21 November 2010

Europe to ban hundreds of Herbal Remedies

Safety concerns sparked drive to outlaw products


Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a "discriminatory and disproportionate" European law.

With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades.
From 1 May 2011, traditional herbal medicinal products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner to comply with an EU directive passed in 2004. The directive was introduced in response to rising concern over adverse effects caused by herbal medicines.
The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has issued more than a dozen safety alerts in the past two years, including one over aristolochia, a banned toxic plant derivative which caused kidney failure in two women.
Herbal practitioners say it is impossible for most herbal medicines to meet the licensing requirements for safety and quality, which are intended to be similar to those for pharmaceutical drugs, because of the cost of testing.
According to the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), which represents herbal practitioners, not a single product used in traditional Chinese medicine or ayurvedic medicine has been licensed. In Europe, around 200 products from 27 plant species have been licensed but there are 300 plant species in use in the UK alone.
The ANH estimates the cost of obtaining a licence at between £80,000 and £120,000 per herb. They say this is affordable for single herbal products with big markets, such as echinacea, a remedy for colds and flu, but will drive small producers of medicines containing multiple herbs out of business.
Under EU law, statutorily regulated herbal practitioners will be permitted to continue prescribing unlicensed products. But the Coalition Government and the previous Labour administration have delayed plans to introduce a statutory herbal practitioner register.
This means thousands of patients who rely on herbal treatments face being denied access to them. Medical organisations, including the MHRA, have warned the measures may drive patients to obtain herbal medicines over the internet – where risks are much greater.
Michael McIntyre, the chairman of the European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association, said: "The problem is you can't get a licence for many herbal medicines because they are grown in people's back gardens and you can't patent them. The implications are very serious. Patients want to receive treatment from trained and qualified practitioners but unless we have regulation they can't have confidence in who is treating them. The worst outcome is that patients will end up going to the internet for their herbal medicines where there are no controls."
Dr Rob Verkerk, of the ANH, said: "Thousands of people across Europe rely on herbal medicines to improve their quality of life. They don't take them because they are sick – they take them to keep healthy. If these medicines are taken off the market, people will try and find them elsewhere, such as from the internet, where there is a genuine risk they will get low quality products, that either don't work or are adulterated."
The MHRA said it had received applications for licences for 166 herbal products, of which 78 had been granted. Sir Alasdair Breckenridge, chairman of the MHRA, said a register of herbalists was essential. "Just because something is natural doesn't mean it is safe," he said. "It is terribly important to have responsible people who have undergone training prescribing these products."
Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, said proposals for regulation would be worthless unless they required practitioners to follow best evidence for the effects of their remedies. "It is in danger of regulating nonsense – and that must result in nonsense," he said.
A review of the codes of conduct by which alternative practitioners were bound found the "vast majority" did not include an obligation to report adverse effects, he said. The only exception was the Chinese Herbal Medicine Code which advised members to report "cases of industrial poisoning or accident".
A spokesman for the Department of Health said no decision had been made on a statutory register of herbal practitioners. "The Government is aware of the strength of feeling on this issue and is actively exploring options."

Remedies under threat

Cascara bark (Cascara sagrada, Rhamnus purshiana)
Helps stimulate a sluggish bowel.
Pau D'Arco (Tabebuia impetiginosa)
Anti-inflammatory, used for infection control.
Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera, or winter cherry)
Anti-inflammatory, for arthritis and boosting the immune system.
Skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis/Chinese skullcap)
For anxiety, headaches and pain relief.
Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria)
For stomach acidity, diarrhoea, headache.
Horny goat weed (Epimedium grandiflorum)
Used to enhance libido.

Humans Wearing Sensors Will Soon Be The Backbone of a Mobile Internet Infrastructure

Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile internet networks by carrying wearable sensors. Experts weigh-in on the novelty and potential dangers. 
According to researchers from Queen's University Belfast, the sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and make mobile phone base stations almost obsolete.
The engineers from Queen's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), are working on a new project based on the rapidly developing science of body centric communications.
Social benefits are being promoted from the work touting improvements in mobile gaming and remote healthcare, along with new precision monitoring of athletes and real-time tactical training in team sports.
The researchers at ECIT are investigating how small sensors carried by members of the public, in items such as next generation smartphones, could communicate with each other to create potentially vast body-to-body networks (BBNs). 
The new sensors would interact to transmit data, providing 'anytime, anywhere' mobile network connectivity. 

Many researchers are skeptical regarding long-term safety from the constant bombardment of electromagnetic radiation to the human body. "This has the potential to create a number of physical illnesses from cancer to neurological disorders," said Mike Davis who specializes in electromagentic frequencies and there affect on humans.
Dr Simon Cotton, from ECIT's wireless communications research group said: "In the past few years a significant amount of research has been undertaken into antennas and systems designed to share information across the surface of the human body. Until now, however, little work has been done to address the next major challenge which is one of the last frontiers in wireless communication – how that information can be transferred efficiently to an off-body location.
"If the idea takes off, BBNs could also lead to a reduction in the number of base stations needed to service mobile phone users, particularly in areas of high population density. This could help to alleviate public perceptions of adverse health associated with current networks and be more environmentally friendly due to the much lower power levels required for operation." 

"The availability of body-to-body networks may bring much greater risks to the population than benefits," said Davis. "Regardless of reduced power levels from base stations, they may ultimately place a greater strain on the healthcare system in the long-term by dramatically affecting the nervous systems of the entire population," he stated. "Humans would become the base stations."
Dr Cotton added: "Our work at Queen's involves collaborating with national and international academic, industrial and institutional experts to develop a range of models for wireless channels required for body centric communications.
"Even though the market for wearable wireless sensors is still in its infancy, it is expected to grow to more than 400 million devices annually by 2014."

Davis worries that once approved, the devices will be ushered in quickly by telecom without proper long-term testing.

Darpa: Fuse Nerves With Robot Limbs, Make Prosthetics Feel Real

Controlling robotic limbs with your brain is just step one. The Pentagon eventually wants artificial arms and legs to feel and perform just the same as naturally grown ones. Which means step two is hooking up those prosthetics directly into severed nerves. That’ll allow the wearer to detect subtle sensations, respond to the brain’s neural signals, move with unprecedented agility, and “incorporat[e] the limb into the sense-of-self.”
Over the last decade, the Pentagon has made remarkable progress in creating life-like prosthetic devices. And most of the advances are because of programs funded by Darpa, the far-out military research agency that’s also behind this latest project, called Reliable Peripheral Interfaces (RPI).
Already, Darpa has funded ventures like the DEKA Arm, which relies on a joystick-style interface, and used “targeted muscle reinnervation surgery” for prosthetics that transmit neural signals from a bundle of nerves in the chest. Darpa-funded researchers at Johns Hopkins have even started human trials on theirModular Prosthetic Limb, which transmits cues to an artificial limb using brain-implanted micro-arrays.
But the RPI program taps into key shortcomings that persist in even the most sophisticated prosthetic devices. Existing neural-prosthetic interfaces aren’t sensitive enough to provide myriad signals — prototypes currently transmit around 500 events a second — or offer users a robust degree of freedom. Not to mention that current neural platforms have short life spans and are tough to repair without invasive surgery, making them ill-suited to troops and vets in their 20s.
So Darpa’s after a prosthetic that can record motor-sensory signals right from peripheral nerves (those that are severed when a limb is lost) and then transmit responding feedback signals from the brain. That means an incredibly sensitive platform, “capable of detecting sufficiently strong motor-control signals and distinguishing them from sensory signals and other confounding signals,” in a region packed tightly with nerves. Once signals are detected, they’ll be decoded by algorithms and transmitted to the brain, where a user’s intended movements would be recoded and transmitted back to the prosthetic.
The end result would be a prosthetic that acts as a veritable extension of one’s own body. And a platform capable of accurately distinguishing between, and interpreting, different sensory signals — temperature, pressure, motion — would “allow the incorporation of the limb into the sense-of-self” and offer unprecedented freedom of movement for a prosthetic wearer.
The agency also wants an ultra-reliable platform, with an error rate of less than 0.1 percent and a lifespan of around 70 years. By comparison, current neural-recording interfaces last around two years before they need to be replaced. Sounds far-fetched, but Darpa’s already got one major lead: The agency’s new Neurophotonics Research Center will investigate fiber-optic prosthetic interfaces that can incorporate thousands of sensors into a single filament.
Photo: Sgt. Ray Lewis/Bouhammer.com

20 November 2010

Your children will live to see man merge with machines.

Last week, historian Ian Morris revealed how, at the end of the last Ice Age, a simple accident of geography gave the West the advantages that led to it dominating the world for the past two centuries.
His argument forces us to accept that our success was nothing to do with superior brains, leaders or culture – and that the East is on the brink of taking over.
That idea may be hard to get used to, but Morris says it will be easy compared with the astounding changes in technology and health that are just around the corner...

The Matrix
Sci-fi future: Films like the Matrix have given a fictional depiction of the merging of man and machine. But could our planet have changed beyond all recognition by 2100?

When we imagine what life will be like over the next century, many people worry how the rise of the East will affect our lives in the West. They need not bother: the reality is that by the year 2100 our planet will have changed out of all recognition and even the concept of East and West may be meaningless.
In an interview in 2000, the economist Jeremy Rifkin suggested that: ‘Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous thousand years.’
But this is, in fact, an understatement.
By my calculations, social development will rise twice as much between now and 2050 as in the previous 15,000 years; and by 2100 it will double again.
By 2100 we can anticipate cities of 140 million people – picture Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, New Delhi and Shanghai all rolled into one.
We should imagine armies with five times the destructive power of today’s, which probably means not more nuclear arms but weapons that make our intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombs and guns as obsolete as the machine gun made the musket.
Robots will do our fighting. Cyber warfare will be decisive. Nanotechnology will turn everyday materials into deadly weapons.

Terminsator Salvation
Brave new world: Robots will do our fighting. Cyber warfare will be decisive. Nanotechnology will turn everyday materials into deadly weapons

The 20th Century took us from hand-cranked telephones to the internet; the 21st will probably see everyone (at least in rich nations) gain instant access to all the world’s information, their brains networked in the same way as – or into – a giant computer.
All this, of course, sounds like science fiction. Cities of 140 million surely could not function. Nano-, cyber- and robot wars would annihilate us all. And merging our minds with machines – well, we would cease to be human. And that, I think, is the most important point.
When I was a little boy, back in the warm glow of the West’s golden age, I used to love the television show Star Trek. Warp drive, phasers and Scotty beaming up Captain Kirk struck me as wonderful. It was a brilliant image of what the distant future might look like; if, that is, we could add technology while keeping everything else the same. But we now know that is not what is going to happen.
Another Seventies TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man, probably came closer to the mark. You may remember the voiceover in the opening credits: ‘We can rebuild him, we have the technology.’ Forty years on we really are rebuilding ourselves.
We actually began the rebuilding a century ago, when science and industry gave us first chemical fertilisers and tractors, then electric pumps to bring water to dry fields, and finally genetically modified crops. More food changed what it meant to be human.
Earth’s population quadrupled in the 20th Century, but the food supply grew even more. On average, all over the world, people are 50 per cent bigger than in 1900. We are 4ins taller, have more robust organs and carry more fat (in rich countries, too much fat).

The Six Million Dollar Man
A reality? Lee Majors in the television show The Six Million Dollar Man. The voiceover in the opening credits said: 'We can rebuild him, we have the technology.' Forty years on we really are rebuilding ourselves

Europeans and Americans live 30 years longer than their great-grandparents and enjoy an extra decade or two before their eyes and ears weaken and arthritis freezes their joints.
And in most of the rest of the world, life spans have lengthened by closer to 40 years. Even in Africa, plagued by AIDS and malaria, people live 20 years longer in 2010 than they did in 1910.
The human body has changed more in the past 100 years than it did in the previous 100,000 years. Our life spans and general health – not to mention our easily available augments such as hearing aids, artificial joints, Botox, and Viagra – would have seemed like magic to anyone who lived in an earlier age. But the changes over the next 100 years will be even greater.
The cutting edge shows up in some unlikely areas, such as the sports field. When Tiger Woods needed eye surgery in 2005, he asked himself an obvious question: why be content with what Nature gave me? Instead of settling for merely perfect 20/20 vision, he upgraded to better-than-human 20/15.
In 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations faced an even more extraordinary question. It temporarily banned the sprinter Oscar Pistorius from the Beijing Olympics because his artificial legs seemed to give him an edge over runners hobbled by real legs.
In the end, Pistorius missed qualifying by 0.7 of a second.
Oscar Pistorius
Advantage? Sprinter Oscar Pistorius was temporarily banned from the Beijing Olympics because his artificial legs seemed to give him an edge over runners hobbled by real legs

By the 2020s, middle-aged people in rich countries might see farther, run faster and look better than they did as youngsters. But they will still not be as eagle-eyed, swift, and beautiful as the next generation.
Genetic testing already offers parents the option of aborting foetuses predisposed to undesirable shortcomings, and as we get better at switching specific genes on and off, ‘designer babies’ may become an option. Why take a chance on Nature’s lottery when a little tinkering can give you the baby you want?
Because, some say, eugenics – whether driven by racist maniacs such as Hitler or by consumer choice – is wrong. All this talk of transcending biology is merely playing God. To that, Craig Venter (who this year justified his nickname Dr Frankencell by synthesizing JCVI-syn1.0, the world’s first artificial life) reportedly replies: ‘We’re not playing.’
Politicians can ban stem cell research, but outlawing therapeutic cloning, beauty for all (who can pay), and longer life spans does not sound workable. And banning the battlefield applications of tinkering with Nature is even less plausible.
The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA – the people who brought us the internet in the Seventies) is currently working on molecular-scale computers built from enzymes and DNA molecules rather than silicon.
These will be implanted in soldiers’ heads, giving post-biological infantrymen some of the advantages of machines by speeding up their thought processes, adding memory, and even providing wireless internet access.
In a similar vein, DARPA’s Silent Talk project is working on implants that will decode preverbal electrical signals within the brain and send them over the internet so troops can communicate without radios or email. One recent National Science Foundation report suggests that such ‘network-enhanced telepathy’ should become a reality in the 2020s.
As early as next year IBM expects to have an array of Blue Gene/Q supercomputers running that will take us a quarter of the way towards a functioning simulation of a human brain.
Some technologists, such as the inventor Ray Kurzweil, insist that in the 2030s neuron-by-neuron brain scanning will allow us to upload human minds on to machines.
Kurzweil calls this ‘the Singularity’ – a stage of history when change becomes so fast that it seems to be instantaneous.
I have suggested that while geography drives social development at different rates in different parts of the world, rising levels of development also drive what geography means.
DNS molecules
Future fighters: The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is currently working on molecular-scale computers built from enzymes and DNA molecules

But if something such as Kurzweil’s Singularity comes to pass, development will not just change geography’s meaning: it will rob geography of meaning altogether.
The merging of mortals and machines will mean new ways of living, fighting, working, thinking and loving; new ways of being born, growing old, and dying. It may mean the end of all these things and the dawn of a world beyond anything our unimproved, merely biological brains can imagine.
All this will come to pass – unless, of course, it doesn’t. History shows us what trends have shaped the world, allowing us to project them into the future, but it also shows that these trends often generate the very forces that undermine them.
The rise of the great ancient empires of Rome and Han China, for instance, set off migrations, wars, famines and plagues that brought them down. One thousand years later, the successes of medieval Chinese and Western states played a big part in starting the Mongol migrations and Black Death that devastated them in the 13th to 14th Centuries.
We can trace the same pattern at least as far back as 2200 BC, when the expansion of Old Kingdom Egypt and the Akkadian Empire in what is now Iraq triggered another package of migration, state failure, famine and plague, ushering in collapse and a Dark Age. In each case, the upheavals coincided with rapid climate change, which complicated reactions to crisis.
The surging social development of the 21st Century is generating an alarmingly similar pattern. Not a year goes by without the World Health Organisation warning of some new pandemic – flu, AIDS, SARS – spreading like wildfire and threatening to kill tens of millions.
Meanwhile, the climate is changing faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years. The worst effects are being felt along a great swathe from central Africa to central Asia.

Floods
Climate change: By 2050 there couldl be 200 million 'climate migrants' region, fleeing famine, disease and state failure

The Stern Review, a British report commissioned in 2006, predicted that by 2050 there will be 200 million ‘climate migrants’ in this region, fleeing famine, disease and state failure, and spreading even more famine, disease and state failure in their wake. As if this were not enough, this arc of instability is also the heartland of nuclear proliferation.
Israel has built up a large nuclear arsenal since 1970; India and Pakistan both tested weapons in 1998. Israeli intelligence expects Iran to get the bomb next year, which may drive half a dozen Muslim states (most likely Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the UAE) to follow suit – if, that is, the Israelis let things go that far.
No American administration could remain neutral in a nuclear confrontation between its closest friend and bitterest enemy; nor, perhaps, could China or Russia, which still has the world’s biggest nuclear force.
Perhaps great statesmen will yank us back from precipice after precipice. Maybe we can avoid a nuclear version of 1914 for 50 years. But is it realistic to think we can keep the bomb out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states for ever? Or deter every leader from deciding that nuclear war is the least bad option?
It is painful to dwell on such possibilities for very long, but they force us to face an important fact. When political pundits talk about what the future will be like, they imagine it as being much like the present, but shinier, faster, and with a richer China. They are wrong.
This is Star Trek thinking, assuming that we can change some things about the world without changing everything.
The 21st Century is going to be a race between some kind of Singularity and Armageddon. This means the next few decades will be the most important in history.
If Singularity wins the race, we will experience technological change so extreme that biology will be transformed; if Armageddon outruns it, we face the destruction of the civilisation we have built up so painfully over the last 15,000 years.
Either way, our rising social development is going to change everything. By the time the East overtakes the West, neither East nor West may matter very much any more.
The real question for our age is not how long Western domination will last. It is whether humanity will break through to an entirely new kind of existence before disaster strikes us down – permanently.

Why The West Rules – For Now, by Ian Morris is published by Profile Books at £25. To order your copy at the special price of £18.99 with free p&p, please call the Review Bookstore on 0845 155 0713 or visit MailLife.co.uk/books.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1325255/Your-children-live-man-merge-machines-But-save-destroy-us.html#ixzz1itbbX8Q6

Who's the Conspiracy Theorist Now? Gov't Scaring the Public with Aliens, Asteroids, and Global Pandemics

Pandemics, Aliens, and Asteroids -- Oh My!  It appears that the corporate-government-media has recently become the number one propagator of conspiracy theories.  That is, of course, as long as the fear campaign pushes the right buttons for the agenda.
The dumbed-down public will always be led by fear until they realize that no major events happen by mistake in the matrix.  All major events, reactions, and proposed solutions are thoroughly orchestrated and performed by the power players.  They hit all the right notes, all of the time, save for some minor tuning as needed.


It's convenient for establishment leaders to claim that major events are mistakes. For example, we're told the attacks of September 11th were a massive failure on the part of the intelligence community. Additionally, we're told that the "idiots" on Wall Street did not see the housing collapse coming, or predict the 2008 financial meltdown, or the recent currency wars, or the recent gold and commodity rush.

t's the typical story told to the public when catastrophe strikes:  whoops, who could have seen that coming? Even some of the most enlightened minds that predicted these events still call the people in charge "stupid" for not seeing or adapting to it.  Perhaps many of the useful idiots who run the gears of the system don't know the fundamentals well enough to predict events, but the true controllers know exactly what they're doing, what reaction they will get, and what calculated solution will ultimately give them more power and wealth. 

We all witnessed the incredible consolidation of wealth and power orchestrated by our corrupt state since the 9/11 attacks, all at the expense of the common man's treasure, blood, and rights -- all caused by 19 (U.S. funded) extremists with box cutters who came from caves.  Only scared little sheep could believe that theory, especially given what has transpired to date.  

Yesterday's article in AOL News announced that Obama's science czar John Holdren is concerned about threats of asteroid impacts on Earth.   While a valid concern, the timely disclosure seems to be yet another attempt to reach out to the alternative media.  This comes after the increasing stories which seem to be leading up to revealing the alien threat to the public, while other new threats of currency wars and new pandemics abound.

However, the 9/11 problem-reaction-solution playbook seems stale, as Al-Qaeda seems less scary by the day.  The matrix is now moving on to the next stage of fear campaigns with aliens, asteroids, more pandemics, and more manufactured economic catastrophes.  This is their all-out attempt to hit us with full spectrum fear. It seems that if the establishment can't defeat the "conspiracy" crowd, they'll seek to distract, divert, or co-opt it to the best of their ability.  As a sign of their desperation to control free humanity, their version of the threats facing us read more like a comic book or a science fiction script, rather than news about actual events.
For those who doubt that any of our multi-threats could have been orchestrated, I suggest you look around to see which part of society actually has benefited from terror and the constant threat of more terror.  The conclusion should be clear:  The Mega-Cartels that seek higher levels of control over their slave population.

'Near human' bots to 'perform surgeries, harvest crops'

The military's blue-sky research arm, Darpa, is working to launch a major push that'd revolutionize robotic capabilities and put bots pretty much everywhere, from hospitals to dude ranches to "explosive atmospheres."
Working along with four other agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security, Darpa has already created a real-life C3PO, a bot that can match human intellect and a four-legged BigDog robo-beast.
They are also making efforts to map monkey minds to yield neurally controlled prosthetics, reports Wired News.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is after "robotic applications to surgery," as well as "computerized therapist personalities [and] artificial intelligence capable of real time monitoring" along with patient interaction and day-to-day care-taking tasks.
The NIH is also interested in organ- and limb-replacement robotics, including advanced prosthetics and "implantable smart robotics for monitoring/drug delivery."
The USDA is looking at an agricultural-bot that'd be responsible for crop harvesting, sorting and inspecting, along with "detecting ripeness, physical damage [and] microbial contamination."
Robots would also rule over animal herds, taking on tasks like "sorting, vaccinating [and] deworming" large numbers of livestock.
The Department of Homeland Security is looking for beyond-tough bomb-handlers and surveillance bots, capable of carrying 50-pound loads in a single arm, traversing stairs and "corrugated drainage pipes" and working "in an explosive atmosphere" or through tunnels filled with "debris, mud and water."
Combined, the solicitations are after a sweeping robotic proliferation, including bots that can "safely co-exist in close proximity or in physical contact with humans."
As the solicitation noted, "the creation of trust in human-robot interactions" remains a top priority.

Rabbi Against Israel (Zionism)

Fox interview of a Rabbi against Israel's zionism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/02/european-jews-criticise-israel

More than 3,000 European Jews, including prominent intellectuals, have signed a petition speaking out against Israeli settlement policies and warning that systematic support for the Israeli government is dangerous.




19 November 2010

'Living Biological Computers' to become Reality

Scientists are one step closer to making a biological computer after building basic components for digital devices out of bacteria and DNA.
Some scientists believe that, in the future, small biological computers could roam our bodies monitoring our health and correcting any problems they  find.
Researchers from Imperial College London have demonstrated they can build the 'logic gates' which are the building blocks of today's microprocessors out of harmless bugs and chemicals.

Brains in jars: Scientists are one step closer to making a biological computer after building basic components for digital devices out of bacteria and DNA (file picture)
Scientists are one step closer to making a biological computer after building basic components for digital devices out of bacteria and DNA (file picture)

The biological logic gates described in Nature Communications are the most advanced 'biological circuitry' ever created by scientists.  
Professor Richard Kitney said: 'Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks in silicon circuitry that our entire digital age is based on. Without them, we could not process digital information.
'Now that we have demonstrated we can replicate these parts using bacteria and DNA, we hope that our work could lead to a new generation of biological processors, whose applications in information processing could be as important as their electronic equivalents.'
Although still a long way off, the team suggests these biological logic gates could one day form the building blocks in microscopic biological computers.

Future: Some scientists believe that small biological computers could roam our bodies monitoring our health and could even detect and destroy cancer cells
Future: Some scientists believe that small biological computers could roam our bodies monitoring our health and could even detect and destroy cancer cells

Devices may include sensors that swim inside arteries, detecting the build up of harmful plaque and rapidly delivering medications to the affected area.
Other applications may include sensors that detect and destroy cancer cells inside the body and pollution monitors that can be deployed in the environment, detecting and neutralising dangerous toxins such as arsenic.
Previous research only proved biological logic gates could be made. The advantage of the biological logic gates over previous attempts is that they behave more like their electronic counterparts.
The new biological gates are also modular, which means that they can be fitted together to make different types of logic gates, paving the way for more complex biological processors to be built in the future.  
    In one experiment the researchers showed how biological logic gates can replicate the way their electronic counterparts process information by either switching 'on' or 'off'.  
    The scientists constructed a type of logic gate called an 'AND Gate' from bacteria E.Coli, which is normally found in the lower intestine.
    The team altered the E.Coli with modified DNA, which reprogrammed it to perform the same switching on and off process as its electronic equivalent when stimulated by chemicals.  
    The researchers were also able to demonstrate that the biological logic gates could be connected together to form more complex components in a similar way that electronic components are made.
    In another experiment, the researchers created a 'NOT gate' and combined it with the AND gate to produce the more complex 'NAND gate'.  
    The next stage of the research will see the team trying to develop more complex circuitry that comprises multiple logic gates.
    One of challenges faced by the team is finding a way to link multiple biological logic gates together, similar to the way in which electronic logic gates are linked together, to enable complex processing to be carried out.


    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2050500/Biological-computers-soon-reality-scientists-build-basic-components-bacteria-DNA.html#ixzz1jCI3FXPs