Give Him the Finger

Regeneration has been a dream of medicine for centuries. If a lizard can grow a new tail, why can’t a man grow a new arm? That dream may soon be reached if clinical trials prove successful.

Hobbyist Lee Spievak lost the tip of his finger to a spinning propeller blade. He lost about one half inch, severed down to the bone. The examining doctors told him he’d lost it for good.

Lee Spievak’s brother Alan works in the field of regenerative medicine. When he heard of Lee’s mishap he sent him a powder called Extra Cellular Matrix, a substance derived from the scrapings of a pig’s bladder. He was instructed to dip his finger in the powder regularly for the next ten days. Instead of forming scar tissue the finger began to regrow normal cells. In four weeks the finger had completely sealed and now Lee Spievak’s fingertip is completely regrown, with nail, nerves, blood vessels, even fingerprint. To look at the finger one would never know it had been severed at all. He does have one complaint, though. Mr. Spievak say the fingernail now grows so fast he has to trim it every two days.

From BBC News

—ADDENDUM—
There may be both more and less to this story than recent reports would suggest. According to a post on a Nature blog this same story was reported in February of last year by CBS and AP. A hand surgeon calls it “junk science”, a university says that an Extracellular Matrix can have profound effects on cell physiology, and the U.S. Army has been investigating. Lee Spievak (or Spievack) says he’s not going to give up any more body parts for research.

Skipping the Barcode Tattoo

The Human Genome Project was an effort to sequence the entire human genome. The human genome contains about 23,000 genes and 3 billion base pairs. The project was completed in 2003, took 13 years and cost over 3 billion dollars.

Today a human genome can be sequenced in about 6 weeks at a cost of $60,000. Researchers who predicted that the cost may be as low as $1000 in three years have been leapfrogged by two companies who claim to be able to do it in one day for $100. At this cost it will soon become part of the standard physical.

The Department of Homeland Security is set to begin collecting the DNA of any citizen who is arrested and any foreigner who is detained. As usual, the U.K. is way ahead on this. British police want to collect the DNA of potential criminals including children as young a 5 years old if they exhibit anti-social behavior.

Let’s Call It National Barbecue Month

Hoof and mouth disease, a virus deadly to livestock, has been researched since 1954 in a government lab on Plum Island, NY. Since that time there have been some accidental releases of the virus, but none escaped the island. That’s why the lab in ON an island.

In 2002 the government ran a simulation of a hoof and mouth outbreak. It resulted in tens of millions of cattle killed by National Guardsmen, riots and protests and a 25-mile burial trench for the carcasses. “It was a mess,” said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who played the president.

Now the government wants to move Plum Island’s lab to the mainland and Kansas is one of the proposed sites. What does Senator Roberts have to say about that, huh? “It will mean jobs,” he says. It will mean research and development, he says.

Yeah, and if all else fails it will mean jobs digging that 25-mile barbecue pit.

Your Next Surgeon May Be Robot.

Carnegie-Mellon University has developed a snake-like robot called the CardioArm. It is inserted into an incision in the chest and is then guided by joystick. The robot’s “head” has both a camera and end effectors capable of performing cardiac ablation, a procedure that delivers electrical pulses to the heart and can destroy problematic tissue.

In 2006 an Italian man in Milan had heart surgery performed by an autonomous robot. The surgery was initiated and monitored by a surgeon in Boston, but the robot performed the surgery without further intervention. Knee surgery[video] is often performed by a doctor sitting at a console and manipulating a 3D image.

Robots are not just getting smarter, they’re getting smaller. Brain researchers use tiny gene probes that seek out specific areas of the brain, allowing an fMRI to monitor activity. They enter the body as eyedrops. “Liu and his colleagues hitched a common MRI probe to a DNA sequence….” The military has developed a surgical robot small enough to carry into battlezones. The robot is controlled remotely by a surgeon in a safe location. Nanoparticles[video] can be guided to specific areas in the body where they release microdoses of drugs. Since the drugs are delivered directly to the problem area the doses can be as much as one thousand times lower.

[Obligatory grovel]
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Speaking Without Voice

I recall hearing about this tech a few years ago. When one “pronounces” words in their head the vocal chords are activated to a minute degree. The idea is to capture the neurological signals on their way to the vocal cords and send them to a speech processor. At the time they were only able to distinguish “yes” from “no”.  A company called Ambient now has a device call Audeo. The sensor is built into a thin, easily donned neckband, making the person look like they are wearing a turtleneck collar. Audeo can currently recognize about 150 words.

Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation likens their progress to the early days of speech recognition. Given the acceleration of technological development we can expect a cheap commercial version of Audeo in about 5 years. Ten years ago commercial speech recognition software was expensive ($400-$1500), needed a powerful computer and required each-word-be-spoken-discreetly. Today, the average home computer can run continuous speech recognition software for $99. In fact, if you try to use discrete speech today, you’ll just confuse the program.

This new tech get surprisingly close to telepathy, although it should be noted that it cannot read thoughts (you need an fMRI for that). It takes a fair amount of concentration and can only read words that are intended to be spoken. Still, once these words are digitized they become just another packet of data, able to be transmitted or manipulated like any other. Imagine a crowded room where everyone has a cellphone and bluetooth headset. Twenty conversations could be occurring at the same time but an observer would see a room of silent, blankly staring people.

Let’s hope they can do some work on vocal nuance or in ten years we’re all going to sound like Stephen Hawking.

Don’t swat it, Burt. It might be one of them gu’mint flies

Researchers at Cornell University have successfully implanted probes into tobacco hornworms that grow into adult moths. Their muscles can then be remotely controlled. Many researchers attach radio transponders to insects to track their flight. There have been several unconfirmed reports of dragonfly-sized craft buzzing around demonstrations in Washington. D.C. Cockroaches have even been employed to pilot robots. Much of this research is funded by DARPA which is part of the U.S. Department of Defense. Next time you pull out the can of Raid, be careful. That bug might be a soldier in the War on Terror.