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It's a fart-measuring pill:
Scientists often hope to break ground with their research. But a group of Australian researchers would likely be happy with breaking wind.
The team developed an ingestible electronic capsule [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41928-017-0004-x] to monitor gas levels in the human gut. When it's paired with a pocket-sized receiver and a mobile phone app, the pill reports tail-wind conditions in real time as it passes from the stomach to the colon. The researchers, led by Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh of RMIT University and Peter Gibson of Monash University, reported their invention Monday in Nature Electronics.
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Ingestible Electronic Pill Senses Gases in the Gut
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:24PM (3 children)
They could mean "immortality", if that cleanup and repair involves aging damage [wikipedia.org].
General purpose nanobots will be difficult to make. I guess that they would require nanoscale lasers, various forms of sensors, some small amount of computing and data storage, and a way of producing a small amount of electricity biologically. Even the simplest "nanobots" that deliver a drug payload [mcgill.ca] to a target (such as cancer cells) are still stuck in the lab. Even if the technology is sound, safety considerations will delay their release by years.
Size [wikibooks.org] would need to be larger than most viruses in order to pack in more stuff. 500 nm diameter? Or maybe they could be made even larger but unable to enter human cells, instead working from the outside. The ideal nanobot should be able to replace the genome in a cell with a corrected version. An alternative could be to make the nanobot a larger microbot instead and have it spit out synthesized "clean" human cells, DNA and all, at the sites where they are needed, while killing old cells.
Cost might not be so bad if they could be grown on a silicon wafer. Billions of nanobots for hundreds of dollars. Depending on the amount needed, the rate at which they break down, and their utility, they could beat out many expensive drugs. Plus, preventative medicine can reduce or eliminate expensive hospital visits.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:12PM (2 children)
Hmmmm. Detecting and repairing aging damage goes pretty far beyond the staple nanobots in Sci-Fi. Most of what I've read and/or imagined is basically simple diagnostics, and mechanical destruction and/or repair. To do what you're talkiing about, those nanobots will have to manipulate stem cells, and trigger them to grow into whatever is needed. Not even my favorite SF writers have gone that far - yet. Aging in the human body is related to how many times, since conception, the cells have reproduced, and how many errors have been introduced with each reproduction. I think it's pretty much universally recognized that those errors can't be rolled back, without fresh stem cells.
But, yeah - given the ability to manipulate stem cells, the bots could probably make you nearly immortal.
Of course, bots would have their limits. If you happen to be at ground zero of a nuclear attack, those bots are going to be pretty useless. Or, if your spaceship falls into the sun - but that's basically the same thing as a nuclear attack. There will probably be lesser trauma from which you won't recover, with or without magical nanobots. Predator runs you through a juicer, and drinks you down - you're probably screwed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:52PM (1 child)
Cleaning up "intracellular" and especially "extracellular" junk as SENS outlines may be possible, and is another important aspect of aging besides mutations.
Lengthening telomeres should be easy enough, but could remove an important defense mechanism against cancer. Luckily, eliminating cancer cells is probably one of the easier tasks for nanobots to perform and could be done with dumb nanoparticle drug cages as mentioned.
Telomeres, at the heart of the aging process [longlonglife.org]
Repairing mutations will be harder. You would essentially want to do gene editing on all of the cells of the body using a digital reference (your "pristine" genomic sequence). Our viral/CRISPR methods of gene therapy seem to kill a lot of cells and introduce mistakes. Whichever way a nanobot would approach the task, if it needs to poke itself into the cell or nucleus, you would expect that to damage some cells. Creating a new cell with the pristine DNA right in place and killing the old one could be a better approach.
Can data storage be made dense enough to store the whole genome locally in the nanobot for synthesis or quality sequencing purposes? The human cell nucleus diameter is 6000 nm, and contains a dense form of storage: DNA. Can we improve on DNA? You can't use (much) genome compression because that would require a huge reference to be stored locally. Maybe you could broadcast your genome wirelessly to all the nanobots so they can use it to guide synthesis, but that might have its own technical difficulties or even privacy concerns.
I don't know if stem cells are the only mechanism nanobots could use to do this. But "fresh" (embryonic) stem cells are becoming a dead meme. Scientists are pretty much making completely usable cells [sciencedaily.com] from skin cells, if not entirely synthetically yet (starting with no cell instead of a skin cell). The capability to make any necessary cell on demand will be developed. On the nanoscale, it could just mimic or co-opt the biological processes to make new cells.
I had "immortality" in quotes, right? But if you need shorthand for this, try "biological immortality" [wikipedia.org] or "functional immortality".
Obviously nanobots are not going to save you from being incinerated. But maybe nigh-magical level nanobots could help prevent death after some car crashes, or prevent you from dying of radiation sickness by repairing damage as it happens.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:28PM
That was an unfortunate choice of words. I meant "fresh" to mean "viable stem cells that can be triggered to develop into whatever cells are needed". I didn't mean to imply that placental or embryonic cells were necessary. In view of the controversy over stem cell research in this country, it was a very poor choice of words. ;^(