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POOP VANDALISM MYSTERY ENDS IN HUGE VICTORY FOR YOUR GENETIC RIGHTS

Police were seeking a “devious defecator": the person responsible for leaving piles of poop in the aisles of a grocery store outside Atlanta. So to help out, the company that operates the store, Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services, asked employee suspects to take a voluntary cheek-swab genetic test.

Two employees who worked in the warehouse didn’t want to take the test because they felt humiliated and feared where their genetic information would end up, but they did so because they felt their jobs were on the line, as Buzzfeed reports. When the results came back, it turned out that neither employee was behind the vandalism. In May 2013, seven months after the test, the employees sued Atlas for genetic discrimination.

The law that establishes grounds for the lawsuit is the little-known 2008 federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). The law’s primary intention was to prevent people from being treated unfairly (by insurance companies, by employers) based on their DNA and its health consequences. But one of the clauses states that employers are not allowed to collect genetic information on their employees, which is how the warehouse workers won their case this past May. This week, a federal jury granted the men $2.2 million in damages, Buzzfeed states.

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Special Operators Are Using Rapid DNA Readers

TAMPA — Fingerprints are so 20th-century. For special operations forces conducting midnight raids in places like Pakistan or Syria, DNA is becoming the gold standard.

Representatives from the U.S. Special Operations Command revealed that they were testing two rapidDNA readers in forward locations. The operators feed in a DNA sample, and the reader compares it against a database that matches DNA to identities. The machines weigh some 60 pounds, so they aren’t small. And they aren’t cheap: each costs about $250,000. But they cangive a result in 90 minutes, a process that used to take weeks.

The devices are the RapidHIT 200 from IntegenX, a California-based company, and the DNAscan from Massachusetts-basedNetBIO.

What will they use them for? Verifying the identity of targets, either before raids or after the fact.

Ultimately, he wants a rugged, battery-powered DNA reader the size of a cellphone, which will allow special operations fighters to “collect DNA right there on the site.” It should connect to a database to allow verification on location as well.

Such a device might be available for field-testing around 2019 or 2020. “It’s a ways out” said Benji Hutchinson, senior director of federal business for MophoTrust, a company that markets the IntegenX. It would “require a major lift,” he said.

Shrinking the technology is just one obstacle to a hand-heldDNA matching system. Perhaps more important is growing the database of DNA samples to match against.

“When we first went out with fingerprints we got about a 5 percent match rate. Now we’ve populated the database, so we get 40 percent match,” said Fitz. He hopes DNA matching will show the same rapid improvement. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said.

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Special Operators Are Using Rapid DNA Readers

TAMPA — Fingerprints are so 20th-century. For special operations forces conducting midnight raids in places like Pakistan or Syria, DNA is becoming the gold standard.

Representatives from the U.S. Special Operations Command revealed that they were testing two rapidDNA readers in forward locations. The operators feed in a DNA sample, and the reader compares it against a database that matches DNA to identities. The machines weigh some 60 pounds, so they aren’t small. And they aren’t cheap: each costs about $250,000. But they can give a result in 90 minutes, a process that used to take weeks. 

The devices are the RapidHIT 200 from IntegenX, a California-based company, and the DNAscan from Massachusetts-basedNetBIO.

What will they use them for? Verifying the identity of targets, either before raids or after the fact.

Ultimately, he wants a rugged, battery-powered DNA reader the size of a cellphone, which will allow special operations fighters to “collect DNA right there on the site.” It should connect to a database to allow verification on location as well.

Such a device might be available for field-testing around 2019 or 2020. “It’s a ways out” said Benji Hutchinson, senior director of federal business for MophoTrust, a company that markets the IntegenX. It would “require a major lift,” he said.

Shrinking the technology is just one obstacle to a hand-heldDNA matching system. Perhaps more important is growing the database of DNA samples to match against.

“When we first went out with fingerprints we got about a 5 percent match rate. Now we’ve populated the database, so we get 40 percent match,” said Fitz. He hopes DNA matching will show the same rapid improvement. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said.

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Genecoin: DNA for the Blockchain

Enter Genecoin, a newcomer in the Bitcoin space that seeks to fulfill an unlikely spot in our Blockchain future: the encoding and storage of who we are. Despite its name, Genecoin is not a crypto currency or a counterparty asset. Genecoin is the name of a nascent company run by a group of anonymous bitcoiners based in a undisclosed location in the United States’ northeast coast. The members of Genecoin are offering a simple proposition to the Bitcoin universe: to populate the Bitcoin Blockchain with the sequenced DNA of its customers.

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Amongst the many technical challenges that Genecoin is openly addressing is just how to store this DNA data using Bitcoin. Given that your typical human’s unencrypted DNA takes up approximately 750 MiB of data, storage of this data in full, on the Blockchain, would be significantly cost prohibitive. However, Genecoin is quick to point out that much of this data is redundant between humans, and that this size can be drastically reduced by merely encoding the ‘differences’ amongst a single human’s DNA from those of a reference model. Such an encoding would require off-chain data be used for reference, and Genecoin is exploring various ways of referencing this data in a decentralized capacity. In addition to the considerations surrounding space efficiency, Genecoin is actively exploring mechanisms to encrypt the storage of one’s DNA on the Blockchain as well. After all, just because one wants their data to persist forever, doesn’t mean they want everyone privy to it. Options for latter decryption would include time-lock, and oracle-based decryption schemes.

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So, why would anyone want to encode their DNA on the Blockchain? Like much in the crypto space, some projects are a solution in search of a problem. However, one easy reason to use the blockchain to store DNA would be as a replacement for a traditional ‘Birth Certificate.’ Notarization has long been a function provided by the Bitcoin Blockchain, so to ‘notarize’ the existence of a person’s DNA could attest to the existence of an identity, and its age. This attestation would thereafter function in the much the same way as does our current oracle-based (hospital-centric) system. Additionally, for those thinking of the far off future, another fanciful notion might be to encode one’s DNA for the purposes of cloning by a future generation. If that sounds a bit too far-fetched, well, just remember that decentralized currencies were once a far-fetched idea as well.

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Intestinal gases have been linked to colon cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease, and could potentially be used as key biomarkers for assessing overall health.

The new technology -- developed by researchers from RMIT University and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia -- measures the concentration of selected intestinal gases through a swallowable capsule with a built-in gas sensor, microprocessor and wireless high-frequency transmitter.

Lead investigator, RMIT's Professor Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, said current non-invasive methods of measuring intestinal gas -- such as breath testing -- were unreliable.

"We know gut microorganisms produce gases as a by-product of their metabolism, but we understand very little about how that affects our health," he said.

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Project Cyborg

Project Cyborg is a cloud-based meta-platform of design tools for programming matter across domains and scales. Project Cyborg provides elastic cloud-based computation in a web-based CAD shell for services such as modeling, simulation and multi-objective design optimization. Researchers, developers, students and citizen scientists can use these tools to advance their own projects and, if they choose, share their work with others and even use Project Cyborg as a marketplace. Cyborg allows individuals or groups to create specialized design platforms specific for their domains, whatever their domains happen to be, from nanoparticle design to tissue engineering, to self-assembling human-scale manufacturing.

See also : BiomeView - Mapping the airborne microbiome

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PocketLab

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IBM’s Watson - Drug Research

As part of Baylor's research, Watson analyzed more than 70,000 scientific articles related to p53, a protein that has been linked to many cancers. Automated analysis carried out by Watson helped Baylor biologists and data scientists identify six proteins that modify p53 and that should be targeted for new research. Most important, the discovery was made in a matter of weeks, according to IBM.

"In the life sciences industry at large, researchers typically come across one of these target proteins per year," said IBM Watson VP John Gordon. "Baylor working with Watson found six targets, and the first two that they've taken into wet labs have been validated, so they're outpacing the industry."

The pace of biomedical research has greatly accelerated in recent years with breakthroughs in speedy, low-cost DNA analysis. What's more, leading pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, and many others are routinely finding correlations among genomic, clinical trial, and de-identified electronic medical records. Where Watson stands out, according to IBM, is its cognitive computing understanding of language and chemistry to make human-like leaps in understanding at computer-analysis speeds.

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Molecule Printer

In a new study published in the journal Science today, Burke has announced the specs of a chemistry's own version of the 3D printer—a machine that can systematically synthesize thousands of different molecules (including the ratanhine molecular family) from a handful of starting chemicals. Such a machine could not only make ratanhine step-by-step, but also could custom-create a dozen other closely-related chemicals—some never even synthesized before by humans. That could allow scientists to test the medicinal properties of a whole molecular family.

"GIVING PEOPLE THE ABILITY TO SYNTHESIZE MOLECULES WOULD BE GAME-CHANGING IN WAYS I CAN'T IMAGINE"

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In a brief talk, Bachelet said DNA nanobots will soon be tried in a critically ill leukemia patient. The patient, who has been given roughly six months to live, will receive an injection of DNA nanobots designed to interact with and destroy leukemia cells—while causing virtually zero collateral damage in healthy tissue. According to Bachelet, his team have successfully tested their method in cell cultures and animals and written two papers on the subject, one in Science and one in Nature. Contemporary cancer therapies involving invasive surgery and blasts of drugs can be as painful and damaging to the body as the disease itself. If Bachelet's approach proves successful in humans, and is backed by more research in the coming years, the team’s work could signal a transformational moment in cancer treatment. If this treatment works this will be a medical breakthrough and can be used for many other diseases by delivering drugs more effectively without causing side effects.