United Therapeutics Corporation has signed an agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to exclusively license breakthrough research that may lead to new ways to diagnose and treat cancer, KurzweilAI.net has learned.
A research program, funded by United Therapeutics and led by MIT Professor William Thilly and MIT Research Scientist Dr. Elena V. Gostjeva, will further explore “metakaryotic” cells that may play a role in the development of… read more
Researchers at Cytos Biotechnology have developed a “universal” allergy therapy that makes the immune system stop reacting to harmless allergens (substances that cause allergies).
In trials, the therapy–a series of shots–helped people allergic to house dust mites and cat dander.
An overactive immune system is thought to be the cause of most allergic reactions. The new therapy “distracts” the immune system by giving patients a molecular decoy (CYT003-QbG10)… read more
Researchers have found a way to efficiently convert different human blood types into a neutral type that can be given to any patient by cleaving identifying sugars from the surface of red blood cells.
The process is currently in human testing and could be available within five years.
Imagine being a potential suspect for every crime committed in your country. That would be the logic if DNA from all of a country’s citizens were stored in police DNA records, claims a report by the UK-based Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
The British-American biotech company Acambis reports the successful conclusion of Phase I trials of the universal flu vaccine in humans.
This vaccine is intended to provide protection against all “A” strains of the virus that causes human influenza, including pandemic strains. About two thirds of seasonal epidemics are due to these strains, as are almost all pandemic influenza strains.
This vaccine could eventually replace annual vaccinations against “A”… read more
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a single “unified” device that can perform both volatile and nonvolatile memory operation, with applications that could improve computer start times and energy efficiency for Internet servers.
“We’ve invented a new device that may revolutionize computer memory,” says Dr. Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. “Our device… read more
A new Firefox plug-in identifies the language used on a web page and automatically provides a translation to the user’s preferred language, with Google Translate used if translations are not available.
Rather than being infinite in all directions, the universe could be radically smaller in one direction; it may be even be shaped like a doughnut. The idea is based on new data produced by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite.
The number of channels receivable by the average U.S. household declined last year, and appears to have stalled out at about 100.
If the decline is a genuine development, it seems to defy the TV industry’s claims of ultimately delivering a virtually unlimited channel universe via digital cable and satellite TV, and other new technologies such as video-on-demand.
A new calculation of the entropy of the universe by Australian physicists indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is 10^104, about 100 times higher than previously calculated, suggesting that the universe is slightly further along on its gradual journey to heat death.
The universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide.
The calculation is based on the calculations that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. So one might assume that the diameter of the universe is 27.4 billion light-years wide. But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, bringing the estimated diameter to 156 billion light-years.
A new study by Martin Bojowald, a theorist at the Pennsylvania State University, and colleagues suggests that with each big bang, the universe mostly forgets its past and starts anew.
The model showed that most, but not all, of the information about what came before the big bang gets irretrievably lost through the big bang transition. And in a perpetual cycle of big bangs and crunches, this information loss… read more
University of California, Berkeley scientist Ben Freivogel combined the cosmological models of large-scale structure formation with the physics of dark-matter axions to predict the most likely value for the ratio of dark matter to normal matter that would allow observers like us to emerge, assuming that the number of observers in a universe is proportional to the number of galaxies within it.
Supporting the antropic principle, his calculations show… read more
Academic supercomputing labs were targeted by unknown attackers over the last month, compromising servers at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Stanford University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and elsewhere.
While the attackers had access to many of the computers that act as nodes on distributed high-performance computing networks, the intruders were more interested in access to computing power than sabotage, laboratory staff maintain.