Archive for the ‘Genetics’ Category

Three patients in Australia are the first humans to have their sight restored using their own corneal stem cells. Of these three patients, two were legally blind and one had limited vision (could read only the largest row of a vision chart).

A team at the University of New South Wales in Australia extracted adult corneal stem cells from the patients’ good eyes, and cultured them on extended wear contact lenses.  They then cleaned the patients’ corneas, and they began wearing the lenses.

Within 10-14 days, the stem cells re-entered the cornea and began to recolonize it.  UNSW’s Dr Nick Di Girolamo describes, “The procedure is totally simple and cheap.  Unlike other techniques, it requires no foreign human or animal products, only the patient’s own serum, and is completely non-invasive.”

The two legally blind patients can now read the top row of a vision chart, and the visually impaired patient can now read enough to get their driver’s license.

It has been a year and  half since the procedures; how long will the effects last? The cornea has no blood supply (it gets its oxygen through diffusion from the air), so it becomes a question of whether the patients’ tear fluid alone can sustain the new tissue in the long term.

Google Squared went live today! Instead of providing a list of links to ranked pages, Google Squared presents information derived from a query in a spreadsheet-like grid called a square.

“‘It essentially searches the Web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way,” Google says. “If your square isn’t perfect at the beginning, it’s easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer.”

This video, from Google’s blog, shows you some of the features.

Will Google Squared kill Wolfram Alpha?

“Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify:

* Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them “Squares” for fun).
* Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you’re interested in.
* See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
* Save and share Squares with others.

“While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it’s far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.”

Does this sound familiar?

Try searching for ‘roller coasters’ using Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha. The winner, here, is clear.

However, Wolfram Alpha can outperform Google at almost everything computational (can Google do this?).

Wolfram Alpha’s data was organized by real live humans; Google Squared is algorithmic.

In a way, this is a very interesting, very public example of the race between humans and machines; how long will it be before Google’s algorithms outstrip Wolfram Alpha’s literal brain-power. Can computers match our minds? Time will tell. Some certainly think so.

That’s it, lab techs. Pack up your things, and get your recommendation letters ready. Time to take your proper place on the sidelines, as a robot named Adam has made us all obsolete.

The Robot Scientist project at Aberystwyth University made headlines today, bringing us the first machine to have independently “discovered new scientific knowledge”.

Adam formulates hypotheses about the origins of “orphan enzymes” (enzymes we haven’t yet associated with their genes). The robot then plans and executes experiments to test its (his?) own hypotheses (!), selecting yeast mutants from a collection, incubating cells, and measuring their growth rates.

As the team reported this week in Science, Adam came up with 20 hypotheses about genes encoding 13 enzymes, 12 of which it confirmed. This tedious and time-consuming work will hopefully free up the schedules of scientists, who will be able to spend more time thinking about the results procured by these robots.

Team leader Ross King pointed out that his robotic associate is able to express scientific findings in a clearer way than humans. “It expresses its conclusions in logic,” he said. “Human language, with all its nuances, may not be the best way to communicate scientific findings.”

Their super-interesting manuscript, published in Science, can be accessed here.

For those of you subscription-less science-pirates, it can be accessed free here. Shh. Enjoy.