>>A Blog About the Science and Technology of Living Forever

The human ear is pretty impressive and hard to artificially replicate. By comparison hearing aids are still sizeable, uncomfortable and have yet to get to the point where it makes it possible to hear rich sounds that humans take for granted. Still, inserts, like crickets, may provide insight into how we can learn to to design a small speaker that is  loud, just as you’d need for a hearing aid and help treat conditions like single sided deafness and unilateral hearing loss. Crickets make sound by rubbing their wings together. The wings are corrugated in patterns which make them stiff. This makes them very loud when the insect rubs them together. Scientists can use laser vibration systems and advanced computer modeling simulations to mimic this idea, by engineering the stiffness of the speaker surface. This produces a simple and efficient way to make ultra small speakers that produce sound that is very loud. Hearing aids are designed to operate in stages. Audio signals are collected by a microphone and then amplified to be louded. Background noise is filtered out with digital processing technology. As a result the speaker in a hearing aid can deliver high-intensity sound to an ear.  Better understanding insects may help us in each of these processes. We can learn more about bio-acoustics through the locust. It has two large “tympanal” membranes that is uses to hear. These membranes, on its chest, vibrate with sound. They transfer the audio signals to the insect’s nervous system,  just like a human’s ear drum. Scientists have discovered that this membrane has a regular variation in thickness. When sound is played to it, i produced tsunami-like vibration with the peak of the wave directly at the location of the nerve cells. This allows for huge amplifications of the sound....

A new nasal spray may give snake bite victims at shot at survival. As many as 125,000 people die each year from from venomous snake bites. The challenge? Getting to a hospital in time to get a dose of anti-venom. Most victims die on the way. Drugs used to treat snakebites aren’t easy to use in the wild. So researchers developed a nasal spray to deliver anti-venom drugs (anticholinesterase agents such as neostigmine.) They have been used for decades on snake bite victims, but the challenge is they have to be administered with a needle. In April 2013, researchers from the California Academy of Sciences and the University of California, San Francisco tested delivery of the life saving medicine via nasal spray. In India a doctor has since successfully used the spray to reverse facial paralysis in a patient who had been bitten by a krait, a common venomous snake found in Indian and south Asian jungles. One bite from a krait has enough venom to kill two grown men. The patient recovered from the facial paralysis in half an hour, and was back on their feet within two...

Cancer breakthroughs in June have stunned the medical world and cleared the way for development of drugs that halt cancerous growths in their tracks and prevent their spreading. The new science gives millions of people suffering from the disease hope and a new tool to fight for their lives. A summary of the new research from the University College London: Researchers say they’ve observed for the first time how cancer spreads throughout the body and metastasizes. Cancerous cells tend to follow healthy cells through the bloodstream. The infected cell sniffs out healthy cells by sensing the chemical makeup of its environment. The discovery means drugs that disrupt this interaction would essentially prevent  (the spread of cancer cells). It will take several years before scientists have a handle on a therapy based on the research. Breast Cancer Breakthrough Another major breakthrough brings hope to breast cancer patients. Researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute announced a drug already on the market in Europe, approved to treat osteoporosis, can also stop late-stage breast cancer. The drug bazedoxifene binds to the estrogen receptor and interferes with its activity and degrades the receptor to get rid of it. The drug affects cancerous cells dependent on estrogen and cells that have developed a resistance to the most frequently-used drugs designed to treat breast cancer. Click HERE to read...

Researchers in Switzerland have discovered the impact of a longevity gene in mice which is crucial in unveiling the secrets of aging. Their findings led to an experiment that extended the life-span of worms by 60% through use of basic antibiotics.

If you’re not willing to send electrical shocks through your brain – “mild” as they might be – to become smarter, here’s a much gentler option: play sounds while you sleep. Researchers have found that “carefully timed” sounds, like the rise and fall of waves washing against the shore, can help people remember things that they learned the previous day. I predict sales of white noise machines to increase in the near future. In the human brain a network of neurons are often activated together. The collective rise and fall of activity of the network produces oscillations, the lines we see in an EEG. At different times the brain oscillates at different frequencies. During sleep the brain produces slow, <1 Hz oscillations – hence the term “slow-wave sleep” – and these oscillations are thought to be important for consolidating memories. The idea that the scientists at the University of Tübingen in Germany wanted to test was whether or not auditory stimulation that boosted the slow-wave oscillations also boosted memory. The study included 11 people who learned word associations right before they went to bed. Their word association memory was tested before they went to sleep and then again the following day. While they slept, they were played short durations of pink noise, a hissing sound similar to white noise. Importantly, the pink noise sounds were timed to the sleeping person’s “slow-wave” brain oscillations. When the individuals received the pink noise stimulation they were able to remember twice as many word associations than without the stimulation. When they repeated the experiment with pink noise that was not synchronized to the slow-waves, they saw no improvement in memory. Monitoring the brain waves with EEG, the researchers also saw that the sound stimuli actually boosted the ongoing slow-wave oscillations. This led the researchers...