#20 AVATAR TECHNOLOGY DIGEST / Gene Therapy, Engineered skin substitute, The lightest metal

Welcome to Avatar Technology Digest. As always we start our Digest with incredible news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence. And here are the top stories of the last week.

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1) Can aging be slowed by using gene therapy to make permanent changes to a person’s DNA?
Elizabeth Parrish, the 44-year-old CEO of an American biotechnology startup called BioViva, says she underwent a gene therapy to reverse aging at an undisclosed location overseas last month, a first step in what she says is a plan to develop treatments for ravages of old age like Alzheimer’s and muscle loss. The medical procedure took place on September 15 in Colombia. She Is the patient Zero.
Her claims appear to raise the possibility of a market in overseas medical tourism for unproven genetic therapies. Gene-therapy preparations, which use a virus to shuttle DNA into human cells, could prove risky. But the technology has advanced so far in the last decade that it is within reach of a small company.

2) The group of Stanford engineers, led by Benjamin Tee, might have made a breakthrough that could change the lives of people with missing limbs. Researchers have developed an artificial substitute for skin that is capable of sensing when it is being touched and sending that data to the nervous system.
The artificial skin is made of a clear plastic with a fingerprint-sized sensor embedded into it. The sensor is made of flexible, organic materials, and the “skin” takes in information based on the amount of force applied to the circuit before translating it into digital signals.

3) It takes skill to fall with grace. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a very real one: emerging relatively unharmed after a tumble is a skill human have and can refine that robots lack innately, often to comical effect. New research by Georgia Tech wants to protect expensive, wobbly robots of the future, by programming them to fall safely and gracefully. In order to test this, first they needed to shove over a bunch of robots.
To compensate falling, scientists at Gergia Tech created a planning algorithm that lets robots break various kinds of falls, including using arms to protect their head and tumbling sideways to minimize the damage. Their paper, “Multiple Contact Planning for Minimizing Damage of Humanoid Falls”, presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, details a system that lets robots survive a range of impacts.

4) Military researchers are putting the final touches on a study of a "skin substitute" grown from a patient's own cells to treat complex burns and soft tissue injuries. The new research study underway at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio holds promise for treating burn patients, including those with severe, life-threatening wounds. The treatment, called "engineered skin substitute," or ESS, combines tissue cultivated from a patient’s skin along with collagen-producing cells to replace the two top components of skin, the epidermis and dermis.
Skin autografts — using an individual’s own cells or skin to replace damaged tissue — have been around for years, but the technology for rapidly growing replacement skin to use in large-scale burn replacement has lagged.

5) Aerospace Boeing has invented the lightest metal ever, called microlattice and it's lighter than Styrofoam. It’s sort of like a feather - it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density. The product is 99.99 per cent air and will be used as a primary component in aerospace engineering - it'll be used to make space rockets.
By utilizing microlattice, Boeing could find ways to cut down on the weight of its jets and save substantially on fuel costs. It's an important invention, because although it is lighter than foam, as it is made of metal it is very strong.

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