After being injected with the telomerase gene, adult and old mice lived 24 percent and 13 percent longer, respectively.

Scientists are doing their best to give us the gift of immortality. The latest in the fight against ever dying is a gene therapy that gives mice a healthy dose of telomerase, the enzyme that keeps our chromosomes – and thus our cells and bodies – “young.” The therapy extended the lifespans of mice by 24 percent and, at least so far, the therapy appears to be completely safe.

As we age the dying cells in our body are replenished through cell division. But with each cell division the bits of DNA at the ends of chromosomes – the telomeres – deteriorate. At some point the shortened telomeres signal to the cell that it’s time to stop dividing, leading to tissue degradation – one of the hard facts of life for the now aged cells. But now scientists have given cells a kind of molecular fountain of youth – at least in mice. They injected the mice with the telomerase gene which then slowed the cellular aging process by extending the dwindling telomere ends. They gave the gene therapy to one year old mice, considered adults, and two year old mice, considered old. The lifespan of the one year olds were extended by 24 percent, the two year olds by 13 percent. Not only did the mice live longer, but they reaped beneficial effects across a range of conditions associated with aging including insulin sensitivity, osteoporosis, and physical coordination.

An inactive form of telomerase had no effect on lifespan, confirming that its telomere-lengthening enzymatic activity was crucial. The study was led by María Blasco at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre and published in EMBO Molecular Medicine.

Dr. Marìa Blasco, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre

The treatment involved replacing the genes of a virus with the gene for telomerase. This viral vector had several advantages. First, viruses are good at getting into the body and infecting a large number of cells. Inserting telomerase into a small handful of cells won’t have much impact on an organism’s lifespan. Second, the gene remains active for years. And lastly, the viral DNA did not insert itself into the DNA of the mouse cells. Past attempts at gene therapy that work this way run the risk of insertion errors that turn the cell into a tumor, as was the case in the trial which caused leukemia in two of nine participants testing a gene therapy for “bubble boy disease.”

Longevity through telomerase is nothing new. Adding telomerase to human cells in culture allowed them to extend their lifespans by at least an extra 20 divisions. And mice genetically engineered to make telomerase lived 40 percent longer and showed improved glucose tolerance, coordination, and less inflammation compared to normal mice. But genetically engineering people isn’t an option (yet), so a treatment form of telomerase such as the injectable virus in the current study – extending the lifespans of adult and old mice – is a much more conceivable approach.

Aging is a complex process with lots of components, many of which we might not even be aware. But if telomere shortening is really so powerfully rate-limiting to our lifespans, then it could turn out to be as close to a silver bullet for longevity as we’re likely to find. Maybe telomerase treatments could buy us those extra years crucial to reaching Aubrey de Grey’s “longevity escape velocity” beyond which new treatments will save us from the disease of death – indefinitely.

[image credits: Science Daily, publico.es, and Science Creative Daily]
images: Science Daily, publico.es, Science Creative Daily

And you thought your vintage Swatch was a fashion statement.

Like to keep track of time and enjoy music on your iPod nano, but can’t tolerate those cumbersome bands and straps? Just surgically implant magnets into your wrist and attach your nano – strap-free.

That’s what Dave Hurban did. The two posts embedded beneath his skin are attached to a pair of magnets each. Hurban measured out the location of the magnets so that they’d fit the nano precisely – the carpenter’s rule, “measure twice, cut once” being oh so important.

Hurban is calling his little bit of self-mutilation in the name of technology iDermal. A body piercer himself, he’s already had his fair share of piercings. So sticking the metallic posts, or “micro-dermal anchors” as he calls them, isn’t so drastic a fashion statement to him as it might be to most. But still, why’d he do it?

As he told Digital Times, because he “thought it would be cool.”

Judging from the comments on the YouTube video not many people are with Hurban on that one. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say he probably doesn’t care what other people think. But take a closer look and you realize that the video has been viewed nearly 2 million times with almost a 2-to-1 ratio of “likes” to “dislikes.” Is that because people admire Hurban’s rebellious shrug of convention or does it speak to a broader movement towards body augmentation in general? We’ve already seen Skinput that turns your forearm and fingers into a control pad. The Pebble smartwatch is (surprisingly?) seriously popular, raising more than $10 million in its Kickstarter campaign. And Google Goggles will make it so uncool to ask for directions in the future. We’re slowly and sometimes stylishly changing into cyborgs. Hopefully most of our augmentations won’t involve as much blood as Hurban’s.

[image credits: iDermal via YouTube]
[video credit: iDermal via YouTube]
images: iDermal
video: iDermal

Welcome back to Accelerated Tech News. For the past six weeks Singularity Hub has been experimenting with a new way of sharing its content with humanity: video. With a rapid review of the week’s past top stories, Accelerated Tech News is the easily digested version of Singularity Hub’s world-class science and technology news. Watch ATN to find the stories that entice your brain, and then go back to Singularity Hub to read the full length articles and learn all you need to know. It’s that simple. Stay tuned for more Accelerated Tech News in the weeks ahead. Production value is going to get better and editing will improve as well. We make no promises, however, about the host’s sense of humor. Some malfunctions simply cannot be fixed.

The Argos system has allowed researchers to track wildlife for years, but the time has come for a new system.

Satellite technology is a modern-day “Wonder of the World.” Consider that currently over 1,000 active satellites orbit the Earth, communicating with ground-based transmitters and receivers for a host of applications, such as delivering scientific measurements, weather information, and television programming, to name a few. Since the launch of Sputnik I in 1957, satellite technology has increasingly connected people together, whether in the same town or on opposite sides of the planet, effectively making the world flat.

One of the increasingly employed technologies is GPS tracking, which many of the world’s 6.6 billion mobile subscribers (over 90 percent of the world’s population) have come to rely on. For the last few decades, scientists too have utilized satellite tracking to monitor wildlife to better understand their migratory patterns and the impact humans have on their environments. Recently, for the first time, satellite tracking has provided insight into the last of the marine megavertebrate species to be monitored by satellite: the giant manta ray.

Although this latest study is a success story for a technology that has matured over two decades, it also highlights just how far behind satellite tracking of animals is compared to humans and how desperately that needs to be changed.

The research, published in PLoS ONE (read the full article for free here), described how six manta rays were tagged with trackers as they traversed nearly 700 miles around the Yucatan peninsula and were monitored for up to 64 days before the trackers fell off. The researchers discovered that the manta rays predominantly remained in warmer water (26-30°C) of less than 50 meters deep, but spent nearly 90 percent of their time outside of Marine Protected Areas where human contact is minimized.

Satellite tracks of three of the six manta rays show their movement over a 1-2 month window.

Because manta rays are currently listed as ‘vulnerable’ to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, knowing the degree to which they intersect with human activities is essential to understanding their long term survival. This is especially important as the rays are often at risk of being hit by shipping boats, chopped up by fisherman for use as shark bait, and hunted for their cartilaginous gill rakers that are used in Eastern medicine practices.

Furthermore, manta rays are exposed to humans increasingly in the megafauna tourism industry that offers scuba divers a chance to swim with the rays. A study by The Manta Ray Of Hope Project estimated that a single manta ray brings in an income of $1 million to local ecotourism over its lifetime. The global tourism value of manta rays is estimated at $50 million a year, while the market value for the ray’s gill rakers is $11 million, so the study concluded that there is much greater financial value to the tourism industry in keeping the manta rays alive. Unfortunately, though current population sizes are unknown, it is believed that giant manta ray numbers are dwindling rapidly.

Slate put together a video highlighting the study:

For over 30 years, the migratory patterns of marine animals, including sharks, turtles, and now giant manta rays, have been made possible by the Argos satellite system. Launched in 1978 as a joint venture between the French Space Agency, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), this system was originally intended for meteorological and oceanographic studies only. But in 1986, the system, which employs a number of satellites, was commercialized, allowing researchers to propose new uses for the system.

Since that time, satellite tracking via Argos has become a vital research tool for studying marine biology and ecology, with over 3,000 animals currently being tracked by Argos. A 2009 review in the journal Endangered Species Research found that satellite telemetry of marine megavertebrates was maturing into “an operational science.” Tracking has helped researchers follow leatherback turtles making a 7,500-km journey across the South Atlantic, manatees trekking from Florida up to Rhode Island, and a host of  sharks, which have seen an 80 percent population drop in the last 50 years. But the study also revealed a rather shocking truth: only 92 studies using satellite tracking were reported in the literature between 1987 and 2006 with less than a quarter of these studying marine mammals.

In other words, we really have very little idea of what’s going on under the sea.

As with other species that call the ocean home, it is difficult to gauge exactly what impact humans are having on marine life, but it doesn’t look so good. We’re doing a horrible job at managing the oceans between the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, whose size is exaggerated but still considerable, the loss of 10,000 shipping containers to the sea every year, and overfishing which has been projected to cause a global collapse of fish species by mid-century if action isn’t taken. A recent study discovered that something as innocuous as replacing native trees along the coast of an atoll with non-native palms produced a cascade of effects resulting in a massive decline of seabird, plankton, and manta ray populations. It’s also conjectured that humans cause extinction at a faster rate than new species can evolve, and though the rate of extinction may not be as rapid as some believe, increasing pressure on the ocean will only add to the 16 known marine species that have become extinct since 1972.

The ocean is considered by many to be the last great frontier on Earth, full of numerous resources and mysteries about life on Earth, so it is imperative that related technologies can be transferred rapidly to enhance marine studies. Recently, James Cameron made a well publicized dive in partnership with National Geographic to the Mariana Trench in a new submarine, beating Richard Branson to the punch and demonstrating how far submersible technology has come since the first dive in 1951 to the bottom of the ocean. Other projects are underway to use the power of modern technologies to explore the ocean, such as the development of underwater drones, which could turn out to be as successful as military drones have been.

New satellite tracking systems are also gaining momentum. An initiative called the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) is focused on small animal tracking using radio transmitters (much smaller than the larger Argos tags) and hopes to be monitoring 1,000 small animals by 2014. Previous tracking of marine life using the 27 GPS satellites has been difficult because the tags are detectable only in shallower water and GPS can take at least a minute to coordinate a signal. However, newer Fastloc technology has reduced the amount of time considerably down to around a tenth of a second and extended the depth to 1,000 meters.

Still, if we will have smartphones soon that will be able to track our position down to the inch using a whole host of technologies, including wireless, GPS, and Bluetooth, to coordinate position, surely there must be a way to do something similar for wildlife monitoring. Satellite tracking has proven to be such a powerful technology that it’s clear what’s needed is an advanced telemetry and coordinated tracking system to monitor multiple species in real time.

And while it may seem like a tall order, such a system will be in place for humans in the near future, even in the face of international issues, legislation, and privacy concerns, so can’t we find a way to monitor the rest of life on Earth as well?

[Media: NASA, National Geographic, WFU, YouTube]

[Sources: Argos, LA Times, PLoS One, Shark Savers]

A study of over a hundred thousand trial participants showed that gene variations which change levels of HDL have no effect on heart attack risk.

The revelation that high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, is the “good cholesterol” has suffered a major blow. A meta-study involving over a hundred thousand participants used two different strategies to see if genetic mutations that increased levels of HDL also decreased risk for heart disease. In both cases the answer was a resounding no. The researchers were shocked when they saw the data. Now it’s their turn to shock HDL proponents and drug companies looking to cash in on the HDL craze.

The study, which was published recently in The Lancet, is causing quite a stir in the field. As Dr. James de Lemos, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, told the New York Times, “I’d say the HDL hypothesis is on the ropes right now.” Dr. de Lemos was not involved in the study.

So what’s the story here? How is it possible that LDL/HDL dichotomy has propagated so powerfully through conventional wisdom that even the CDC refers to them as “good” and “bad” cholesterols and pharmaceutical companies like Abbot Laboratories are working hard to get in on the HDL cash cow?

Past studies have shown that much of what increases our risk for heart disease, like obesity, lack of exercise, smoking, and insulin resistance, is correlated with low HDL. It was a logical conclusion, then, that by increased HDL levels we could decrease those risks. But correlation doesn’t mean causation, and the takeaway conclusion from the current study is that decreased HDL is simply a sign of increased risk for heart disease but the level of HDL doesn’t actually affect heart disease.

In the most recently published study researchers used genetic, lipoprotein, and heart attack outcome data from some thirty odd studies to see if a genetic mutation known to increase HDL levels decreased the chance of heart attack. They focused on the gene for endothelial lipase. Past research has shown that when endothelial lipase has certain single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) it leads to increased levels of HDL. Looking at study data from 116,000 participants, they saw that 2.6 percent of them had the SNPs and confirmed that their HDL levels were significantly higher than average. But when they compared the incidence of heart attack between the two groups they found no difference whatsoever.

The second part of the study took a similar approach, but instead of limiting analysis to one gene the researchers looked at 14 gene variants know to affect HDL levels and asked if the variations affected cardiovascular health. Again, the amount of HDL did not affect whether or not a person suffered a heart attack.

But even with such a high sample size, it’s possible that the methodology of the study was somehow flawed. Using low-density lipoprotein (LDL) – the so-called bad cholesterol – as a control, the researchers analyzed gene variants among the participant pool and confirmed that decreased levels of LDL lessened the chance of a heart attack, validating their analysis of the HDL data.

Think twice before you reach for that bottle of HDL-boosting Niacin.

This may come as a shock to many, but another study published last year suggested that HDL was not so “good” after all. The trial tested the effects of niacin, a drug that increases a person’s HDL levels, on over 3,000 patients at risk for heart disease. Because niacin stimulates the production of HDLs they were expected to improve the cardiovascular outlook of these high-risk patients. Two years into the study researchers confirmed that the group’s HDL levels were increased. At three years, however, the study was stopped prematurely due to “lack of efficacy.”

But while the research may be “on the ropes,” not everyone’s throwing in the HDL towel just yet. Dr. Steven Nissen who is the Cleveland Clinic’s chair of cardiovascular medicine and conducts HDL research himself told the New York Times that he is “hopeful,” reasoning that HDL is “complicated.” In 2010 the Cleveland Clinic received a $11.6 million grant to study the benefits of HDL, so it’s easy to see how the current study would indeed “complicate” things.

Cardiovascular disease is the world’s number one killer. Responsible for 30 percent of all deaths globally, it claimed the lives of nearly 16 million people in 2008. The pharmaceutical giants all have their own version of cholesterol-lowering statin: Merck’s Zocor, AstraZeneca’s Crestor, and Pfizer’s Lipitor, which has become the most profitable drug of all time at sales of over $130 billion. It’s no wonder then that companies have been busy trying to reap the rewards of HDL-boosting niacin.

Abbott Laboratories, which offers a version of niacin called Niaspan, responded to the halted trial by saying it might not work for the chronically high-risk, but it remains to be seen if others won’t benefit. But like Dr. Nissen, I suppose Abbott can take momentary solace in the fact that these are, after all, just two studies – albeit one a very large study. But if others begin to confirm the current findings, the “good” in HDL will become “good riddance.”

[image credits: Healthy Living, DoctorSaputo.com, and Benefits of Niacin]
images: Healthy Living, DoctorSaputo.com, and Benefits of Niacin

Genetically modified T cells which attack HIV have been shown to be both effective and safe after more than a decade.

A clinical trial testing a gene therapy for HIV patients is now 11 years old. Recently, the researchers running the study published an examination of the patients after all this time. Of the study’s 43 patients, all were healthy, and 41 of them confirmed that their immune cells which received a genetically-altered boost were still performing as hoped more than a decade after the initial infusions.

Researchers first collected some of the patients’ T cells, the type of white blood cell that fights infections and tumors. They then added a retroviral vector to the cells that inserted its DNA into the cells’ own DNA. The important part of the new DNA would cause the T cells to recognize a protein found on HIV and target the virus for attack. The modified T cells were injected back into the patients between 1998 and 2002.

One of major concerns with gene therapies is the risk that the inserted DNA will cause cell replication errors and turn the cell cancerous. Years ago, in a different study, two out of nine young boys developed leukemia after undergoing gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (“Bubble Boy disease”). But there is a key difference between that trial and the current one. The earlier trial involved genetic modification of blood stem cells. As none of the participants in the current study have developed cancer after 11 years, the researchers are concluding that the type of cell makes all the difference. “T cells appear to be a safe haven for gene modification,” Carl June, one of the lead researchers of the study said in a press release.

The study was co-led by Bruce Levine, head of the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility at Pennsylvania University’s Perelman School of Medicine. It was published earlier this month in Science Translational Medicine.

Eleven years of being both effective and safe is a gene therapy breakthrough. But as promising as the study is, there’s still room for improvement. Patient viral loads were not reduced to undetectable levels, something routinely achieved by drugs. This could be due to an inadequate dosage of T cells. But now that T cells have been shown to be gene friendly, a higher dose could be tried in the future. Also, they tested function of the modified T cells in lab dishes. But while there was no direct confirmation that the cells are performing effectively inside the body, the fact that all 43 patients are healthy seems to be pretty rigorous evidence.

The trial was led by University of Pennsylvania researchers Bruce Levine and Carl June.

So how is it possible that the modified T cells are still chugging along after 11 years? Human T cells can live for years, and they divide,  passing their genetic material on to their cellular progeny. In fact, the current level of gene function in the patients indicates that over half of the original modified T cells or their progeny should still be functional for 16 years following infusion.

Even though the modified T cells in the current study haven’t proved more effective than drugs, they may still yet as higher doses are tried. HIV can be effectively controlled with drugs but patients are often required to take multiple pills at specific times of the day for the rest of their lives. And the drugs often have unpleasant side-effects such as nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea. Even if HIV levels aren’t rendered undetectable, as they weren’t in the current study, just decreasing a patient’s dependency on drugs would be a major accomplishment.

The promising results a decade out isn’t just good news for HIV patients and clinicians alone. Gene therapies targeting other diseases could benefit from the protocol. Any malady that can be helped by setting the molecular sights of T cells on a target should be fair game. In fact, Levine and June are already reprogramming T cells to seek out and destroy leukemia tumors. In a paper published last October they reported how cancerous cells in three patients were wiped out in just three weeks. As in the HIV trial the T cells were modified to recognize and attack cells expressing a specific protein. CD19 is a protein found on leukemia cells but not on healthy ones.

It’s about time gene therapies began delivering on the promise that so many have hoped for. Researchers are busy trying to find out why gene therapies turn stem cells into tumors but behave so well in T cells. Answering that question could open the door to gene therapies in other cell types. The current study is the latest in a spurt of good news for gene therapies. Other trials have stopped bleeding in hemophilia patients, successfully treated Parkinson’s symptoms, and helped the blind to see. Let’s hope we’re entering an era in which successful gene therapy trials are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

[image credits: Scientific American and Philly.com]
images: Scientific American and Philly.com

By tapping databases and connecting people, places, and things Google's Knowledge Graph enriches your search experience.

This week Google is rolling out a new search tool: the Knowledge Graph. Breaking with the old strategy of keywords and webpages, Knowledge Graph makes use of the vast amounts of online data to give you persons, places, and things that are related to what you’re looking for. This new search philosophy of “Things Not Strings” ceases to treat your query as a random string of characters, and treats them as real world ideas instead. And it’s only the beginning of the move away from having to wade through website after website to find what you’re looking for.

Without Knowledge Graph, Google search results are keyword-based and direct us to websites that contain our keyword or related keywords. But as we know words are often ambiguous. For example, if you type in “mercury” you could be interested in the elemental liquid, the planet, or the fleet-of-foot messenger of the Roman gods. By being connected to a network of relevant material, results become more narrow, getting us to our relevant “mercury” more quickly. They’re richer too, allowing us easy access to information about the first planet from the sun.

Now, instead of Googling to get to the Wikipedia page, much of the information you’re looking for will already be displayed in the results – a Googlepedia. Sort of.

When searching for a book, dog breed, or planet, an information panel will appear in that empty white space to the right of the results list. The section will contain a brief description, a collection of facts, the highest-ranking related images, related searches, and other related information such as a map, an upcoming concert for a band, or recently Google+ posts from people in your circles.

The information display won’t be nearly as complete as a Wikipedia page, and not all topics get an information display. Easily packaged subjects like specific sports teams, movies, locations, and famous people get a display. Cars, video games, and companies do not.

Of course, your facts are only as good as your sources. The Knowledge Graph draws from multiple online data sources including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and Freebase, an open database generated by Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010. Wikipedia has nearly four million articles, and Freebase has data on over 24 million people, places, and things. Subject-specific information is gathered from sites like Weather Underground for weather and the World Bank for global economics. As before, data from Google searches are used to make educated guesses of what people are searching for and what webpages they want to see. They’ve only just started building it up, but already the Knowledge Graph includes 500 million people, places, and things with connections to 3.5 billion attributes. And the bewildering network of connections will be honed by people using it with a feature that allows users to point out incorrect or irrelevant information.

Like the real world and information about it, the Knowledge Graph is a work in progress. Here’s a short video that describes how Google is reshaping itself from an “information engine to a knowledge engine.”

What will Google look like after the Knowledge Graph has had 5 or 10 years to gobble up databases? If it’s true that Google was already making us dumber, get ready to donate a few more IQ points for the sake of convenience.

For many searches we probably won’t notice the “extra knowledge” in the results (incidentally, the Graph has yet to grace the Google page on my laptop), but already we can see where all of this is going. Along with Google, tools like WolframAlpha and Siri, have conditioned people to expect more out their software – they want useful information and they want it quick and easy. Google Chrome’s text to speech function makes that happen, and so do Google Glasses. It doesn’t get any easier than looking at things and talking to yourself. The Knowledge Graph adds to these as part of Google’s effort to both shape the direction that people interact with technology, and to stay relevant and competitive in this increasingly AI-driven world.

[image credits: Google via YouTube]
[video credits: Google via YouTube]
images: Google
video: Google via YouTube

Will the future involve wiping your memory of any copyrighted works you haven't paid for?

What will post-Singularity life be like in 2052 if you died and your mind was uploaded to a computer? Possibly mired in data rate throttling, advertiser-sponsored consciousness, immoral thought extraction, and memory wipes of copyrighted material.

A new witty video called “Welcome to Life” offers a little glimpse into what it might be like for your mind to awake in a digital world after your biological self has expired. Taking jabs at the Apple experience, terms of service agreements, and all the legal hurdles one might anticipate that could hinder future existence, the video humorously approaches a subject that is rather difficult to imagine. The creator of “Welcome to Life”, Tom Scott, is also responsible for a parody of the Google Glasses video, which captured over 2 million views on YouTube.

Here’s a glimpse into your possible future:

For me, the most intriguing part is the end with the question, “Do you wish to continue?” When the technology becomes available to upload our minds and never fear failing health or aging, we can answer “Yes” to that question perpetually, so long as our service providers can keep the lights on.

Thanks to Noah, a Singularity Hub member, for sending the video to us!

[Media: YouTube]

[Sources: Tom Scott]

The H5N1 virus, or Bird Flu, was easily transmissible between birds but not humans. Two scientists have changed that and are publishing how they did it.

The emergence of the avian flu in 2003 caused alarm around the world as it spread through countries in Asia, leaving victims in its wake. While largely contained to the bird population, for the relatively few humans unlucky enough to catch it the flu proved deadly. Now, two groups of perhaps seemingly mad scientists have successfully modified the H5N1 virus so that it could be passed easily between humans. One of them has already published the work for all the world to see, and the second is soon to follow. What kind of dangers will materialize in a world where the laboratory formulas for superflus and other potential bioweapons are out in the open?

Of the 603 people infected since the 2003 H5N1 outbreak, 356 have died – a 59 percent mortality rate (by comparison, the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 that claimed the lives of over 50 million had a mortality rate of just 2 percent). Still, people could take solace in the fact that the flu, luckily, while very well suited to being passed between birds, was not effective at passing from human to human.

Until now.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus University in the Netherlands have both been able to modify the virus so that it now is easily transmitted between humans.

Understandably, some are none too happy.

The wisdom of making the DNA sequence of a potentially very deadly virus public was discussed extensively in the media and behind closed public health office doors in the months prior to publication. The University of Pittsburgh’s D. A. Henderson, who helped eradicate smallpox, issued an editorial last December in response to the “ominous news,” arguing that “the benefits of this work do not outweigh the risks.” That same month the World Health Organization expressed “deep concern” about the “possible risks and misuses associated with this research” and about “the potential negative consequences.” Also in December, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provoked concerns further by being clear that we’re all talking about terrorists, citing “evidence in Afghanistan that…al Qaeda…made a call to arms for – and I quote – ‘brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry to develop a weapon of mass destruction.’”

The growing concern and condemnation seemed justified when the December tumult concluded with a ruling by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) that Kawaoka’s paper and Fouchier’s paper that was also in the works, be censored – that the mutations shouldn’t be published lest terrorist groups be given the secret formula for a superflu.

Now the debates raged within the scientific community, with one side rejecting the censoring of science in any form, the other side echoed D. A. Henderson’s doubt that the research was even merited in the first place. Long story short, the advisory board reversed their ruling in March after receiving ‘revised’ versions of Kawaoka and Fouchier’s papers. I use that term lightly, as all the mutation data is still there.

The key to Kawaoka’s (controversial yet FBI-approved) breakthrough was a viral protein called hemagglutinin that affects the ability of a virus to bind host cells. The hemagglutinin in H5N1 was well-suited to promote transmission of the virus between birds but not between humans. Kawaoka produced millions of H5N1 variants in which the hemagglutinin was mutated in different ways. When they screened the variants they found a version that, unlike its naturally-occurring counterpart, was very good at infecting human cells in a Petri dish.

The hemagglutinin of the human-targeting H5N1 virus showed four new mutations. Three of the mutations changed the shape of the protein from its normal shape and the fourth changed the pH level at which the virus attaches to cells and injects their genetic material. Sifting through the millions of mutations revealed a secret molecular formula for gaining deadly entry into human cells. To maximize the lethality of their creation, the team combined the mutated gene with the seven remaining genes – flu viruses have a total of eight genes – of a particularly transmittable flu virus; specifically, from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus.

And then they gave the modified viruses to ferrets. The new virus worked ‘beautifully,’ rapidly infecting ferrets separately housed in different cages. Assuming ferrets are a good model for viral transmission among other mammals, like humans, the scientists would have taken a virus that was relatively harmless to humans and turned it into a Franken-flu with a monstrous potential for harm were it ever to get out.

The paper, detailing what mutations went where, was published May 2nd in the journal Nature.

Only four or five mutations were needed to turn the relatively harmless bird flu into a potential nightmare.

So should we be concerned about the world knowing that switching asparagine-224 to a lysine and a few other like changes turns a relatively harmless bird disease into a superbug threat for humans? A couple months ago during one of our Google+ Hangouts we brought up the debate to New York Times science columnist and writer of The Loom Carl Zimmer who’d last year wrote a book about viruses.

“I can sleep at night knowing that that’s going on but I don’t rule out the danger of it. On the other hand I do think there’s a danger in totally stifling this type of research. If somebody did release some sort of horrible bioweapon we would probably find a vaccine or cure if this information was available to people as easily and quickly as possible so that you’re essentially crowdsourcing a solution as opposed to, say, if anybody wants this data you’re going to have to fill out three thousand pages of paperwork and then we’ll get back to you, and in the meanwhile another thousand people have died.”

The practicalities of a quick and effective response aside, Zimmer isn’t too alarmed by the threat of a superbug let loose in the first place.

“I think an argument could be made that [a virus] is a pretty lousy bioweapon. There’s good chance that if you were…trying to make a very virulent kind of flu you might very well be the first person to die. But let’s imagine you were able to transport it to some other country and unleash it. Take a look at what happened in 2009 with the Swine Flu. It was first noticed in Mexico, and by the time scientists really had a good handle on it in Mexico, we now know that it was already all over the world, because people have been getting on planes and going all over the place. So, if some horrible person unleashed a very virulent flu in New York, a lot of people would get on planes and go back to that terrorist’s home country trying to escape the flu.”

Of course, anyone willing to unleash a virulent flu in New York might not have cared to think these matters through.

And the second recipe, Fouchier’s, which will be published shortly in Science, is rumored to formulate an H5N1 virus even more lethal than Kawaoka’s. Fouchier’s group took a slightly different strategy by jumpstarting it with mutations that fostered its transmission from birds to ferrets, but then instead of screening for mutations that made the virus transmissible between ferrets, they took viruses from sick ferrets and injected them into healthy ferrets. Mimicking the way the viruses adapt in nature the viruses mutated as they were artificially transmitted from ferret to ferret, until they began transmitting on their own. As Fouchier told the New Scientist, his flu “is transmitted as efficiently as seasonal flu.” With a near 60 percent mortality, let’s hope his observation is never confirmed. The seasonal flu already leaves between 250,000 and 500,000 around the world dead each year.

But the method by which Fouchier’s bird flu was created could be considered an argument for creating superflus in the lab in the first place. Injecting viruses from sick ferrets into healthy ones until they adapted simulates the worst case scenario for humans. Conceivably, all it would take for the bird-to-human H5N1 to become a human-to-human H5N1 would be a finite number of transmissions between humans. As with the ferrets, the virus would adapt. How many direct contact transmissions would it need before it became airborne? The virus passed between Fouchier’s ferrets need just ten transmissions.

Ten transmissions and five mutations – one more than Kawaoka’s virus needed. Either way, it’s a very short jaunt along evolution’s path to go from a relatively benign bird flu to the potentially most destructive infectious agent ever to face humanity. So if similar mutations are needed to make the virus airborne between humans, knowing ahead of time what those mutations are, as Zimmer pointed out, gives us a head start in creating a vaccine.

A good enough reason? You tell me. But in the end it doesn’t really matter which side of the issue you’re on because the superflu recipe is already out there. We know it’s the first of two, and we can bet that other publications will follow that are potential bioweapon cheat sheets for “horrible persons.” Surely the debate will rage on as these papers come out, with one side saying benefits don’t outweigh risk, the other side saying we can’t afford to not be prepared.

[image credits: Wall Street Journal, International Business Times, and Nature]
images: China, China2, Paper

Tupac Hologram Sings At Coachella

Just a week after Easter, Coachella music festival was shaken by the ghostly visage of slain rapper Tupac Shakur, resurrected to strut the stage for five surreal minutes, leaving the crowd stunned. It is now well known that this hip-hop apparition was a product of both state-of-the-art computer graphics and antiquated stage tricks. However, the source of the erstwhile rapper’s unmistakable voice – which shouted “what the f*** is up Coachella?!” to a festival that didn’t exist until three years after his 1996 murder – is still unclear. It’s possible that ‘Pac’s pronouncements were invoked by way of speech synthesis, digital mimicry of the human voice. “The underlying technology is somewhat freely available and with enough time, I believe it would be possible to synthesize a new song by hand,” says Alan Black, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute. “I sort of think that’s what happened here.”

Experimenters have sought to recreate and control the sounds of speech for centuries, processing snippets of recorded voices, manipulating signals, and modeling the human vocal tract – sometimes with unsettling results. These days, a common approach involves building digital libraries of recorded phonemes (‘Shakur,’ for example, can be broken into five phonemes: ‘Sh,’ ‘a,’ ‘k,’ ‘u,’ and ‘r’), which are recombined and treated with vibrato, pitch, and breath to synthesize human utterances. This is called “concatenative synthesis,” and the process is refined enough that a new translation program by Microsoft can do it automatically. After an hour of getting familiar, the software will translate a user’s words among 26 languages, in their speaking voice.

Hatsune Miku - The Virtual Diva

A similar process also drives the daily conversations between iPhone users and Siri, Apple’s chatty digital assistant. The source voice of Siri is undisclosed except in the UK, but wide public acceptance of conversational tech reveals how ready we are to recognize the personalities of even artificial speakers. The sound of the dated synthesizer that allows famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking to communicate is so inevitably tied to his public identity, his technician was reluctant to upgrade to more realistic synthetic voices now available.

Meanwhile, the speech patterns of dearly departed voices are being painstakingly recreated, as with the beloved Japanese entertainer Hitoshi Ueki, aspiring for total realism in vocaloid form. Years before Coachella, holographic superstars have been performing fan-generated songs to sold-out arenas in Japan and the States, a full-blown pop phenomenon powered by voice synthesis. Chart-topping “E-Diva” Hatsune Miku is the most popular of this growing troupe of singing, dancing vocaloids, whose digital intonations stir fans as surely as Lady GaGa or Katy Perry (themselves arguably examples of speech synthesis).

When IBM’s DeepQA computer Watson was equipped with a soothing voice synth and let loose on Jeopardy, we were offered a glimpse at the potential power of a computer brain with the ability of human speech. Even the game show’s counter-intuitive format and questions ripe with puns and wordplay rarely tripped up Watson, always addressed by name, always listening and ready to speak up. Talking to machines can seem downright natural when we feel that we are exchanging more than mere data, even if the sense of true communication is, at this point, only illusory.

When crowds are brought to their feet by what basically amounts to an overhead projector, and frustration peaks as we and our devices misunderstand one another, granting machines our most fundamental form of communication is leading to a more complicated relationship, and may indeed signal a burgeoning conversation. While we might not expect thrilling repartee with a synthetic voice for some time, it’s clear that as our computers learn their first words we are beginning to recognize their voices.

About The Author: Doug Bierend is a Los Angeles based writer interested in technology, culture, and where they intersect

The Singularity Hub Membership Program is building a one of a kind community of future-minded thinkers, and I’m proud to say that we’ve had some amazing success so far. Here’s a taste of just some of the people who have joined the Membership recently:

• One of the world’s most successful Second Life entrepreneurs and real estate developers
• Commercial and securities litigation lawyer who is writing a science fiction novel on nanotechnology.
• Advertising executive who licenses and curates a TEDx event.
• Physicist and software engineer starting a nonprofit to provide lab space to the community
• Researcher analyzing millions of tweets a day to better understand general intelligence
• “Transmedia” producer and writer exploring virtual reality in Los Angeles
• Tech entrepreneur and CEO taking a two year sabbatical to travel around the world
• Senior physician working with global organizations aiming to usher in the era of eHealth.

These incoming Members join a vibrant collection of techno-optimists that include: authors, futurists, virtual reality entrepreneurs, media experts, CEOs, attorneys, doctors, soldiers, web personalities, movie makers, university deans, cartoonists, bloggers, MMO game programmers, and teachers.

The Singularity Hub Membership Program has spread across the US and is undeniably global with members living in Washington DC, London, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh, Miami, Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, Vienna, Moscow, Greece, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and the Netherlands.

There’s no question that the most powerful part of the Hub Membership is the Members themselves. Every week we bring in new VIPs from various tech industries so that our insightful and enthusiastic members get a first hand chance to talk directly with the people helping shape humanity’s future. Last week we spoke with Rudi Hoffman, one of the world’s most successful evangelists for cryogenic storage of human bodies. Hoffman explained how life insurance and a little forethought could have your body preserved indefinitely after death. And for much less money than you would think: less than $200/month in many cases, and without any help from family after you die. Our next Hangout guest is Robbie Allen, head of Automated Insights (formerly Statsheets). Allen has built a network of thousands of sports related webpages using computer generated content instead of human writers. And he’s bringing the same approach to all other corners of the writing market. When the minds of our Membership meet up with the expertise of our guest VIPs, great things happen.

So don’t miss out on it. If you’re already a member, keep enjoying it, and let us know what we can do to make it better. Also, don’t forget to invite your friends. Every new member you recruit gets you a month’s free subscription. If you’re not a member, think about joining. Reading about the amazing technological changes happening today is wonderful. Being part of the community that hopes to guides those changes is even better.

You’re watching Accelerated Tech News, Singularity Hub’s experimental new video series that gives you the week’s top stories in science and tech in an easily digested video summary. What makes ATN experimental? You mean, besides the fact that we’re shooting it in a bunker with a guy who refers to his audience as “hubbers”? This new approach to our world class techno-optismistic content is here to take a few risks and present a new alternative to how you learn about the emerging trends in science and industry that will shape humanity in the next decade. Do you want the indepth content that explores such topics as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to the fullest extent? Then the main articles on Singularity Hub are there for you. If, however, you want a fast-paced approach, a quick look at all the great innovations that are fueling the 21st Century, Accelerated Tech News is your ideal source. Think of ATN as a table of contents, a way to sample the scientific flavors of the week before you choose those stories you want to consumer and really digest in full. Watch Accelerated Tech News to get excited, then read Singularity Hub to expand your mind.

ATN is also experimental because we want it to serve a new kind of purpose: cultural diplomacy. Let’s face it, the Technological Singularity gets a bad rap out there in the mainstream media. Either we’re sold silly notions of the “robo-pocalypse” through Hollywood blockbusters or we’re told major innovations in robotics, genetics, and computing are “50 to 100″ years away. Even on the internet the concept of the Singularity is derided as the “rapture of nerds”. Where is the voice of the techno-optimist, the well reasoned exploration of the possibility that humanity could change, is likely to change, drastically in the next few decades? Accelerated Tech News is our answer. It’s our ambassador to the general population. If we can show you enough cool science news, if we can connect the dots between one innovation and the next, maybe we can start to prove that exponential growth in technology is something to believe in. And work towards.

So, as a new time watcher, or as a dedicated “hubber”, we want your input. This is all a big experiment, and we need some data. If ATN is the ambassador to the general population, how can we make it better? Should it be quirkier and more light hearted, or serious and to the point? We want to keep it fast, and keep it easily digested by the public, but other than that we are open to your suggestions. Let us know what kind of program you want in the comments below. Together we can build a show that not only gets us excited about Singularity Hub news, but that gets the world thinking about the possibilities of tomorrow.

Would you give up your privacy for a free BlackBerry?

For four years, nearly 200 high school students in Dallas voluntarily allowed every text, email, and IM to be monitored. That these youth would sign off on such an invasion of privacy, especially in light of the content that was discovered within their communication, shows how much the next generation has changed their views on privacy.  Students allowed a team of researchers to capture all of their messaging, whether it was completely innocent or contained swearing, sexual references, and even drug deals, to the tune of 500,000 texts per month in exchange for a free BlackBerry!

With a $3.4 million grant from the NIH, Dr. Marion Underwood from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas-Dallas embarked on the study with the goal of investigating the formation and maintenance of friendships as well as the dynamics of social and physical aggression. The students signed up in 2003 as 4th graders (with their parents consent) for the research, which at the time was named “The Friendship Project.”

For the next four years, students and parents would be interviewed and would self report about friendships, but valuable information about relationships and social interactions is lost when relying only on self reporting and interviewing. But in 2007, with the students one year away from entering high school, Dr. Underwood got a BlackBerry and saw the potential for tracking all of the students’ communication.

The study was then transformed into the more ominously titled “The BlackBerry Project.”

To continue to participate in the study, students agreed to have all of their electronic communication stored in a database. Those who did received a new BlackBerry complete with unlimited messaging, a data plan, and voice minutes. Every year through high school, the students have been given a new BlackBerry, and now as seniors, they have produced an enormous amount of data, a virtual window into the lives of teens. It’s clear that the researchers will be crunching on the data for a long time.

According to Forbes, Dr. Underwood indicated that concern over privacy among the students and their parents have been a non-issue (probably for different reasons).

Details about the success of the methodology in tracking teen communication were released in a recent paper published in Developmental Psychology. The paper describes a data set collected from a two-day window over homecoming, which included a football game and a dance.  For parents, some unsettling statistics from the 43,000 texts emerged (which comes out to 127 texts per participant per day). The data shows that students were rather open in their communication with nearly seven percent of texts contained either profane or sexual language. Contrary to other studies and perhaps popular opinion, girls texted to the same degree as boys. Not only did many students report using their BlackBerry always or most of the time, the overwhelming majority reported liking the BlackBerry a great deal.

Results from the study show that boys and girls text often and equally.

The teens were from homes in the Dallas area that spanned the entire income range. Additionally, their racial distribution (50% Caucasian, 23% African American, 15% Hispanic) is also approximately representative of the demographics of other major U.S. cities, such as Boston.

While it is shocking to some that kids would so willingly allow their most intimate conversations to be mined for data about everything from bullying to suicidal thoughts, it is easy to underestimate the value of a smartphone to today’s teens. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that among 12 to 17 year olds, 75 percent own cell phones. Additionally, over 70 percent of teenagers text message regularly and have unlimited text messaging plans. A student without a cell phone is left out of the biggest social scene at school and lacks convenient access to the web, which is a global social club.

But beyond gadget envy, the willingness of the participants reflects a shift in the generational attitude about privacy.

A 2007 Zogby poll found a markedly different perspective about privacy between younger Americans and older age groups. For instance, according to the poll, around 1 out of 3 respondents aged 18-24 felt that their privacy would be violated if someone posted a picture of them in their swimsuit, whereas nearly 2 of 3 older respondents agreed. Furthermore, 1 out of every 5 of the younger people said that who they had dated was too private for the web, but over half of the older demographic said it would be an invasion of their privacy if someone accessed their dating profile without their consent. Altogether, the generational disparity disappeared in one area: 91 percent said that expectations about privacy have changed due to technology and the Internet.

In terms of privacy within the study, Dr. Underwood describes how she and the two others on the team with access to the database went to great lengths not to betray the confidence of the teens to their parents, even when some of the kids ran away from home or illegal activities were being discussed. And students were well aware that the “BlackBerry people” were watching but indicated trust that they wouldn’t be reported for what was texted.

This suggests that privacy was important to the students when it came to passing information to their parents, but not to complete strangers.

With the mound of data the team is sitting on, this is not the last we’ll hear from the Blackberry Project. Furthermore, researchers and companies around the world now have a winning game plan for the Free-Phone-For-Data strategy. While older generations and privacy advocates might be appalled at that prospect, the younger generations will likely think “What’s the big deal?” And that difference explains volumes about the underlying difference between how different generations use social media and the web in general.

It’s safe to say, privacy doesn’t mean the same thing to the younger generation as it does to the older and, just as many suspected, you can thank the web and technology for that.

[Media: APA, sxc]

[Sources: APA, Forbes, PR Newswire]

Small molecule, big controversy. A new study clears doubts about how resveratrol causes its anti-aging effects.

Resveratrol, the famed anti-aging supplement extracted from red wine, has experienced its share of controversy. An experimental artifact, a pair of studies that questioned its health benefits, and the shady practices of one now-discredited scientist have put resveratrol in a bad light as of late. But a recent study now attempts to help set the record straight by confirming one part of the resveratrol puzzle.

Resveratrol was first identified in 2003 when Konrad Howitz, working with David Sinclair’s group at Harvard, found that it activated the protein SIRT1. Past research has “implicated” SIRT1 as an anti-aging factor due to the beneficial effects it has on glucose homeostasis, neurodegeneration, and integrity of the cell’s power house, the mitochondria. A number of studies suggested that the healthful benefits of resveratrol were via the activation of SIRT1 but it still remained to be shown convincingly. Even casting doubt on resveratrol’s ability to activate SIRT1 were two 2005 studies that showed that a fluorescent marker used in one of the experiments was activating SIRT1 itself.

To get to the molecular bottom of things, Harvard biologist David Sinclair and his team devised an elegant experiment to see if resveratrol still had the same effect on cells if SIRT1 was removed. This would be a convincing demonstration that the beneficial effects of resveratrol were indeed through the activation of SIRT1. To do this the group developed a mouse that was genetically modified so that all of the SIRT1 in its body would disappear when it was given a certain chemical. Strikingly, normal mice in the study reaped the expected benefits when given resveratrol, but mice with no SIRT1 did not.

Sinclair co-founded Sirtis Pharmaceuticals, which is developing drugs that, like resveratrol, activate SIRT1, so obviously data supporting that the benefits of resveratrol are via SIRT1 activation helps out Sinclair and other companies developing drugs meant to mimic resveratrol or otherwise activate SIRT1. Conversely, we previously pointed out that two studies which put into question resveratrol’s beneficial effects were performed by Pfizer and Amgen, companies in competition with Glaxo-Smith-Kline who bought Sirtis in 2008 for $720 million.

Does the potential conflict of interest detract from the powerful demonstration Sinclair’s team was able to show with their genetically-modified mice?  There are sure to be more pieces to the resveratrol puzzle and the current experiment will have to be reproduced. But for the moment, demonstrating the link between the wine extract and SIRT1 is an important step if resveratrol will ever be shown to live up to its anti-aging potential.

[image credits: LA Times and extremelongevity.net]
images: wine and molecule

During test drives the cars will have red license plates. When the car is eventually marketed to consumers, the plate will be green.

We knew Nevada was serious about becoming the first state to adopt driverless cars when the governor signed a law last year requiring the state to come up with regulations by which to authorize autonomous vehicles. They did, and now the first license to test autonomous vehicles in the state has been awarded to – no surprise here – Google’s robotic car.

It wasn’t long ago that it gave a lift to its first passenger. Now the Google car has been awarded the first autonomous test license. That it’s Google who takes the first licensed test run comes as no surprise, not only because their sensor-laden, robotic Toyota Prius has been the most visible robotic car over the past year and a half, but also because the licenses are largely a result of Google’s own lobby pushing for them. And some of the car’s 200,000 miles have been logged on freeways and neighborhood streets in Carson City, Nevada and – you guessed it – the Vegas Strip. After reviewing Google’s system functions, safety plans, employee training, and accident reporting mechanisms the Nevada DMV’s Autonomous Review Committee gave Google its license. The license requires two humans to be in the car at all times, with one behind the wheel to take over in case something goes wrong.

So if you live in Nevada be on the lookout. Autonomous cars will have Nevada license plates with red backgrounds and an infinity symbol, to make them easy to spot by citizens and police officers. If all goes according to plan and the test vehicles perform as hoped, the vehicles will be made available to the public, green plates will replace the red, but the infinity symbol will remain.

You gotta hand it to both Google and Nevada, they’re certainly wasting no time in getting robotic cars on the road. The Nevada DMV said in a press release that Google may have been the first, but other auto manufacturers have also indicated their interest in filing license applications. So it seems that this is just the beginning, and if all goes well, public acceptance of robotic vehicles is sure to increase dramatically.

These are exciting times, the age of robotic vehicles is upon us.

[image credits: ars technica]
image: Google