A brain implant startup called Synchron is preparing to recruit patients for a large-scale clinical trial to seek commercial approval for its device. Reuters reports: Synchron on Monday plans to launch an online registry for patients interested in joining the trial meant to include dozens of participants, and has received interest from about 120 clinical trial centers to help run the study, CEO Thomas Oxley said in an interview. "Part of this registry is to start to enable local physicians to speak to patients with motor impairment," he said. "There's a lot of interest so we don't want it to come in a big bottleneck right before the study we'll be doing."

Synchron received U.S. authorization for preliminary testing in July 2021 and has implanted its device in six patients. Prior testing in four patients in Australia showed no serious adverse side effects, the company has reported. Synchron will be analyzing the U.S. data to prepare for the larger study, while awaiting authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to proceed, Oxley said. Synchron and the FDA declined to comment on the expected timing of that decision. The company aims to include patients who are paralyzed due to the neurodegenerative disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), stroke and multiple sclerosis, Oxley said. [...]

Synchron's device is delivered to the brain via the large vein that sits next to the motor cortex in the brain instead of being surgically implanted into the brain cortex like Neuralink's. The FDA has asked Synchron to screen stroke patients using a non-invasive test to determine whether they would respond to an implant, Oxley said. "They want to expand the market to people who have had a stroke severe enough to cause paralysis because if limited to quadriplegia, the market is way too small to be sustainable," Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said of Synchron. In 2020, Synchron reported that patients, opens new tab in its Australian study could use its first-generation device to type an average of 16 characters per minute. That's better than non-invasive devices that sit atop the head and record the electrical activity of the brain, which have helped people type up to eight characters per minute, but not the leap forward that is hoped for with an implant, Ludwig said. Oxley would not say whether typing has gotten faster or offer any other details from the ongoing U.S. trial. Reuters notes that Synchron's investors include billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. It's competing with Elon Musk's Neuralink brain implant startup and claims it's farther along in the process of testing its device.

Earlier this year, Neuralink said it implanted a chip in its first human patient. It later said the patient fully recovered and was able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts.

"Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding," reports TechCrunch, "just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit."

Varda has now raised $145 million to date, the article points out, and the $90 million in new Series B funding "marks an inflection point for the company, which is now gearing up to scale from the initial demonstration mission to a regular set of missions carrying customer payloads, Varda founder Delian Asparouhov told TechCrunch." El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bruey, a spacecraft engineer who cut his teeth at SpaceX. The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals... Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle. But the business case for expanding this research has never materialized — until now...

Part of the reason Varda is possible today is due to the availability of regular, low-cost rideshare launches from SpaceX and Rocket Lab's innovations in satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the startup has made significant headway in its own right, as the success of the first mission showed: Their reentry capsule appears to have performed flawlessly and the experiment to reformulate the HIV medicine ritonavir was executed without a hitch, it says. Varda has also started publishing the results of its internal R&D efforts, including a scientific paper on its hyper-gravity (as opposed to microgravity) crystallization platform, which the startup developed as a sort of screening method prior to sending drugs to space. [The paper is titled "Gravity as a Knob for Tuning Particle Size Distributions of Small Molecules."] It's an entirely new field of research that takes advantage of the ability to truly unlock gravity as a variable in scientific experiments. "Over time, we will be able to generate data sets between both hyper-gravity and microgravity and start to show correlations," he said....

In a recent podcast appearance, he specified that the all-in initial mission cost around $12 million, which will drop to $5-6 million by mission 4 and $2.5 million or less by mission 10.) Larger capsules are also in the longer-term pipeline, though also not until the 2027 time frame. Asparouhov also confirmed that pharmaceuticals will be Varda's sole focus for the next 10-20 (or more) years, based on the company's conviction that pharmaceutical products will generate more economic value compared to other materials. A lot of that comes down to the fact that there are a significant set of drugs that require only a "seed" of the material that can only be made in microgravity, and the rest of the drug formulation can be completed here on Earth...

The company is also aiming to improve the processing capabilities of the on-board pharmaceutical reactor. The first mission carried just one drug protein, but in the future the company hopes to process multiple drug products that could be run through different processing regimes. In the future, other missions could carry larger reactors for drugs that do need more than the "seed" crystal, and those mission profiles would be closer to something like mass manufacturing.
Varda already has "a handful" of signed contracts with biotech companies, according to the article — and Varda's next manufacturing mission "will launch later this year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: A Pittsburgh-based biotech company has started a one-of-a-kind trial in a patient with a failing liver. Their goal is to grow a functional second liver within the patient's body -- something never achieved before. If effective, it might be a life-saving therapy for those who require liver transplants but have to wait months for a compatible donor organ. LyGenesis is currently carrying out a trial in only one patient with end-stage liver disease (ESLD) to test the efficacy of their allogenic regenerative cell therapy. As per Nature, the experimental procedure was conducted in Houston on March 25. The report also states that the patient is "recovering well" after receiving the treatment. However, the formation of the new liver-like organ in the lymph node may take several months. Moreover, the individual will be kept on immunosuppressive drugs to prevent any initial rejection of the donor cells. The physicians will continue to monitor the patient's health closely.

In this trial, scientists prepared donated hepatocyte cells for transplantation by suspending them in a solution. These cells were then transplanted into the patient's upper abdominal lymph nodes, which are tiny bean-shaped structures. These structures are an essential immune system component and filter waste from the body. Apart from the abdomen, lymph nodes are also found in the neck and chest. The team opted for a minimally invasive approach to inject the cells into the patient's lymph node via a catheter in the neck. "The lymph nodes then act as in vivo bioreactors, helping the hepatocytes to engraft, proliferate, and generate functional ectopic liver tissue," the press release noted. In simplest terms, these cells have the ability to multiply over the next several months. In a person with a failing liver, lymph nodes might operate as a second liver-like organ.

For the first time, surgeons have transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig into a living person, doctors in Boston said Thursday. From a report: Richard Slayman, 62, of Weymouth, Mass., who is suffering from end-stage kidney disease, received the organ Saturday in a four-hour procedure, Massachusetts General Hospital announced. He is recovering well and is expected to be discharged soon, the hospital said. "I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive," Slayman said in a statement released by the hospital.

The procedure is the latest development in a fast-moving race to create genetically modified pigs to provide kidneys, livers, hearts and other organs to help alleviate the shortage of organs for people who need transplants. "Our hope is that this transplant approach will offer a lifeline to millions of patients worldwide who are suffering from kidney failure," said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, the hospital's director for clinical transplant tolerance, in the hospital statement.

Several biotech companies are racing to develop a supply of cloned pigs whose DNA has been genetically modified so they won't be rejected by the human body, spread pig viruses to people or cause other complications. NPR recently got exclusive access to a research farm breeding these animals for a company in this competition, Revivicor Inc. of Blacksburg, Va. The kidney transplanted in Boston came from a pig created by eGenesis of Cambridge, Mass. The eGenesis pigs are bred with 69 genetic modifications to prepare organs for human transplantation. The changes protect against a virus known to infect pigs as well as delete pig genes and add human genes to make the organs compatible with people.

Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports: Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

"A pet company has twice sent back dog breed results for human swab samples," reports the Guardian, "prompting doubts surrounding the accuracy of dog breed tests." On Wednesday, WBZ News reported its investigations team receiving dog breed results from the company DNA My Dog after one of its reporters sent in a swab sample — from her own cheek. According to the results from the Toronto-based company, WBZ News reporter Christina Hager is 40% Alaskan malamute, 35% shar-pei and 25% labrador.

Hager also sent her samples to two other pet genetic testing companies. The Melbourne, Australia- and Florida-based company Orivet reported that the sample "failed to provide the data necessary to perform the breed ID analysis". Meanwhile, Washington-based company Wisdom Panel said that the sample "didn't provide ... enough DNA to produce a reliable result"...

The global dog DNA test market, which was valued at $235m in 2022, is projected to grow to $723m by 2030, according to Zion Market Research. The industry's main players include DNA My Dog, Orivet and Wisdom Panel, among others.

But faulty results have cast doubt on the accuracy of the DNA tests.
Thanks to jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S.

Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post: A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic step into the future: It made a copy of itself. Then the copy made a copy, and over the course of many millions of years, RNA begot DNA and proteins, all of which came together to form a cell, the smallest unit of life able to survive on its own.

Now, in an important advance supporting this RNA World theory, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., have carried out a small but essential part of the story. In test tubes, they developed an RNA molecule that was able to make accurate copies of a different type of RNA. The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gets them closer to the grand goal of growing an RNA molecule that makes accurate copies of itself.

"Then it would be alive," said Gerald Joyce, president of Salk and one of the authors of the new paper. "So, this is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory or, in principle, anywhere in the universe...."

John Chaput, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California at Irvine who did not participate in the study, called the crossing of that threshold by the Salk team "monumental," adding that "at first, I looked on it as a little bit jaw-dropping. ... It's super-neat."
The Post adds that "the scenario they tested probably mimics one of the earliest stirrings of evolution." And Michael Kay, a professor of biochemistry at University of Utah, says the new paper has given the RNA World theory "key evidence" to show "it is plausible and reasonable." He added that the RNA copier developed at Salk will "provide a valuable tool for people wanting to do directed evolution experiments."

Mexico is waiting for the United States to provide evidence that shows imported genetically modified corn is safe for human consumption. "In a written submission to a panel of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Mexico, the top buyer of U.S. corn, argued that science proves GM corn and the herbicide glyphosate are harmful to human health and its native varieties, and that its decree to ban GM corn for human consumption is within its right," reports Reuters. From the report: [Deputy Agriculture Secretary Victor Suarez] said the onus is now on the United States to show GM corn is not harming Mexico's population, which consumes a higher amount of corn than many countries through daily diet staples like nixtamalized dough and tortilla. The United States "argues that the decisions in Mexico are not based on science and that their decisions are," Suarez told Reuters in an interview. "But we still haven't seen the science of the United States or the companies. We are looking forward to that study with great pleasure."

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Mexico's approach to biotechnology runs counter to "decades' worth of evidence demonstrating its safety." A senior official for the U.S. Trade Representative said, "Scientific authorities, including in Mexico, have consistently found biotech products like corn to be safe over a period of decades." [...] Mexico's written response cited studies it said showed links between GM corn consumption and glyphosate exposure to liver inflammation in people and impacts to immune response in animals, saying it considers the risk to human health "extremely serious."

The United States in August requested a dispute settlement panel under the USMCA over Mexico's decree to ban GM corn for human consumption, specifically in the use of making flour for tortillas. The decree allows the use of GM yellow corn in animal feed, which accounts for the majority of Mexico's nearly $5.9 billion worth of U.S. corn imports annually. Washington argues Mexico's decree banning imports of GM corn used for tortillas is not based on science and violates its commitments under the USMCA, which has been in place since 2020. "There is no impact on trade," Suarez said of Mexico's decree. "The value and volume of exports of GM corn to Mexico has increased."

Mexico's decree also calls for the gradual substitution of GM corn, a point of contention highlighted by U.S. officials. In its written response, Mexico argued that no specific time frame has been established and therefore it has had no trade impact. "It is a strategic goal, like the United States would like to have energy sovereignty and energy self-sufficiency," Suarez said. The United States is expected to issue a rebuttal to Mexico's response.

In 1970 an Oregon man discovered a body with "clear signs of foul play".

NPR reports that "The identity of the young woman remained a mystery — until Thursday." State authorities identified the woman as Sandra Young, a teenager from Portland who went missing between 1968 and 1969. Her identity was discovered through advanced DNA technology, which has helped solve stubborn cold cases in recent years. The case's breakthrough came last year in January, when a person uploaded their DNA to the genealogy database GEDMatch and the tool immediately determined that the DNA donor was a distant family member of Young....

From there, a genetic genealogist working with local law enforcement helped track down other possible relatives and encouraged them to provide their DNA. That work eventually led to Young's sister and other family members, who confirmed that Young went missing around the same time.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the news.

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN.

Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer...

The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer...

Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added...

By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said.

A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma.
"All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN.

"To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: As the French startup ecosystem continues to boom -- think Mistral, Poolside, and Adaptive -- today the Paris-based Bioptimus, with a mission to build the first universal AI foundation model for biology, emerged from stealth following a seed funding round of $35 million. The new open science model will connect the different scales of biology with generative AI -- from molecules to cells, tissues and whole organisms. Bioptimus unites a team of Google DeepMind alumni and Owkin scientists (AI biotech startup Owkin is itself a French unicorn) who will take advantage of AWS compute and Owkin's data generation capabilities and access to multimodal patient data sourced from leading academic hospitals worldwide. According to a press release, "this all gives the power to create computational representations that establish a strong differentiation against models trained solely on public datasets and a single data modality that are not able to capture the full diversity of biology."

In an interview with VentureBeat, Jean-Philippe Vert, co-founder and CEO of Bioptimus, chief R&D Officer of Owkin and former research lead at Google Brain, said as a smaller, independent company, Bioptimus can move faster than Google DeepMind to gain direct access to the data needed to train biology models. "We have the advantage of being able to more easily and securely collaborate with partners, and have established a level of trust in our work by sharing our AI expertise and making models available to them for research," he said. "This can be hard for big tech to do. Bioptimus will also leverage some of the strongest sovereignty controls in the market today."

Rodolphe Jenatton, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind, has also joined the Bioptimus team, telling VentureBeat the Bioptimus work will be released as open source/open science, at a similar level to Mistral's model releases. "Transparency and sharing and community will be key elements for us," he said. Currently, AI models are limited to specific aspects of biology, Vert explained. "For example, several companies are starting to build language models for protein sequences," he said, adding that there are also initiatives to build a foundation model for images of cells.

However, there is no holistic view of the totality of biology: "The good news is that the AI technology is converging very quickly, with some architectures that allow to have all the data contribute together to a unified model," he explained. "So this is what we want to do. As far as I know that it does not exist yet. But I'm certain that if we didn't do it, someone else would do it in the near future." The biggest bottleneck, he said, is access to data. "It's very different from training an LLM on text on the web," he said. And that access, he pointed out, is what Bioptimus has in spades, through its Owkin partnership.

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.
The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco's leaders have spent the past few years desperately trying to figure out how to deal with a glut of empty offices, shuttered retail and public safety concerns plaguing the city's once vibrant downtown. Now, a California lawmaker wants to try a sweeping plan to revive the city's core by exempting most new real estate projects from environmental review, potentially quickening development by months or even years. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced SB1227 on Friday as a proposal to exempt downtown projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, for a decade. The 1970 landmark law requires studies of a project's expected impact on air, water, noise and other areas, but Wiener said it has been abused to slow down or kill infill development near public transit.

"Downtown San Francisco matters to our city's future, and it's struggling -- to bring people back, we need to make big changes and have open minds," Wiener said in a statement. "That starts with remodeling, converting, or even replacing buildings that may have become outdated and that simply aren't going to succeed going forward." Eligible projects would include academic institutions, sports facilities, mixed-use projects including housing, biotech labs, offices, public works and even smaller changes such as modifying an existing building's exterior. The city's existing zoning and permit requirements would remain intact. "We're not taking away any local control," Wiener said in an interview with the Chronicle on Friday.

California Sen. Scott Wiener is proposing a bill that, he said, would make it easier for San Francisco's downtown area to recover from the pandemic. However, it's not clear how much of an impact the bill would have if it's eventually passed since other factors are at play. New construction has been nearly frozen in San Francisco since the pandemic, amid consistently high labor costs, elevated interest rates and weakening demand for both apartments and commercial space.Major developers have reiterated that they have no plans to start work on significant new projects any time soon. Last week, Kilroy Realty, which has approval for a massive 2.3 million-square-foot redevelopment ofSouth of Market's Flower Mart, said no groundbreakings are planned this year -- anywhere.

"Something revolutionary is on the horizon..." claims the company's web site. "Wearable neurotechnology that augments sleep, attention, and ultimately the human experience."

Or, as Fierce Biotech put it, "A startup emerged from stealth this week with grand plans to pioneer a new form of neurotech dubbed 'electric medicine.'" Elemind's approach centers on artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that are trained to continuously analyze neurological activity collected by a noninvasive wearable device, then to deliver through the wearable bursts of neurostimulation that are uniquely tailored to those real-time brain wave readings. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company claims that its approach — which is based on research from its founders, a group of high-profile scientists hailing from the likes of MIT, Stanford and Harvard — offers a more "natural" treatment option than pharmaceuticals for neurological conditions like insomnia, essential tremor and memory loss.

"Chemical drugs affect the entire body, often leading to unwanted side effects. Elemind offers a nonchemical, direct and on-demand solution that learns and dynamically adjusts to each person," Meredith Perry, a co-founder of Elemind and its CEO, said in the company's debut announcement. "We're the first and only company able to precisely guide and redirect brainwaves in real time."
"Elemind's first product is a general wellness device and will not be subject to FDA regulation," notes an announcement from the company. But they've thoroughly researched the product's potential: To date, Elemind's technology is supported by five clinical trials and several publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Clinical trials show Elemind's technology is effective at inducing sleep up to 74% faster, suppressing essential tremor with a significant decrease after only 30 seconds of stimulation, and boosting memory. Clinical trials also demonstrate Elemind is effective at increasing pain thresholds and enhancing sedation; this study is currently in peer review....

"You can think about it like noise cancellation for the mind," said Dr. David Wang, CTO and co-founder of Elemind. "Our technology uses phase-locking auditory stimuli to align precisely with the user's brainwaves and steer them to a different frequency associated with a different state."
The company plans to announce its first product within a few months, reports the Boston Globe, noting that the company's $12 million in seed funding came from "a consortium that includes Village Global, an early-stage venture fund backed by high-tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates., Reid Hoffman, and Ann Wojcicki..."

More info from VentureBeat.