bioelectronics

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Pharma and Tech Giants Team Up to Design Devices That Can Hack Your Body’s Electrical Signals

Akshat Rathi | Nextgov | August 1, 2016

Electrical signals from the brain govern much of what goes on in the human body. Pharma and tech giants are spending big money to figure out how to hack these signals, a burgeoning field known as “bioelectronics.” GlaxoSmithKline and Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet subsidiary, are investing more than $700 million over seven years to create a new company, Galvani Bioelectronics. The firm, 55 percent owned by GSK, will have one lab in Stevenage, U.K., and another in San Francisco...

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Silicon Valley Was Going to Disrupt Capitalism. Now It’s Just Enhancing It

Evgeny Morozov | The Guardian | August 6, 2016

The tech giants thought they would beat old businesses but the health and finance industries are using data troves to become more, not less, resilient. The chances that, in a few years’ time, people will be able to receive basic healthcare without interacting with a technology company became considerably smaller after recent announcements of two intriguing but not entirely unpredictable partnerships. One is between Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline...

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Will Octobot Transform Medicine?

Acclaimed futurist Ray Kurzweil has a lot of bold predictions (including that computers will become smarter than us within a few decades), and some of his most interesting ones deal with how technology -- especially nanotechnology -- will soon totally revamp how we manage our health, leading to longer, healthier lives and hugely increased intelligence. Sounds like science fiction, right? Meet Octobot. Harvard researchers have unveiled what they describe as the "first autonomous, entirely soft robot," which they call Octobot (it has eight arms, like an octopus). It has no metal, no battery, no electronics of any sort, yet manages to move under its own power. It uses a "microfluidic logic circuit" rather than a circuit board to control the movements of its arms and to power itself along, using gas reactions...