Computer programs may be able to identify individuals most at risk of anxiety, mood disorders

 

An MRI scan of the sagittal section of the brain. Credit: Wellcome Images.

(Medical Xpress) -- Computer programs can be taught to differentiate between the brain scans of healthy adolescents and those most at risk of developing psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and depression, according to research published yesterday in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The research suggests that it may be possible to design programs that can accurately predict which at-risk adolescents will subsequently develop these disorders.

There are no known biomarkers - biological measures - that can accurately predict future psychiatric disorders in individual adolescents. Even genetic risk cannot accurately predict individual risk for future psychiatric illness: for example, a family history of bipolar disorder confers a 10 per cent risk of future bipolar disorder, as well as a 10 to 25 per cent risk of disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, major depression and anxiety disorders, but it is impossible to accurately determine whether an individual will develop these disorders.

The early identification of individuals at high risk of future psychiatric illness is critical. Most psychiatric disorders typically have an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, and early detection and treatment could potentially delay, or even prevent, the onset of these illnesses in high-risk adolescents.

Now, a team of researchers led by Dr Janaina Mourao-Miranda, a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow at UCL (University College London), has shown that computer programs can distinguish between brain scans of healthy but genetically at-risk adolescents and healthy low-risk controls.

Sixteen healthy adolescents who each had a parent with bipolar disorder took part in the study, along with 16 healthy adolescents whose parents had no history of psychiatric illness. The adolescents performed an emotional face gender-labelling task in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures activity in the brain.

In the first experiment, the faces presented had happy or neutral expressions; in the second experiment, the faces had fearful or neutral expressions. The researchers then used a computer program capable of machine learning to predict the probability that an individual belonged to the low-risk or the at-risk group.

They found that the program was accurate in three out of four cases. The predictive probabilities were significantly higher for at-risk adolescents who subsequently developed a psychiatric disorder, such as anxiety and depression, than for those who remained healthy at follow-up. This suggests that it may be possible, in time, to develop a computer program able to identify those individuals at greatest risk of developing psychiatric disorders.

Interestingly, the researchers found that the best discrimination between at-risk and low-risk adolescents occurred when neutral faces were presented in the happy face experiment. This supports previous studies that suggest that individuals diagnosed with anxiety or mood disorders are more likely to perceive neutral faces as ambiguous or potentially threatening.

"Combining machine learning and neuroimaging, we have a technique which shows enormous potential to help us identify which adolescents are at true risk of developing anxiety and mood disorders, especially where there is limited clinical or genetic information," says Dr Mourao-Miranda.

Coauthor Professor Mary Phillips, from the Clinical and Translational Affective Neuroscience Program at University of Pittsburgh, adds: "Anxiety and mood disorders can have a devastating effect on the individuals concerned and on their families and friends. If we are able to identify those individuals at greatest risk early on, we can offer early and appropriate interventions to delay, or even prevent, onset of these terrible conditions."

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Wellcome Trust and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Brazil).

More information: Mourao-Miranda J et al. Pattern recognition and functional neuroimaging help to discriminate healthy adolescents at risk for mood disorders from low risk adolescents. PLoS One 2012 (epub ahead of print).

Provided by Wellcome Trust

"Computer programs may be able to identify individuals most at risk of anxiety, mood disorders." February 16th, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-individuals-anxiety-mood-disorders.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

A mile in their shoes: understanding empathy

Credit: iStockphoto.com

The human brain evolved to ensure our survival. One example of that survival instinct is our sense of competition – historically, it’s part of what drives us to wage wars over power and resources. But an equally powerful survival tactic is our ability to love and cooperate with others.

“A lot of times, that story never gets told,” says Karen Gerdes, a social worker at ASU. She is interested in empathy, which is the ability to perceive the world from other people’s points of view and to feel what they are feeling. Empathy is a complex emotion because it involves both unconscious, involuntary responses and conscious, cognitive processes. For example, suppose you’ve had a traumatic experience, like losing a loved one.

“You see someone else who is going through that experience, and your brain automatically starts firing as if it’s happening to you. That helps you to understand a little bit better about what that person is going through,” Gerdes says.

People who are very empathic tend to be more understanding and have stronger relationships. For a social worker, empathy is also an essential part of the job.

“Social work is all about improving quality of life for people,” Gerdes says. “We do that by helping them to be their better self, and by creating a society that is more supportive. Empathy is at the core of both of those things.”

Gerdes is an associate professor in the School of Social Work in the College of Public Programs. She began studying empathy in 2006 after learning about new research from the field of social cognitive neuroscience.

“They’ve confirmed that our brain is set up to process information in a way that helps us to be more empathic and cooperative,” Gerdes said.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), neuroscientists can watch empathy in action in a person’s brain through the interaction of four neural networks – groups of neurons that perform specific functions. When all four of these neural networks are engaged, that person is expressing empathy.

Have you ever felt yourself smiling after seeing a stranger laugh, or feeling sad after watching someone else cry?

This emotional “mirroring” phenomenon is called affective sharing, and it’s one of the observable neural networks that define empathy.

“People that are especially sensitive could find themselves feeling angry or irritable or annoyed and not even know why, and it’s because they’re picking up on the emotion of another person who is actually feeling those things,” Gerdes says.

Affective sharing is an automatic, unconscious phenomenon, but there’s more to empathy than just mirroring another person’s emotions. You also must be able to put yourself in their shoes. This is the function of another neural network, called perspective taking. It’s that cognitive ability to understand a situation from the perspective of someone else that separates empathy from sympathy, which is just an expression of concern or sorrow.

The third neural network that defines empathy is self-awareness, or the ability to differentiate between your own experience and that of the person with whom you are empathizing. In the example of losing a loved one, it may be helpful for the brain to remind you of those feelings so you can empathize with a friend, but you also must recognize that your experience is separate from theirs.

“You’re there with them, but you’re open to listening, because their experience is not going to be exactly the same as yours. You need to be able to differentiate that so you’re not imposing things on them that worked for you,” Gerdes says.

Additionally, empathy requires emotion regulation – the fourth neural network. Emotion regulation allows a person to tone down the mirroring emotions that result from affective sharing. Social workers often work with people who lack emotion regulation.

“If you put it in the context of a man that abuses his wife, he understands when his wife gets frustrated, the affect sharing is working, but the emotion regulation piece isn’t,” Gerdes says. “He may be feeding off his own anxiety as well as the people around him, and because he can’t control that, he takes it out on the people closest to him.”

Once you understand how these neural networks function, you can actually cultivate empathy. For example, to improve emotion regulation, Gerdes suggests using mindfulness techniques, such as meditation or focused breathing.

“It helps people to cope better with the emotions they’re picking up on from others, to function better at a higher level,” Gerdes says.

It can also be helpful to simply bring the emotional contagion aspect of empathy to consciousness, Gerdes says. Next time you start feeling anxious or irritated for no reason, take note of your surroundings. Are other people in the room angry or sad? Being aware of the contagious quality of emotion can help you determine whether someone’s bad mood is rubbing off on you.

To build your capacity for perspective taking, Gerdes suggests watching movies or reading books about the specific group of people you want to understand. The more you know about the context of a person’s life, the more empathic you can be.

Since empathy is at the core of social work, it’s important to be able to measure it. Gerdes says one of the most accurate measures is the multi-faceted empathy test (MET), which is based on social cognitive neuroscience research. It asks participants to look at 23 sets of photographs of people in emotionally charged situations and then try to determine each person’s emotional state, perspective and intentions.

While MET is an effective test, it is also relatively expensive and requires some training to administer. Most researches tend to rely on self-report measures because they are inexpensive. The most widely used self-report measure is the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI), which was developed in the ‘80s. The problem with IRI is that it ends up assessing a person’s level of sympathy rather than empathy.

“Sympathy and empathy are completely different constructs. They’re probably correlated with each other, but they’re not the same thing,” Gerdes says.

Gerdes is developing a new self-report measure called the empathy assessment index (EAI), which is based on the latest neuroscience research. In a recent study, she tested the measure by comparing data from a group of offenders with a group of social workers. The offenders included men who had been charged with domestic violence or sexual molestation, and at-risk parents struggling with anger management issues.

“We wanted to compare the offenders’ scores on our instrument, the assessment index, to the social workers’ scores. If it’s a valid measure, there should be a significantly significant difference in their scores, and thank goodness there was,” Gerdes says. She hopes to see a shift from the outdated IRI self-report measure to the new, research-based EAI measure, which will be more accurate but just as inexpensive to use.

Empathy is a relatively new word, only having come about in the 20th century. While most social work classes discuss empathy to some extent, few schools have incorporated the latest research into the curriculum. But Gerdes believes they soon will, because empathy is an important concept for both social workers and the general public.

“When you have an empathy deficit, like Hitler did, you have genocide,” Gerdes says. “When you have appropriate empathy, those things don’t happen because you’ll interfere with them happening. You’ll do everything you can, because it’s at the core of our human interaction that I try to understand you and you try to understand me.”

Provided by Arizona State University

"A mile in their shoes: understanding empathy." February 16th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-mile-empathy.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Colorfull Trees

Study posits a theory of moral behavior

To understand the illicit behavior of some, we need to study the moral dimension of the self and what makes some individuals more dishonest than others.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Why do some people behave morally while others do not? Sociologists at the University of California, Riverside and California State University, Northridge have developed a theory of the moral self that may help explain the ethical lapses in the banking, investment and mortgage-lending industries that nearly ruined the U.S. economy.

For decades, sociologists have posited that individual behavior results from cultural expectations about how to act in specific situations. In a study, “A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality,” published in the February issue of the journal American Sociological Review, Jan E. Stets of UC Riverside and Michael J. Carter of CSU Northridge found that how individuals see themselves in moral terms is also an important motivator of behavior.

Bankers, stock brokers, and mortgage lenders who caused the recession were able to act as they did, without shame or guilt, perhaps because their moral identity standard was set at a low level, and the behavior that followed from their personal standard went unchallenged by their colleagues, Stets explained.

“To the extent that others in a situation verify or confirm the meanings set by a person’s identity standard and as expressed in a person’s behavior, the more the person will continue to engage in these behaviors,” Stets said of the theory of moral identity she and Carter advance. “One’s identity standard guides a person’s behavior. Then the person sees the reactions of others to his or her behavior.  If others have a low moral identity and others do not challenge the illicit behavior that follows from it, then the person will continue to do what he or she is doing. This is how immoral practices can emerge.”

The sociologists surveyed a diverse group of more than 350 university students in a two-phase study that measured students’ moral identity, assessment of specific situations as having a moral component, and moral emotions, such as guilt and shame. The students first were asked how they responded in specific situations where they had a choice to do the right or wrong thing; for example, copy another student’s answers, drive home drunk, take an item, give to charity, allow another student to copy their answers, let a friend drive home drunk, return a lost item, or return money to a cashier.

Three months later, survey respondents were asked how to rate each scenario in moral terms, and how they thought individuals ought to feel following doing the right or wrong thing in each situation. The students placed themselves along a continuum between two contradictory characteristics — honest/dishonest, caring/uncaring, unkind/kind, unfair/fair, helpful/not helpful, stingy/generous, compassionate/hardhearted, untruthful/truthful, not hardworking/hardworking, friendly/unfriendly, selfish/selfless, and principled/unprincipled. The more that individuals endorsed themselves as honest, caring, kind, fair, helpful, generous, compassionate, truthful, hardworking, friendly, selfless, and principled, the higher their moral identity.

Wherever individuals are located on this continuum, they act with the goal of verifying the meanings of who they are that is set by their moral identity standard, Stets and Carter said. “We found that individuals with a high moral identity score were more likely to behave morally, while those with a low moral identity score were less likely to behave morally. Respondents who received feedback from others that did not verify their moral identity standard were more likely to report guilt and shame than those whose identities were verified,” they said.

The goal is to live up to one’s self-view however that appears across the moral continuum from being very uncaring and unjust to very caring and very just, the researchers said. “When the meanings of one’s behavior based on feedback from others are inconsistent with the meanings in one’s identity standard, the person will feel bad,” they said.

More research is needed to identify the source of moral identity meanings, Stets and Carter said. “Exposure to particular social contexts and individuals may encourage a higher moral identity. For example, when parents are involved in their children’s lives, their children are more likely to recognize moral values. Schools can also sensitize individuals to moral meanings by providing an atmosphere that fosters justice, virtue and volunteering. Religious traditions that promote reflection on moral issues and foster charitable work also help individuals recognize moral meanings.”

Studying the moral self is opportune given the unregulated practices of bankers, stock brokers, and mortgage lenders whose behavior facilitated the recent recession in the United States, Stets and Carter said.

“The cost of their irresponsible practices has touched the lives of many innocent victims, as witnessed in the loss of individuals’ retirement savings, homes, and jobs. The fact that a few greedy actors have the potential to damage the lives of many (as evidenced in the Bernie Madoff case) brings issues of right and wrong, good and bad, and just and unjust to public awareness,” they said. “To understand the illicit behavior of some, we need to study the moral dimension of the self and what makes some individuals more dishonest than others.”

Provided by University of California, Riverside

"Study posits a theory of moral behavior." February 16th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-posits-theory-moral-behavior.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

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Morning and Evening Mantras - Suprabatham and Mangalams - Sanskrit Spiri...

How To Track Your Company’s Progress

                                                                                Looking for Venture Funding? Math is Your Friend

These few metrics will give you some added insight into just how much progress your company is making.

Entrepreneurs routinely ask me what my one or two go-to financial metrics are, beyond the standard revenue, gross margin, net income and cash ratios. I usually demur, saying that business models wildly vary and an effective analytical tool in one sector might not be much use in another. A product company or one that sells perpetual licenses might not be too concerned with its customer churn rate, but a services company might be right to obsess over it.
In truth, I am sympathetic to the interest in innovative metrics. I love baseball and the data deluge associated with what, at first glance, is a simple game. But after decades of building companies, the addiction to detail was replaced by a ravenous hunger to identify the two or three unique levers of control in a business.
As a result, I do have a couple of favorite metrics that I keep an eye on beyond the standards. They by no means capture every angle of a business, and they are fallible, but I find them universally useful in evaluating and comparing companies and their progress. I’ve also highlighted two problem areas that always seem to create confusion.
My favorite metrics:
Revenue per Employee
In most technology companies, gross margins are relatively high and salaries are the biggest single cost. Cost per employee for technology companies in the U.S. is surprisingly consistent at just above $100K. So revenue per employee gives you a very efficient way of comparing overall efficiency of and between businesses.
Revenue per dollar of sales & marketing spend
I like to see how much revenue generated by each dollar inserted into the company’s sales and marketing machine.
More particularly, I track the change in this metric quarter-over-quarter, because that shows the rate at which sales and marketing is becoming more efficient (hopefully). Like a golf handicap, rates will differ a lot between, but you still want to beat the course by always getting more efficient.

Top 5 Educated Countries In The World

Education is not necessary a key ingredient to success, however it definitely doesn’t hurt. These 5 countries are the most educated in the world and thus have great potential for success in the future. Get the list here!
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5. New Zealand
> Pct. population with postsecondary education: 40%
> Avg. annual growth rate (1999 – 2009): 3.5% (14th lowest)
> GDP per capita: $29,871 (14th lowest)
> Pop. change (2000 – 2009): 11.88% (8th largest)
New Zealand is not a particularly wealthy country. GDP per capita is less than $30,000, and is the 14th lowest in the OECD. However, 40% of the population engages in tertiary education, the fifth-highest rate in the world. The country actually has a rapidly growing population, increasing 11.88% between 2000 and 2009. This was the eighth-largest increase in the OECD. Part of the reason for the high rate of tertiary graduates is the high output from secondary schools. More than 90% of residents graduate from secondary school.
4. United States
> Pct. population with postsecondary education: 41%
> Avg. annual growth rate (1999 – 2009): 1.4% (the lowest)
> GDP per capita: $46,588 (4th highest)
> Pop. change (2000 – 2009): 8.68% (12th highest)
The U.S. experienced a fairly large growth in population from 2000 to 2009. During the period, the population increased 8.68% — the 12th highest among OECD countries. Meanwhile, the rate at which the share of the population with a tertiary education is growing has slowed to an annual rate of 1.4% — the lowest among the 34 OECD countries. Just 71% of funding for educational institutions in the country comes from public funds, placing the U.S. sixth-lowest in this measure. Among OECD countries, the largest share of adults with a tertiary education live in the United States — 25.8%.
3. Japan
> Pct. population with postsecondary education: 44%
> Avg. annual growth rate (1999 – 2009): 3.2% (10th lowest)
> GDP per capita: $33,751 (17th lowest)
> Pop. change (2000 – 2009): 0.46% (6th lowest)
In Japan, 44% of the adult population has some form of tertiary education. The U.S. by comparison has a rate of 41%. Japan’s population increased just 0.46% between 2000 and 2009, the sixth-slowest growth rate in the OECD, and the slowest among our list of 10. Japan is tied with Finland for the third-highest upper-secondary graduation rate in the world, at 95%. It has the third-highest tertiary graduation rate in the world, but only spends the equivalent of 1.5% of GDP on tertiary education — the 17th lowest rate in the OECD.
2. Israel
> Pct. population with postsecondary education: 45%
> Avg. annual growth rate (1999 – 2009): N/A
> GDP per capita: $28,596 (12th lowest)
> Pop. change (2000 – 2009): 19.02% (the highest)
Although there is no data on the percentage of Israeli citizens with postsecondary education dating back to 1999, the numbers going back to 2002 show that growth is slowing dramatically compared to other countries. In fact, in 2006, 46% of adults ages 25 to 64 had a tertiary education. In 2007 this number fell to 44%. Only 78% of funds spent on educational institutions in Israel are public funds. The country is also only one of three — the other two being Ireland and Sweden — where expenditure on educational institutions as a proportion of GDP decreased from 2000 to 2008. Israel also had the largest increase in overall population, approximately 19% from 2000 to 2009.
1. Canada
> Pct. population with postsecondary education: 50%
> Avg. annual growth rate (1999 – 2009): 2.3% (5th lowest)
> GDP per capita: $39,070 (10th highest)
> Pop. change (2000 – 2009): 9.89% (10th highest)
In Canada, 50% of the adult population has completed tertiary education, easily the highest rate in the OECD. Each year, public and private expenditure on education amount to 2.5% of GDP, the fourth-highest rate in the world. Tertiary education spending accounts for 41% of total education spending in the country. In the U.S., the proportion is closer to 37%. In Israel, the rate is 22%. In Canada, nearly 25% of students have an immigrant background.
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Man Hasn't Eaten...For 70 Years

Doing Biotech in My Bedroom

A new generation of biologists embraces the do-it-yourself ethic of computer programming.

• BY ANTONIO REGALADO

Audio »

Do-it-yourself: Cathal Garvey, 26, poses in the biology laboratory he created in his mother's spare bedroom.
Deirdre Brennan

See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Youth Effect.

In a spare bedroom of his family's house in County Cork, Ireland, Cathal Garvey is repeating the feats that led to the dawn of the biotechnology age. He's growing bacteria. He's adding DNA. He's seeing what happens.

"To transform bacteria was once a huge deal, a new method," he explains. "Today, you can do it with Epsom salt and an over-the-counter brand of laxatives."

Garvey, who is 26, dropped out of a PhD program at a big cancer lab two years ago. Instead of giving up on science, however, he started doing it on his own, spending $4,000 to equip a laboratory in his parent's house. As a member of the "do-it-yourself" biology movement, Garvey takes inspiration from the early days of hobby computers, when garage tinkerers spawned companies like Apple and the rest of the PC industry. The idea now is that anyone—not only big-budget academic labs or large companies—should be able to practice biotechnology.

Garvey was still working toward his PhD when he tried his first at-home experiment: isolating pale-blue bioluminescent bacteria from squid he purchased from a Cork fishmonger. It was a beginner's experiment, but he says he immediately realized he had a choice to make: "Would I finish and get a few letters after my name, or seize the day and do something that needed to be done?"

His goal, he says, is to show that biology can be done in an open-source fashion, and on a shoestring budget. Instead of beakers, he uses recycled jars. A sterilizer is rigged from a pressure cooker and a hot plate. To feed his germs, he boils potatoes into a starchy mix. "In a university you are trained to think that this is all too expensive and difficult to do on your own," he says.

DIY biology is part of a wider trend in design that's sometimes called maker culture: people are using 3-D printing services or cheap, custom electronic circuits to develop prototypes of gadgets, products, or vehicles. Now that amateurs can put rockets into space, what's to stop them from genetically modifying life forms in the kitchen?

Several DIY biologists have begun making inexpensive equipment so that more people can participate. CoFactor, a California company, now sells a $599 DNA-copying machine calledOpenPCR. And via Shapeways, a 3-D printing company, Garvey is selling a plastic test-tube holder he designed. When attached to a drill bit at home, the $50 piece becomes a fast-spinning centrifuge. Near San Francisco, there's now a 2,400-square-foot laboratory calledBioCurious, where community members can test their molecular-biology skills.

George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, helped pioneer the DIY movement in biology. One reason he thinks the trend can't be dismissed is that the cost of both synthesizing and decoding DNA molecules is now falling five times faster than the cost of computing power. That makes it "very interesting to watch," he says.

Some would-be garage biologists have run into obstacles. After meeting for beers at a pub in September, a DIY bio group in Seattle decided to shut down because it lacked clear goals. Other local groups—without lab space or money—have met a similar fate. 

Hacked together: A home-built thermal cycling instrument made by Cathal Garvey from a coffee can and heat gun cost less than $80. It is used to copy DNA molecules. Many commercial versions cost more than $1,000.
Deirdre Brennan/Cathal Garvey

Nor is everyone as impressed by the movement as Church is. "I would be a little skeptical what is the endpoint of all this," says Declan Soden, the Cork Cancer Research Centre biologist whose lab Garvey once studied in. "If you are trying to develop a treatment for cancer using molecular biology, the amount of time and effort and resources is pretty considerable, and the regulatory constraints are a lot tighter," says Soden, whose lab has an annual budget of $3 million. "I think that puts it out of the league of do-it-yourself hobbyists."

Another worry is that hobbyists will be flushing bacteria down household sinks, or even creating dangerous germs. Soden says Garvey was a "very, very bright" student who was too impatient to work in a large academic laboratory. "My concern is what you're doing is changing bacteria, and that may present a risk to the general public," he says.

Even so, some futurists think citizen biology could one day rival industrial biotechnology, much as open-source software challenges commercial products. In 2007, Freeman Dyson predictedthat leadership in biotechnology would eventually shift away from large corporations like Monsanto to kitchen laboratories, becoming "small and domesticated rather than big and centralized."

One company that sees the DIY trend as a business opportunity is Autodesk. The software maker, which sells high-powered design programs for engineers and architects, has recently begun sponsoring college genetic-engineering competitions and is developing software to aid biologists in their goal of re-wiring the genes of bacteria so that they will make fuel or drugs.  "Our current generations expect to make a difference in the world, and they expect the material world to respond to them," says Jeff Kowalski, Autodesk's chief technology officer. "Biology is going to be part of that. While I agree that the science is not fully accessible to people, we see it being commoditized fast."

After paying a $325 license fee, Garvey won approval last July from Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency to create genetically modified microbes in his mother's home. His "Class 1" lab rating lets him work only with germs that pose "negligible risk" to the public or the environment.

Garvey's current goal is to develop a suitable system for amateur biologists who want to genetically modify bacteria. The bacterium E. coli, common in university labs, isn't so easy to work with. It smells, eats expensive media, and has a bad public reputation as the cause of toxic stomach infections. Instead, Garvey is trying to establish a common soil bacterium,Bacillus subtilis, as an open-source standard. "B. subtilis has a blank-slate reputation," he says.

Using his computer, Garvey designed a circular ring of 3,200 DNA letters, which he paid a contract lab in Texas $1,300 to synthesize and mail to him. It's a miniature chromosome called a plasmid that the B. subtilis bacteria will absorb. To endow a germ with new traits (say, fluorescence, or the smell of rain on a sidewalk), just splice the needed DNA into the plasmid.

Garvey calls his construct "Indie Biotech Backbone 1.0," and he plans to sell it to other biohackers. "Now that we have some tools, the hardest question is what to do with it," he admits. For his own part, he imagines reprogramming grass to make diesel fuel—the sort of thing he could plant outside and let grow. "The dream," he says, "is to program life, play around, where it doesn't cost you anything to fail."

Exploding Carbon Nanotubes Could Act as Drug Grenades

Heating water inside carbon nanotubes until they explode could deliver drugs precisely, say chemists

KFC 

Carbon nanotubes offer a number of exotic options for therapies. For example, tubes filled with drugs and sealed with biodegradable caps, could work their way inside cells where they deliver their load. 

But the worry is that such a scheme may not target the drugs well enough if the caps degrade too quickly or too slowly. 

So Vitaly Chaban and Oleg  Prezhdo at the University of Rochester in New York state have a suggestion. Their idea is to fill the tubes with a mixture of drugs and water molecules and seal them with a secure cap.

Inside the body, the tubes enter various types of cell. But a treatment would involve illuminating only the cells of interest with an infrared laser which heats the tubes and boils the water they contain. The resulting increase in pressure bursts the cap and forces the water and drug molecules into the cell, like a grenade bursting.

These guys have carried out a molecular dynamics simulation to study how such a process might work. They say confinement in a nanotube substantially changes the boiling point of water and that just a small increase in temperature can boil the water and create pressures equivalent to hundreds of atmospheres.

That could be another tool in the rapidly expanding armoury of drug delivery mechanisms. But  Chaban and Prezhdo will need to answer some additional questions about the safety of this process. 

One obvious potential problem is that the explosive destruction of carbon nanotubes could damage the molecular machinery inside cells. That could cause more problems than it solves. 

The advantage, though, is that the drug is delivered only at the spot where it is required at the instant it is needed.

It's an idea that could be relatively easily tested and may turn out to be hugely useful.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1202.1328: Water Boiling inside Carbon Nanotubes: Towards Efficient Drug Release