Category: Tech News

• A Peek Inside a Dead Football Player’s Brain

  The brains that come through Ann McKee’s lab don’t lie. But they are only the beginning of the story about head trauma and its role in neurodegenerative disease.

  The brain on the table once belonged to a pro football player. It’s also much bigger than average, so it may have been the brain of a very big man—perhaps he played lineman. Those are the only things I know about it before Ann McKee starts cutting it into pieces.

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• Big Auto Searches for Meaning Beyond Selling Cars

  Car companies from Ford to BMW take a page from Silicon Valley’s playbook to offer transportation services, in some cases without a real business model in mind.

  The Ford Motor Company unveiled its new Fusion sedan and powerful F-150 Raptor pickup truck last week at the 2016 Detroit auto show. But shiny new sheet metal and roaring engines were upstaged by the company’s unveiling of a suite of so-called “mobility services.” Those offerings include the shared use and ownership of cars, parking reservations, multimodal routing, small retail stores, and an iTunes-like app to provide access to these services.

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• Using Patient Fingerprints to Break Down Medical Record Silos

  A startup uses encryption and fingerprint authentication to compare medical records across providers—and aims to make them easier to move, too.

  For the over 40 million people served by the more than 300 health systems working with startup CrossChx, checking in for a doctor’s appointment is much like unlocking an iPhone. All you need is your right index finger. Touch it onto a fingerprint reader at the check-in desk, and your identity is verified. Your driver’s license can stay in your wallet.

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• Can Augmented Reality Make Remote Communication Feel More Intimate?

  A Microsoft Research study uses augmented reality to project a life-size person into a room with you, perching them in an empty seat.

  Nothing beats talking to another person face-to-face, but a group of researchers are considering whether a life-size projection of a person that appears to be sitting across from you in an actual chair might be a close second.

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• Companies Aim to Make Drugs from Bacteria That Live in the Gut

  Relatively new discoveries about of the role of the microbiome in human health have sparked a race to develop new therapies based on microbes.

  Scientific discoveries in recent years suggest that some serious conditions could be cured by adding “good” bacteria to your digestive tract. Now several companies are racing to develop drugs that do so.

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• Hope in a Glove for Parkinson’s Patients

  A wearable device promises to help steady hand tremors by using an old technology—gyroscopes.

  When he was a 24-year-old medical student living in London, Faii Ong was assigned to care for a 103-year-old patient who suffered from Parkinson’s, the progressive neurological condition that affects a person’s ease of movement. After watching her struggle to eat a bowl of soup, Ong asked another nurse what more could be done to help the woman. “There’s nothing,” he was grimly told.

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• Big Pharma Doubles Down on CRISPR for New Drugs

  A joint venture between Bayer and CRISPR Therapeutics is the latest effort to make CRISPR drugs that could target and modify cells inside the body.

  Can the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR help cure diseases? Drug companies are racing to find out.

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• Parents Turn to Prozac to Treat Down Syndrome

  The disorder known as Trisomy 21 is untreatable. Or is it? Some families think an antidepressant could help.

  When Southwest Airlines pilot Paul Watson lands in a new city, he often strikes out to visit the labs of local scientists studying Down syndrome. He likes to stay current because his 14-year-old son, Nathan, has the condition.

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• Illumina’s Bid to Beat Cancer with DNA Tests

  The DNA sequencing giant will launch a new company, Grail, to develop blood tests to detect cancer.

  The world’s largest DNA sequencing company says it will form a new company to develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise.

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• The Dubious Promise of Bioenergy Plus Carbon Capture

  Climate change agreements rest on negative emissions technologies that may be unachievable.

  While many scientists and climate change activists hailed December’s Paris agreement as a historic step forward for international efforts to limit global warming, the landmark accord rests on a highly dubious assumption: to achieve the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to less than 2 °C (much less the more ambitious goal of 1.5 °C), we don’t just need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to essentially zero by the end of this century. We also must remove from the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon dioxide that have already been emitted (see “Paris Climate Agreement Rests on Shaky Technological Foundations”).

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