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I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, but I thought I would also blog about this WSJ story since they have a nice graphic showing how telomeres work. One of the three winners of the Nobel prize, Elizabeth Blackburn, is local

A press release today says that “IBM Research Aims to Build Nanoscale DNA Sequencer to Help Drive Down Cost of Personalized Genetic Analysis”. The release goes on to say that “This advanced research effort to demonstrate a silicon-based “DNA Transistor”

That was the headline from a recent AP story. Depending on how the research goes, that could be a very conservative estimate. Here’s more from the article: “James Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and colleagues in Denmark

The proponents of Net neutrality say that government regulation is necessary for a free and open Internet, but history doesn’t support that argument. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, for example, was supposed to bolster competition. Instead, by compelling companies to

From Rockefeller University via Kurzweil AI.Net: “The human brain is made up of 100 billion neurons — live wires that must be kept in delicate balance to stabilize the world’s most magnificent computing organ. Too much excitement and the network

That was the headline in a NYT article today. The reality is that scientific respect for life-extending research has been there for quite a while, it’s just that the NYT recently noticed. In any case, here’s an interesting prediction that

This is one way. Dr. Samuel Preston (after whom the Preston curve is named) says that the US health care system isn’t the reason for the longevity divide between the US (78 years) and countries like Japan (83 years). Instead,

The father of the “Green Revolution,” Norman Borlaug, died yesterday. If you didn’t know about him, you should. By creating new types of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat, he saved millions from starvation. This is a good story about him, and you

This is great news from the Economist: “More children are surviving beyond their fifth birthday, according to a new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). The child mortality rate—the number of under-fives dying per thousand live births—declined from

14 genomes were sequenced for about $4000. That’s down from the $250,000 that it used to cost. Pretty cool. From the Mercury news: “Complete Genomics, a Mountain View startup, announced Tuesday that it had deciphered 14 full human genomes for