Via BBC:

A molecule designed to find, latch onto, then treat hardened arteries could offer a new way to tackle heart disease, say its inventors.

Nanoburrs, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), target only damaged cells in blood vessel walls.

Once attached, they can release drugs in precisely the right place.

But the British Heart Foundation warned the technology was some years from being used in patients.

The hardening of the arteries which supply the heart, or atherosclerosis, can eventually lead to blockages which can cause heart attacks.

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal says specialists normally use tiny balloons to force open the vessels, then place a tube called a stent inside to keep it open.

Often the process triggers a rapid re-growth of tissue around the stent which can lead to the artery blocking again, and a recent advance has been a stent which releases drugs for a number of days after insertion to keep this process under control.

The MIT approach offers another way to get these drugs to exactly the right place.

Its nanoburrs are coated with proteins which can only stick to a structure in the blood vessel wall called the "basement membrane".

This is only exposed when the wall is damaged, so only damaged sections of blood vessel are targeted.

Once in place, a reaction takes place to release the drug over a prolonged period - up to 12 days so far.

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Eclipse Phase is a pen & paper roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy and horror.
An "eclipse phase" is the period between when a cell is infected by a virus and when the virus appears within the cell and transforms it. During this period, the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is.

Het ziet er erg mooi uit op de website. En de transhumanistische gedachte, Shock Level 4, wordt fraai uitgedrukt in de tagline:

Your mind is software. Program it.
Your body is a shell. Change it.
Death is a disease. Cure it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

Ook voor een niet-gamer als ik een mooie website om vaker te bezoeken. De game zelf is uitgebreid besproken op het blog van Anders Sandberg.

Via de Extro-Britannia-website.

This talk will put forward a case that quantum computers might help those who wish to achieve the goal of whole-brain emulation and exotic neural networks, and will review how this may provide insight into the currently hotly-debated topic of the role played by quantum mechanics in the brain and consciousness.

2pm-4pm, Saturday 12th September.
Speaker: Dr Suzanne Gildert,
Research Fellow at University of Birmingham, UK

Room CL 101, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College,
Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX

The talk in more detail

This talk will explain the fundamental concepts of the quantum computer (QC) and how these systems might be able to perform certain tasks that classical computers find incredibly difficult. The talk will also explain why QCs might be useful for some very interesting problems with applications to a wide variety of fields such as
biology, microprocessor design, pharmaceuticals, economics, transport, chemistry and business. More importantly, the talk will also explain what they can't do! Quantum computers are sometimes wrongly portayed by the media as being replacements for desktop machines, whereas the reality is that they are more like fast co-processors.

There will be a review of some of the experimental challenges involved in building QCs, and a focus on a particularly promising version known as the Superconducting Flux-based Quantum Computer. The devices involved in this type of QC are defined using a process similar to semiconductor technology, but using Niobium and Aluminium rather than Silicon. There will be a brief overview of the physics which causes these devices to demonstrate 'Macroscopic Quantum Coherence'- an effect which allows us to scale up quantum effects to a size where we can manipulate them easily, and why the devices must be cooled to millikelvin temperatures for them to work properly.

Finally, the talk will look at several 'controversial' applications which may arise as Quantum Computing (and classical High Performance Computing) begins to cross into the field of neuroscience and neural networks.