Speakers like Steven Pinker make the Harvard Thinks Big series well worth watching.

Of the many things I love that are enabled by the internet, getting a free education has to be among the best. There are thousands of high quality lectures available online, allowing anyone with good connectivity to expand their understanding with the help of some of the brightest and most gifted thinkers on the planet. Harvard University, in a nod to conferences like TED, has recently completed its second annual Harvard Thinks Big series. In these yearly events, 10 of the most famous of the faculty give 10 minute talks fit to excite, entertain, and enlighten their audience. The topics range from storytelling and imagery in fairy-tales to how becoming a geek could get you girls. I’ve chosen a few of the best (and most Hub-related) videos to share with you below – including a look at the continuing importance of cities, and humanity’s need to overcome biologically-driven morality. Easily digestible but thoroughly inspiring, these short talks are just the sort of presentation that can keep you hungry for learning. Thanks again, Harvard, for the good education.

As we’ve discussed before, our empirical understanding of the brain is improving and with that knowledge comes the opportunity to reexamine our social, legal, and moral assumptions. Joshua Greene is a professor of psychology who uses fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and genotyping to better understand how humans make decisions. He and his colleagues have discovered that there are multiple mechanisms in our brain for choosing between right and wrong. In the following video, Greene asks us to consider which mechanisms we should keep, and we should abandon as we move towards building a global community:

With the spread of high speed internet connections, more of us are able to communicate across vast distances with low cost and high fidelity. Webcams and chat rooms are just the beginning. Is this connectivity going to ring the death knell for cities? After all, why live in a crowded urban setting when you can communicate with anyone in the world from your lush rural paradise? In the following video Edward Glaesar, a professor of economics, makes the case that cities will expand and thrive in the upcoming era. Physical proximity will stay valuable:

Last year’s inaugural Harvard Thinks Big had several great speakers. The following videos are of Steven Pinker’s discussion on the falling rates of violence over the course of civilization, and Andrew Barry’s talk on how geneticists will be able to find the differences that separate us from other animals. Both are well worth your time.

While many of the Harvard Thinks Big talks aren’t about science and technology, I encourage you to browse through all the videos and find others that tickle your fancy. The 2010 lectures are available on the HUTV site, while the 2011 talks are becoming available on one of Harvard’s YouTube channels. Short presentations like these are a wonderful launching pad to push you to investigate new topics you may not have been exposed to otherwise.

10 minutes is hardly enough time to become an expert in a new subject, but there is certainly a lot of value in short introductory lectures for those looking to continue their education. Many universities are slowly making their main classroom lectures readily available online, not just for their students, but for the world as a whole. As that happens, I think we’ll see many more people use the internet as a means of obtaining access to some of the highest levels of academic discourse. When they do, will the boundaries between formally educated and informally educated fade? Hmm…I don’t know. Hey, Harvard, get a professor to lecture on that next year, okay?

[screen capture and video credits: HUTV]
[source: HUTV Network (Harvard Thinks Big)]

IT'S ALIVE! ...seriously though, this pig heart is still alive. Cell decay has been slowed using Somah, Harvard's new wonder preservative.

Science fiction is fraught with mad scientists who discover strange chemicals that can empower the human body or even reanimate the dead. Well, Harvard has come about as close to that scenario as anyone would want them to. Prof. Hemant Thatte has developed a cocktail of 21 chemical compounds that he calls Somah, derived from the sanskrit for “ambrosia of rejuvenation”. Using Somah, Thattle and his team have accomplished some amazing feats with pig hearts. They can keep the organ viable for transplant up to 10 days after harvest – that’s incredibly longer than the 4 hour limit seen in hospitals today. Not only that, but using low temperatures and Somah, they were able to take a pig heart that was removed post mortem and get it to beat 24 hours later in the lab. Watch that amazing video after the break.

We’ve seen amazing chemical treatments that have the potential to transform the medical industry. Mark Roth is working with hydrogen sulfide to put soldiers and other trauma victims into suspended animation on the way to hospitals. The University of Bristol uses xenon gas and low temperatures to prevent brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation. Now Somah could help preserve organs for more than a week outside the body. As researchers continue to unlock the mysteries of your body’s chemistry, they may find more ways of preserving and protecting it indefinitely. This will make it much easier to repair or replace parts of your body as they fail, letting you live longer, and healthier. Maybe indefinitely.

Thousands of patients waiting for an organ transplant die each year in the US alone. Donated organs are limited in availability by distance and time. After harvesting, a heart has just about 4 hours to reach its recipient, anything more than that and decomposition will render the heart nonviable. If we could extend that window to 10 days, almost any organ could be made available to almost anyone, anywhere. That will lead to many saved lives. It will also lower costs as there would be no need for chartered jets and other speedy transports.

Somah may also save lives by extending the number of viable heart donors. Now, most of these organs are harvested from patients who are brain dead, but with a beating heart (effectively still alive as far as the body is concerned). After death, cells begin to degrade quickly. If a donor arrives to a hospital DOA, their organs may not be available to transplant to needy recipients. Somah, however, has been shown to reverse some of this cell decay. The chemical cocktail helps transform metabolic agents into preservative agents. Thatte’s team took a pig heart harvested post mortem and let it sit in Somah for 24 hours at lower temperatures. The cell degradation was very low. They then warmed the heart up, hooked it into an artificial circulatory system and got it to beat. This clip is brief, but it shows the incredible achievement:

To better understand if and how Somah preserved a heart, Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers. One was filled with Somah, the other with Celsior from Genzyme – the standard chemical bath which preserves organs in hospitals today. As described in the journal Circulation, the team took tissue samples every four hours from each heart. They found that the Somah heart had a much lower rate of cell decay, including important cardiomyocyte and endothelial cells which are necessary for the heart to work in a new host. Based on this research they concluded that hearts preserved in Somah should be viable for up to 10 days. Celsior can store the organ for 4 hours. That’s an epic difference.

And one that investors are hoping to bank on. A new startup, Hibergenica, is looking to commercialize Somah for use in humans. The company is still in its very early stages. Likewise, Somah still has a ways to go. Transplants from pigs to other pigs (using Somah) will have to be performed before human clinical trials can begin. We’re talking years of research before the FDA would possibly approve Somah for use in the US.

Other companies are relatively closer to augmenting the time hearts stay fresh outside the body. We’ve already seen how TransMedics can keep a heart beating for 12 hours inside a machine, and they are moving forward with tens of millions in funding. Somah, however, could potentially keep hearts viable for 20 times longer, and probably with fewer electrical and mechanical requirements. It will be interesting to see how these technologies ramp up in comparison to stem cell projects aimed at creating entirely new organs from a patient’s own cells. Simpler forms of that concept (for windpipes) have had a series of successes recently with human patients. No matter which of these technologies is the first to achieve widespread use, the future seems ready to provide us with the means to get a new heart when we need it.

[image credit: Harvard]
[video credit: Thatte, Harvard]
[source: Technology Review, Tech Transfer (Harvard), Circulation]

Which of the faces on the right match the one on the left? Questions like this helped researchers determine that you inherit your ability to accuractely recognize faces.

The quest for augmenting human intelligence is a fierce one. Our modern civilization is based on years of school attendance – nominally in pursuit of making smarter workers and citizens. It goes beyond that, however: we don’t just want to get smarter through hard work, we want an easy fix. Students regularly use nootropic drugs, herbal supplements are toted as keeping your mind young, and we continually report on studies that hope to find which vitamins and minerals are essential to brain health.

Yet the 21st century approach to making smarter humans is probably going to be genetic in nature. We’ve seen how a single manipulated gene can improve memory and cognition in rats. Now, the CFMT twin study suggests that genes are also responsible for one of our most basic social skills: recognizing faces. Politicians and business executives everywhere would line up around the block if a genetic therapy could be developed to augment facial recognition skills. There’s no sign that such a therapy would be possible yet, but this research suggests that the performance of at least one brain mechanism (possibly many more) is determined by our genes. Which parent doesn’t want a smarter child? Chalk this up as another pressure on society to begin producing designer babies.

It’s pretty rare for us bloggers to be able to participate in the scientific research we report on. Luckily, the CFMT is available to take online. It only asks for a minimum of identifiable information, and takes 5-10 minutes to complete. All you do is study some computer generated faces (like those seen above) and then recognize them in a line up. Pretty simple, and kind of fun. The test is available via Faceblind.org – part of a research partnership between Harvard and UCL interested in prosopagnosia.

I haven’t been able to find online versions of the word recognition and art recognition tests given to the twins (and 1500+ non-twin volunteers). The PNAS paper does show a typical question for each however:

For both the Abstract Art Memory and Verbal Paired Association Memory tests the image/words on the left would be shown then removed before the images/words on the right would be shown.

It will be interesting to see if this research spawns a dedicated search for the genes responsible for improved (or impaired) facial recognition. Certainly growing databases of genetic samples, and the ever decreasing costs of whole genome sequencing makes that search a reasonable possibility. As we find other heritable cognitive abilities, similar work can be performed. Exhaustive studies of our genes may lead to a better understanding of the ‘genotype of cognition’.

Speaking of studies, why don’t we see how Singularity Hub readers stack up on the facial recognition scale? Take the Cambridge Face Memory Test and post your scores in the comments section. We can get a leader board started. May the best genes win!

[image credit: PNAS, Faceblind]
[sources: Faceblind, PNAS, UCL, Harvard]

Work at Harvard University will allow scientists to observe the entire lifespan of worms. Humans could be in the far future.

The lessons of a lifetime are powerful, even if that life belongs to a worm. Harvard scientists have developed a microfluidics system so that they can observe the entire lifespan of minute water born animals . These researchers hope their observation will provide important insight into the effects of aging, and diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. According to a paper published on RSC, the microfluidics system allows the Caenorhabditis elegans worms to move as normal without leaving the field of view of cameras and microscopes. Their microfludic cells are sort of the worm equivalent of virtual reality treadmills. Food (in the form of bacteria) comes in, waste is removed, and the worm can swim around. There’s even a special suction system (developed by other teams) to temporarily secure the C. elegans and facilitate close observation or laser microsurgery. The microfluidics system has many different chambers so that a large number of worms can be observed while still tracking the individual identity of each one. In short, Harvard’s created a means to completely observe the entire life of an animal, and it may lead to some remarkable insights in biology.

The Harvard work is touted as medical. Observations of minute changes in swimming activity, body size, and other signs of health will allow researchers to understand how aging affects not only body chemistry but also activity. That sort of understanding could direct studies on mice, primates, right up to humans. Researchers believe that learning from worms is an important step in learning about human aging and nerve disorders. We’ve seen similar connections drawn between experiments with worms and conclusions in humans for substances like resveratrol. They are probably more tenuous than researchers would care to believe.

I think the greater implication of the Harvard work is that these scientists have created one of the first full life-logging systems for a statistically large number of animals all at once (about 16). Imagine the same in humans, you could observe an entire office; the complete life of each inhabitant. That’s a far way off for now, but if microfluidics is the answer for worms, there could be similar answers for higher order organisms. Remember that these worms are moving their bodies freely (swimming in different directions) without leaving their chambers. It really is like a VR environment for them.

Of course, humans are familiar with the life-logging concept, though it has yet to reach the level of observation we’ve seen for animals in laboratory settings. We are moving into an age of constant social networking, flickr, and YouTube. The upcoming generation may be some of the first who’s life has more recorded moments than not. That’s going to lead to a huge amount of data about how humans age. Until that time, we can learn similar information about lower animals but in a much shorter time span.  The Harvard microfluidics system, and the work with C. elegans, gives some truly unique insight into the life of animals start to finish. Pretty cool stuff.

[photo credit: RSC]

By color-coding stem cells, reserachers isolated those that would form different parts of the heart.

It’s Alive! Researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital have succeeded in taking embryonic stem cells from mice and growing cardiovascular tissue. The research team, led by Dr. Kenneth Chien, believes that a similar process may one day serve to repair cardiac damage in humans. The work was recently published in the journal Science. You can see the mouse heart cells beating at different speeds in the video from Boston.com after the break.

Cardiac injury is some of the most difficult damage to heal in the body. When the heart undergoes massive damage from a coronary, you have few options – replace broken parts, add a pacemaker, or get a whole new heart. The work done by Chien and his team focuses on creating a new way to repair tissue damage. Instead of adding in mechanical parts, or finding a donor organ, stem cells may be used to replace and heal the damaged cardiac tissue. Eventually, those patients that develop a myocardial injury could have pluripotent stem cells harvested from their skin, marrow, or fat which would then be introduced into the heart via injection. No open heart surgery, no pacemakers, just stem cells and a needle.

While the pulsing tissue in the video is cool looking, readers may recall that we’ve seen far more advanced stem cell creations on Singularity Hub. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created entire mouse and pig hearts that beat. Those videos are much more impressive. What then, makes the Harvard/MGH research so noteworthy?

Unlike the Minnesota work, the Harvard project isn’t aimed at creating entirely new organs. Instead, Chien and his colleagues have developed a manner to differentiate between different pluripotent stem cells. They introduced a color coding system via genetic engineering so that the stem cells could be selected based on which part of the heart they will become. Using this technique, the appropriate mouse stem cells could be cultivated to replace/heal just one portion of the damaged organ. It’s that identification and isolation of stem cell types that is so unique for this work.

Using their technique, the team is ready to start the next step: developing a 3D collection of mouse cardiac tissue. After that, the team could start performing heart repair on living mice. If successful, it will likely take many years of research and clinical trials before such a stem cell therapy would become a publicly available treatment in humans. Still, these current results show that Chien and his team are able to find the right stem cells for the job.

Though watching a newly formed heart beat is more impressive than watching the same motion in a tiny strip of tissue, we should remember that we really need both. Some damage from heart attacks will be able to be repaired. Other damage or chronic forms of heart disease will require a full organ transplant. By pursuing both options, researchers in Massachusetts and Minnesota will eventually provide the best possible health care. And it’s needed. According to the CDC, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, about 27% of total lives lost. Similar rates are seen throughout the developed world, primarily because of poor lifestyle choices. C’mon little mouse heart tissue, keep beating! We’re all going to want your help real soon.

[Video Credit: Boston.com and Kenneth Chien et al]