标签：#biot

Mini human brains are being grown in labs all over the world. Soon, they could outthink neural networks.

The use of AI systems to create viruses opens up new possibilities for combating bacterial resistance. It also raises concerns about the pace at which technology is outstripping regulation.

A startup has created beagles without the gene that causes runny noses and watery eyes for allergy sufferers.

Kris DeVault is desperate. His son, Brody, was born in March 2023. It wasn’t long before he started to show signs of developmental delay, says DeVault. As time went on, Brody started missing key milestones in speech, movement, and coordination, he says. When Brody was around two and a half years old, a genetic test…

The health tech data giant, which handles vast amounts of patients' medical data, said hackers struck one of its protected health data stores.

As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to apply to a newly established review board for approval. Once its treatment is rubber-stamped, the…

This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice. Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved…

When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave it too long and the organ will become unusable. In most cases, organs will be kept…

"The thing that the space needs is a company making $100 million a year of revenue," Science Corp. CEO Max Hodak said.

The four-year-old firm's latest fund is 60% larger than its second vehicle announced 18 months ago.

Ronald Fischer, aka Richard Graydon, was arrested in New York last week.

The de-extinction startup is looking to double or triple its previous valuation, according to the report.

A salamander can lose a leg and grow a new one. Cut a zebrafish's fin and it simply builds another. Mammals, us included, got the consolation prize: a scar. For a century, biologists assumed that somewhere on the evolutionary road to becoming warm-blooded, fast-moving animals, we traded regeneration away for good. Two research teams working on opposite sides of the planet have just made that assumption look wrong. The headline is almost hard to believe: the ability to regrow lost body parts may not have been deleted from our biology at all. It may simply have been switched off, and switches can be flipped back on. The genetic "remote control" that stopped working The first clue comes from a team at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, working with genomics powerhouse BGI-Research. Publishing in Science , they zeroed in on a gene called ALDH1A2 , the instruction sheet for an enzyme that turns vitamin A into retinoic acid, a molecule that acts like a foreman on a construction site, telling cells where to go and what to build during tissue repair. Animals that regenerate freely crank this gene up at the wound site. Mice, it turns out, still carry the same gene. They've just lost the genetic "remote controls," the regulatory DNA that tells the gene to fire after an injury. The hardware is intact; the software command was disconnected somewhere in evolution. So the researchers reconnected it. By reactivating that dormant switch and restoring the flow of retinoic acid, they got mice to regenerate damaged outer-ear tissue, something a normal mouse simply cannot do. In their own words, they had found "a genetic switch involved in the evolution of regeneration." Meanwhile, in Texas, they regrew a limb joint The second piece of evidence lands the point with force. At Texas A&M, a group led by Dr. Ken Muneoka took a different route to the same destination. Instead of editing a genetic switch, they used a precisely timed sequence of two signaling proteins.

Perimenopause has entered the chat. Perimenopause—and its better-known relative, menopause—used to be considered taboo. Not anymore, thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers. Perhaps it’s my age, but these days, both my algorithm and my conversations with friends increasingly swing toward perimenopause. Menopause is defined as the life stage that…

Neko Health has developed proprietary body-scanning technology, which it couples with bloodwork, to assess a person's health.

Gidi Littwin's new AI startup, Hemispheric, makes diagnostic brain scans for conditions like depression, PTSD, and Parkinson’s. He wants the technology to be as cheap and easy as a blood test.

The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences.

Researchers cobbled together funding and time to show how quantum computing could aid in the development of drugs to help underserved populations and combat rare diseases.

When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, his firm Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the venture outfit has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs's words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. "I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast," he said.

Pull a hot steel bolt out of a furnace and quench it in oil, and a fair question is: does the bolt cool from the outside in, with a sharp temperature difference between its skin and its core, or does the whole thing drop in temperature more or less together? The answer is not obvious from the part itself. A thin copper washer and a thick ceramic block behave very differently in the same bath, even at the same starting temperature. The Biot number is the small calculation that settles this question before you commit to any heavy analysis. It tells you, in a single dimensionless figure, whether an object can be treated as having one uniform temperature or whether you must resolve a temperature gradient inside it. That distinction changes the math from a one-line exponential decay to a partial differential equation. Why this calculation matters Transient heating and cooling problems show up everywhere: heat-treating metal parts, quenching forgings, cooling electronics, baking or chilling food, warming up an engine block. In every one of these, the engineer wants to know how the temperature changes over time. The hard version of that question requires solving the heat conduction equation across the body, with position and time as variables. The easy version is the lumped-capacitance model, which treats the whole object as a single point at one temperature. It reduces the problem to a simple first-order exponential. The catch is that the lumped model is only valid when internal conduction is fast compared with surface convection. The Biot number is exactly the check that tells you whether that condition holds. Skip the check and apply the lumped model where it does not belong, and you can badly mispredict cooling times, residual stresses, and the risk of cracking from thermal gradients. The core formula The Biot number compares two thermal resistances. One is the resistance to conducting heat through the inside of the solid. The other is the resistance to carrying heat a