Showing posts with label TED Talk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TED Talk. Show all posts

As we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of it is dissolving in the oceans, leading to drastic changes in the water's chemistry. Triona McGrath researches this process, known as ocean acidification, and in this talk she takes us for a dive into an oceanographer's world. Learn more about how the "evil twin of climate change" is impacting the ocean — and the life that depends on it.









Interactive Script:



Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world — and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things we can do ... if we start right now.


Manu Prakash - An Assistant Professor of bio engineering at Stanford University, who made a fold-able microscope which he is calling it as "Foldscope". In the words of this IIT Kanpur student, the world need it and every coming generation child should carry a pocket microscope and those children should know what actually they are dealing with "microscopically".


Forget stitches — there's a better way to close wounds. In this talk, TED Fellow Joe Landolina talks about his invention — a medical gel that can instantly stop traumatic bleeding without the need to apply pressure.



"Antibiotic drugs save lives. But we simply use them too much — and often for non-lifesaving purposes, like treating the flu and even raising cheaper chickens. The result, says researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, is that the drugs will stop working for everyone, as the bacteria they target grow more and more resistant. He calls on all of us (patients and doctors alike) to think of antibiotics — and their ongoing effectiveness — as a finite resource, and to think twice before we tap into it. It’s a sobering look at how global medical trends can strike home."

The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work,he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway.

Read the full interactive script here.....













Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an impassioned plea to end the "backward, heartless, disastrous" movement to stamp out the drug trade. He gives two big reasons we should focus on intelligent regulation instead.

"So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education mantra: Safety first."
Read the full interactive script here....























Along with a crew of technologists and scientists, Jorge Soto is developing a simple, noninvasive, open-source test that looks for early signs of multiple forms of cancer. Onstage at TED Global 2014, he demonstrates a working prototype of the mobile platform for the first time.


 In the above TED talk Jorge Soto tells about the importance of early detection of cancer.

He also says "One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it."

"We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any." 


  • Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before.
Jorge Soto and their team who are from countries like Chile, Panama, Mexico and Greece, based on their scientific discoveries, they believed that early cancer detection will be done by testing blood sample. But there is no current reliable technique available for this. So, they find a method which detects the molecules, those freely move in blood sample called Micro RNA. So, their method basically depend upon testing the micro RNA.

Click here....The Role of micro RNA in Cancer:


  • To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, we need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs. 
  • So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment. And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker.

  • However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA.And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small.