Running DNA Like a Computer Could Help You Fight Viruses One Day

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DON’T TAKE THIS the wrong way, but you’re just data. Genes built you, from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head. In that sense, you’re not unlike a computer: Code produces the output that is your body.

In fact, for the past two decades, scientists have used actual DNA as if it were literal code, a process called DNA computing, to do things like calculating square roots. Today, researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that they’ve deployed DNA to detect antibodies—soldiers your body produces to fight viruses and such—by running a sequence of molecular instructions. Someday, the same kind of calculations could automatically release drugs in response to infections.

The Rise In C-Sections Could Be Changing Human Evolution

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C-sections have been on the rise for decades, now making up more than 30 percent of all deliveries in the United States.

An intriguing new study out of Austria suggests that as C-sections have become more common, they might also be altering the course of human evolution. More babies are being born with heads that are too big for their mothers’ pelvises ... which leads, the theory goes, to more C-sections.

Why?

E-Cigarette Use Falls Among Teens

Vaping and marijuana use more popular among teens than regular cigarettes, according to NIH

A Betamorph E-Cigs employee exhaling vapor from an electric cigarette at the company's store in Albuquerque, N.M. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS

E-cigarette use among teens dropped in 2016, reversing an upward trend that had prompted the U.S. Surgeon General to recommend increased regulation and taxation.

Among high-school seniors, 12% this year said they had used e-cigarettes in the past month compared with 16% in 2015, according to the National Institutes of Health’s annual Monitoring the Future survey.

E-cigarettes and marijuana are both more popular among teens than regular cigarettes, whose use among teens has been declining for more than two decades, according to the survey. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor.

Among high-school seniors, 23% said they had used marijuana in the past month, and 11% said they had smoked conventional cigarettes. Some 13% of high-school seniors said they had used tobacco with a hookah in the past year, down from 23% in 2014, the peak since the survey began measuring hookah use in 2010.

12 Reasons Why Apple Cider Vinegar Will Revolutionize Your Health

Recently, one of my good friends shared with me her story of how she cured her eczema naturally using apple cider vinegar (ACV).

Since she was a young girl, her skin would break out in painful, itchy rashes which she would treat with doctor prescribed and recommended steroid creams.        

Google’s AI Reads Retinas to Prevent Blindness in Diabetics

GOOGLE’S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE can play the ancient game of Go better than any human. It can identify faces, recognize spoken words, and pull answers to your questions from the web. But the promise is that this same kind of technology will soon handle far more serious work than playing games and feeding smartphone apps. One day, it could help care for the human body.

Demonstrating this promise, Google researchers have worked with doctors to develop an AI that can automatically identify diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause blindness among adults. Using deep learning—the same breed of AI that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—the system detects the condition by examining retinal photos. In a recent study, it succeeded at about the same rate as human opthamologists, according to a paper published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We were able to take something core to Google—classifying cats and dogs and faces—and apply it to another sort of problem,” says Lily Peng, the physician and biomedical engineer who oversees the project at Google.

But the idea behind this AI isn’t to replace doctors. Blindness is often preventable if diabetic retinopathy is caught early. The hope is that the technology can screen far more people for the condition than doctors could on their own, particularly in countries where healthcare is limited, says Peng. The project began, she says, when a Google researcher realized that doctors in his native India were struggling to screen all the locals that needed to be screened.

In many places, doctors are already using photos to diagnose the condition without seeing patients in person. “This is a well validated technology that can bring screening services to remote locations where diabetic retinal eye screening is less available,” says David McColloch, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Washington who specializes in diabetes. That could provide a convenient on-ramp for an AI that automates the process.