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Monday March 18, 2013 Daily edition   News and Blog Headlines Engineered artificial human livers for drug testing and discovery Boyden to share prestigious brain prize Hey, at least you can be virtually immortal A cancer gene therapy activated by a pill Paramount acquires science-fiction novel ‘Nexus’ Latest News Engineered artificial human livers for drug testing and discovery March 18, 2013   Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) researchers have engineered an artificial human liver that mimics the natural tissue environment closely. The development makes it possible for companies to predict the toxicity of new drugs earlier, potentially speeding up the drug development process and reducing the cost of manufacturing. The liver is an important target organ … more… Boyden to share prestigious brain prize March 18, 2013   Ed Boyden, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, was named a recipient of the 2013 Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize. The 1 million Euro prize is awarded for the development of optogenetics, a technology that makes it possible to control brain activity using light. The Brain … more… Hey, at least you can be virtually immortal March 18, 2013   Where their grandparents may have left behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island, retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives, The New York Times reports. Two major forces are driving virtual immortality. The first and most obvious: inexpensive video cameras and editing programs, … more… A cancer gene therapy activated by a pill March 18, 2013   A unique new cancer treatment uses gene therapy to induce a cancer-fighting immune response whose intensity can then be controlled with a pill. The combination could help tailor treatment to a patient’s individual response, MIT Technology Review reports. The treatment uses the body’s own cells or tumor cells to produce extra copies of a naturally … more… Paramount acquires science-fiction novel ‘Nexus’ March 18, 2013   Paramount Pictures has acquired screen rights to Nexus, the science fiction novel by Ramez Naam, to be produced by Mary Parent of Disruption for Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa. The author, former CEO of Apex Nanotechnology, is the author of the nonfiction book More Than Human: Embracing The Promise Of Biological Enhancement. Here’s the plot from Amazon: … more… New EVENTS   MSV 2013 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Methods Dates: Jul 22 – 25, 2013 Location: Las Vegas, Nevada more... New VIDEOS   Interactive volume segmentation and visualization in augmented reality New books Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now author Douglas Rushkoff   This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed re­ality that our human bodies and minds can never truly in­habit. And our failure to do so … more… Visit KurzweilAI.net You are currently subscribed to the KurzweilAI.net newsletter as *|EMAIL|* To unsubscribe, please click here. To change your email preferences, please click here. *|LIST:ADDRESS|*.