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. Judge for yourself.

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.

Parrish says she had received two forms of gene therapy produced under contract with a commercial laboratory, which she did not identify, outside the United States. In one treatment, she says, she received injections into her muscles containing the gene follistatin, which in animal experiments is shown to increase muscle mass by blocking myostatin, itself an inhibitor of muscle growth.

She says she also received an intravenous dose of viruses containing genetic material to produce telomerase, a protein that extends telomeres, a component of chromosomes known as the “aging clock.” Telomerase is a frequent target of anti-aging research because the molecule is present in cells that can continue to divide indefinitely, like stem cells and tumors.

The idea for extending life span using telomerase, for instance, is based on work of Spanish scientists who in 2012 showed that telomerase gene therapy could extend the life span of mice by as much as 20 percent.

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.

The researchers’ main goal was to ensure that the sensors were able to mimic that same range of pressure that humans feel, thus creating a more lifelike “feel” with the sensors. To recreate these sensations, the researchers used carbon nanotubes, incredibly strong and small tubular cylinders. They fashioned these nanotubes into pyramid-like structures so that the more they were compressed, the more electricity they conducted.

These electrical impulses were then sent to the brains of mice almost like Morse code, replicating, in a way, the process by which impulses on our skin are captured and information is transferred.

While the transfer of electrical signals from our skin to our brain is completely natural, the researchers found it hard to replicate the process in their “skin.” The old process of transferring these signals used a computer to turn the signals into something the body could use. But this process used far too much energy and added imprecise noise to the data that it sent to the brain, so the researchers created the sensor to eliminate the computer altogether.

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.

There are plenty of robots designed to avoid falling, like Alphabet’s surreal animal-like BigDog series of machines. But bipedal robots, or bipedal-ish robots, designed to operate in spaces made for humans, don’t have the luxury of a weird, well-balanced body. As a result, they tend to fall over a bunch.

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.

Moreover, many current products replace either one layer of skin or the other, but not the top two layers together.

ESS already has been designated an “orphan” drug by the FDA, to be used for investigative purposes to treat pediatric patients burned over more than 95 percent of their bodies.It could help the rare cases — 500 to 2,000 a year — of civilian and military adult patients nationwide whose injuries include burns over more than 50 percent of their bodies.

These patients now have very few options for successful treatment, leaving them vulnerable to infections and the deadly threat of sepsis.

Researchers believe the dermal and epidermal cell matrix from ESS has the potential to provide a more effective direct permanent restoration of structure and function of full thickness skin, with minimal scarring,”

The ESS study will involve 12 patients whose burns cover more than half the surface area of their bodies. It is a "Phase 2" trial, designed to determine the safety and effectiveness of the treatment.  

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.

The metal-based microlattice structures are significantly less dense than the rarest aerogels and other ultralight foams, while exhibiting high strength and an unexpectedly high ability to absorb energy and recover shape after compression.

The structure is comparable to the hollow honeycomb structure of bon, and is is composed of a network of thin, hollow struts. The struts are around 100 micrometers in diameter and have walls just 100 nanometers thick.

Microlattice was first announced in 2011 by a research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech.

It can sit on top of a dandelion without crushing the seeds, and if dropped from a height 'floats' down to Earth like a feather.

This innovation will save a lot of money in fuel costs while still maintaining a strong structure.

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