday. The drug, Aimovig, made by Amgen and Novartis, is a monthly injection with a device similar to an insulin pen. The list price will be $6,900 a year, and Amgen said the drug will be available to patients within a week. Aimovig blocks a protein fragment, CGRP, that instigates and perpetuates migraines.

Original article

 

“How tech can turn doctors into clerical workers” | The New York Times Magazine

For every one hour doctors spend cumulatively with patients, studies have shown, they spend nearly two hours on primitive Electronic Health Records, or “E.H.R.s,” and another hour or two during sacred personal time. The leading E.H.R.s were never built with any understanding of the rituals of care or the user experience of physicians or nurses. A clinician will make roughly 4,000 keyboard clicks during a busy 10-hour emergency-room shift. It is hoped that artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms will transform doctors’ experience, particularly if natural-language processing and video technology allow them to capture what is actually said and done in the exam room. The physician focuses on the patient and family.

Original article

 

“To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect” | Quanta Magazine

In his latest book, “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect,” Dr. Judea Pearl argues that artificial intelligence has been handicapped by an incomplete understanding of what intelligence really is, and elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever.

Original article

“How the Enlightenment Ends” | The Atlantic

Taking a historical and philosophical perspective on the rise of artificial intelligence, Henry Kissinger raised three concerns: first, AI may achieve unintended results; second, in achieving intended goals, AI may change human thought processes and human values; Third, AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions.

Original article

 

“Tagging Essential Malaria Genes to Advance Drug Development” | Science

An NIH-funded research team for the first time completely characterized the genes in the P. falciparum (a malaria-causing parasite) genome. Their work identified 2,680 genes essential to P. falciparum’s growth and survival in red blood cells, where it does the most damage in humans. This gene list will serve as an important guide in the years ahead as researchers seek to identify the equivalent of a malarial Achilles heel, and use that to develop new and better ways to fight this deadly tropical disease.

Original blogpost | Research paper

 

“American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research” | mSystems

American Gut Project (AGP) is an open-source, crowdsourced science project to understand the microbial diversity of the Human Gut. As of May 2017, the AGP included microbial sequence data from 15,096 samples from 11,336 human participants, totaling over 467 million (48,599 unique) 16S rRNA V4 gene fragments. The project informs citizen-scientist participants about their own microbiomes by providing a standard report and deposits all deidentified data into the public domain on an ongoing basis without access restrictions.

Research paper | Project page

 

“Pancreatic cancer foiled by a switch of tumour subtype” | Nature News

In a study published in Cancer Cell, researchers showed that mutations in the gene KDM6A were inolved in an aggressive subtype of pancreatic cancer by causing repositioning of an enzyme complex that modifies histone proteins associated with DNA, leading to altered gene expression. The authors found that cells harbouring mutations in KDM6A or other genes of the COMPASS-like complex were highly sensitive to inhibitors of BET-family proteins. The authors also demonstrated the effectiveness of the BET inhibitor JQ1 in treating tumours of Kdm6a-deficient mice.

News article | Research paper

 

“Blood, sweat and tears in biotech — the Theranos story” | Nature

“Few scandals have so gripped both the health-care and technology industries as the seismic rise and fall of blood-testing company Theranos. In Bad Blood, acclaimed investigative journalist John Carreyrou, who broke the story in 2015, presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes.”

Book review

 

“Google Cloud for Life Sciences: new products and new partners” | Google Cloud Blog

At Bio-IT World, Google is showcasing new Google Cloud Platform products such as Variant Transforms, which helps organizations structure genomic variant data in BigQuery, as well as new partnerships that help teams achieve operational and scientific excellence through cloud computing.

Original blogpost