Welcome to Avatar Technology Digest. And here are the top stories of the last week. As always we start our Digest with incredible news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence.
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1) Machines with artificial intelligence have shown quite an improvement in several aspects. For instance, they can play chess, compute complex mathematical problems and even identify pictures. Researchers from the University of Illinois did a study on the ConceptNet 4 version of the AI and they discovered that its IQ level is the same as that of a 4-year-old child.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created an intelligent machine called ConceptNet under its artificial intelligence program. The research team, chose an IQ test known as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. The IQ test is commonly used in schools across the United States and is designed to measure the level of intelligence in five key categories.

The ConceptNet scored a [mark] that is average for a 4-year-old child, but below average for 5- to 7-year-olds, concluded the researchers. The result was highly dependent on how the intelligent machine understood and interpreted the questions.

2) A controversial European neuroscience project “Blue Brain Project” aims to simulate the human brain in a supercomputer. It has published its first major result: a digital imitation of circuitry in a sandgrain-sized chunk of rat brain. The work models some 31,000 virtual brain cells connected by roughly 37 million synapses.

The goal of the Blue Brain Project, is to build a biologically-detailed computer simulation of the brain based on experimental data about neurons' 3D shapes, their electrical properties, and the ion channels and other proteins that different cell types typically produce.

Researchers who created the simulation said its digital neurons flicker with activity seen in real rat brains and replicate patterns of electrical behavior that are triggered, for example, when a rodent’s whiskers are touched.

The simulation draws on 20 years of measurements from rat brains and took a decade to turn into code that runs on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer capable of solving billions of equations every 25 milliseconds.

The model can be manipulated in ways that are difficult to do experimentally, providing insights into how individual cells contribute to the functions of neuronal networks.

The Blue Brain Project is an ambitious - many say overly ambitious – effort to reverse engineer the rodent brain, and ultimately the human brain, with a view to building a working model of the organ in a computer. Do that, the argument goes, and scientists might have a hope of understanding the neural mechanisms that underpin such extraordinary phenomena as consciousness, love and the antics of the Bullingdon Club.

3) Age-related macular degeneration could be treated by transplanting photoreceptors produced by the directed differentiation of stem cells, thanks to findings published today by Canadian researchers.

ARMD is a common eye problem caused by the loss of cones. The team of researches of the University of Montreal has developed a highly effective in vitro technique for producing light sensitive retina cells from human embryonic stem cells. The method has the capacity to differentiate 80% of the stem cells into pure cones. Within 45 days, the cones that we allowed to grow towards confluence spontaneously formed organized retinal tissue that was 150 microns thick. This has never been achieved before.

In order to verify the technique, researchers injected clusters of retinal cells into the eyes of healthy mice. The transplanted photoreceptors migrated naturally within the retina of their host. Researchers have been trying to achieve this kind of trial for years.

Thanks to this simple and effective approach, any laboratory in the world will now be able to create masses of photoreceptors. Even if there's a long way to go before launching clinical trials, this means, in theory, that will be eventually be able to treat countless patients.

Beyond the clinical applications, these findings could enable the modeling of human retinal degenerative diseases through the use of induced pluripotent stem cells, offering the possibility of directly testing potential avenues for therapy on the patient's own tissues. 

4) For years, scientists have been trying to manipulate pig organs so that they could be transplanted into the 8,000 humans waiting for a life saving transplant. So far, that hasn’t worked. But George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of the biotech company eGenesis, hopes to change that. Earlier this week he announced that he and his colleagues had used the gene editing tool CRISPR to modify an unprecedented number of genes in pig embryos in order to make them easier to transplant into humans.

The one other big concern is rejection of donor organs by the human immune system. Church has reportedly tackled that problem too, by modifying over 20 genes in additional embryos that make the proteins that irritate our immune cells.

Researchers in China, have also had recent successes in making multiple CRISPR edits to pig genomes. They were even able to combine the technique with somatic cell nuclear transfer (the method used correct various mutations in the creation of multi-parental embryos) without mosaic mutation or any of the usual undesirable 'off-target' effects. 

Perhaps the most arresting news from the Chinese pig geneticists has been their creation of custom pet rainbow micropigs. Not only are these pigs miniature due to inactivation of one copy of their growth hormone receptor gene, but they can be ordered in different colors.

Church, and his startup company eGenesis, hope to begin implanting gene-edited pig embryos into mother pigs as soon as it is possible.

5) DNA is your blueprint, firmware, and operating system all rolled into one, so of course it’s really important for the code to be correct. But the nature of chemistry is that things sometimes go wrong at random. DNA breaks down over time, sometimes there are mistakes in transcription, and ultraviolet radiation and some chemicals can damage DNA. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 awards three pioneering scientists who have mapped how several of these repair systems function at a detailed molecular level.

Now thanks Tomas Lindahl, Aziz Sancar, and Paul Modrich we have improved understanding of how our own cells work and repair damaged DNA. That, in turn, can help develop more effective medical treatments.

Scientists worked independently over the years, rather than collaborating on a shared project.

Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery,base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA.

Aziz Sancar has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The cell also utilises nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by mutagenic substances, among other things.

Paul Modrich has demonstrated how the cell corrects errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division. This mechanism, mismatch repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousand fold.

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