“A large European-Asian consortium brought some order to the chaos when it reported in a Nature paper in April that humanity can be roughly divided into three “enterotypes” depending on which genus of bacteria dominates in people’s gut: Bacteroides, Ruminococcus, or Prevotella. People’s enterotype appeared to be stable over time, but it remains unclear why your gut population might be so radically different from your neighbor’s.”
Yet another report on diet and gut microbiome. If I could start all over again in grad-school, I’d study this. Human microbiological ecology is going to be big in so many areas, helping us understand the effects that our microbiome has on our health. And of course, this will go hand-in-hand with practical use of naturally occurring microbes.
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“In Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Gulliver encounters a small group of immortals, the struldbrugs. “Those excellent struldbrugs,” exclaims Gulliver, “who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!”
But the fate of these immortals wasn’t so simple, as Swift goes on to report. They were still subject to aging and disease, so that by 80, they were “opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative,” as well as “incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.” At 90, they lost their teeth and hair and couldn’t carry on conversations.”
Long life versus living long. Thinking of the ring wraiths. 
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“A tiny spare bedroom is not an ideal space for a high tech biofabrication facility. To get to the one Josh Perfetto is putting together, visitors must walk all the way to the back of his mostly unfurnished house in Saratoga, California—through the kitchen, past some empty rooms, across a den with a lone couch—then climb a poorly lit staircase and round a corner.”
A really nice article on the state of gadgets DIYbiologists are creating on their own to do their biology. Very fun.
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“These results add another dimension to the evolution of resistance and suggest that the low antibiotic concentrations found in many natural environments are important for enrichment and maintenance of resistance in bacterial populations.”
I get a feeling that antibiotics will soon become as archaic as blood-letting. The sooner we deal with the consequences that any amount of the current selection of antibiotics is just generating super-bugs, the sooner we can get off traditional antibiotics. I’m really hopeful of new ways to controls microorganisms that would be a healthier mix (rather than the usual single target that can be evolved around) of other microorganisms, highly specific chemicals, and targeted designed nucleic acids.
But, then again, what do I know? What do you think of the future of antibiotics?
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“Where others see barroom taps crowded with beer options, Chris Lohring sees opportunity brewing.”
A nice article on the state of breweries in the region, the business, and the entrepreneurs. Quite exciting.
As for me, I’ll stick to small time 5-gal brewing.
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“Brewing good beer isn’t something unique to Ireland, Germany, or the mountains of Vermont. In fact, there are quite a few craft breweries in Massachusetts that find an appreciative customer base both inside and beyond the borders of the Bay State.
“Here are 10 breweries and brewpubs that produce their suds in the state, as well as the most popular beers they produce.”
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“A new wave of niche breweries is the most noteworthy since the mid-1990s. New England is playing catch-up with California and other parts of the country already experiencing their own craft beer boomlets.”
Take a look at the inner workings of a brewery.
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“Here I’ll try to give a high-level picture of Ginkgo’s pipeline for organism engineering. If you’ve checked out our webpage, you’ll see that we have several different organism engineering projects happening at Ginkgo that span several different hosts. Our goal was to build out a pipeline that could support the engineering of all these very different organisms for very different purposes but that uses a shared pipeline. To accomplish this goal, we deliberately opted to decouple design from fabrication. Ginkgo organism engineers place requests via our CAD/CAM/LIMS software system. Those requests are then batched and run on Ginkgo’s robots.”
This is indeed exciting. These folks are among the most experienced in synthetic biology and they are finally taking their engineering skills to the next level. They are reducing organism creation to a CAD request to an automated pipeline by an organism engineer. Really cool. [See more here: http://ginkgobioworks.com/works.html]
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“Nearly 8 of out 10 Americans are willing to pay up to $100 for a medical device that monitors their vital signs, according to an IBM survey that tracks trends in the use of mobile devices in healthcare. Fewer than 10% of respondents are paying out-of-pocket charges for such devices today, but more than one-third expect to do so within the next two years.”
This is great. Trends in miniaturization of sensors, mobile connectivity, and accountable care are creating the right conditions for health sensors to boom. This article summarizes a survey done by IBM (disclaimer: my employer) with a whole slew of very interesting findings – a state of the market, so to speak.
Do you know anyone using mobile snsored devices to track health info for their health care provider?
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“I was knocking back a Harpoon IPA last week in an old textile warehouse in Boston, thinking about what Massachusetts will mean to the global economy in this century. The beer had been brewed by a company headquartered just a few blocks away, in the Seaport District. But it had been chilled in a giant steel vat designed by another company, Promethean Power Systems. Promethean is developing technology that uses energy from the sun to operate a refrigerator, intended to help farmers in developing countries keep milk and produce fresh longer, increasing their earnings. The sun-cooled beer was being served at a grand opening party for Greentown Labs, a grungy-but-proud-of-it workspace occupied by Promethean and eight other start-up companies developing new energy-related technologies.”
Very nice article about the new businesses cropping up in the state that are creating wold-changing products and services. Fits in well with some of my thoughts on the philanthropy of business.
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