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The Scientist Behind Moderna on How Engineering Revolutionizes Medicine

What does it take to turn bold ideas into life-saving medicine?

In this episode of The Big Question, we sit down with @MIT’s Dr. Robert Langer, one of the founding figures of bioengineering and among the most cited scientists in the world, to explore how engineering has reshaped modern healthcare. From early failures and rejected grants to breakthroughs that changed medicine, Langer reflects on a career built around persistence and problem-solving. His work helped lay the foundation for technologies that deliver large biological molecules, like proteins and RNA, into the body, a challenge once thought impossible. Those advances now underpin everything from targeted cancer therapies to the mRNA vaccines that transformed the COVID-19 response.

The conversation looks forward as well as back, diving into the future of medicine through engineered solutions such as artificial skin for burn victims, FDA-approved synthetic blood vessels, and organs-on-chips that mimic human biology to speed up drug testing while reducing reliance on animal models. Langer explains how nanoparticles safely carry genetic instructions into cells, how mRNA vaccines train the immune system without altering DNA, and why engineering delivery, getting the right treatment to the right place in the body, remains one of medicine’s biggest challenges. From personalized cancer vaccines to tissue engineering and rapid drug development, this episode reveals how science, persistence, and engineering come together to push the boundaries of what medicine can do next.

#Science #Medicine #Biotech #Health #LifeSciences.

Chapters:
00:00 Engineering the Future of Medicine.
01:55 Failure, Persistence, and Scientific Breakthroughs.
05:30 From Chemical Engineering to Patient Care.
08:40 Solving the Drug Delivery Problem.
11:20 Delivering Proteins, RNA, and DNA
14:10 The Origins of mRNA Technology.
17:30 How mRNA Vaccines Work.
20:40 Speed and Scale in Vaccine Development.
23:30 What mRNA Makes Possible Next.
26:10 Trust, Misinformation, and Vaccine Science.
28:50 Engineering Tissues and Organs.
31:20 Artificial Skin and Synthetic Blood Vessels.
33:40 Organs on Chips and Drug Testing.
36:10 Why Science Always Moves Forward.

The Big Question with the Museum of Science:

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Shanghai scientists create computer chip in fiber thinner than a human hair, yet can withstand crushing force of 15.6 tons — fiber packs 100,000 transistors per centimeter

A group of researchers has built a computer chip in a flexible fiber thinner than an average human hair. The team from Fudan University in Shanghai says that their Fiber Integrated Circuit (FIC) design can process information like a computer, yet is durable enough to be “stretched, twisted, and woven into everyday clothing.” Use cases touted by the authors of the paper include advancements in the fields of brain-computer interfaces, VR devices, and smart textiles. This cutting-edge FIC design was apparently inspired by the construction of the humble sushi roll.

Flexible electronics have come a long way in recent years, with malleable components for power, sensing, and display readily available. However, so-called flexible electronic devices and the wearables made from them still usually contain components fabricated from rigid silicon wafers, limiting their applications and comfort. The Fudan team says that their FIC can remove the last vestiges of electronic rigidity “by creating a fiber integrated circuit (FIC) with unprecedented microdevice density and multimodal processing capacity.”

New design tool 3D-prints woven metamaterials that stretch and fail predictably

Metamaterials—materials whose properties are primarily dictated by their internal microstructure, and not their chemical makeup—have been redefining the engineering materials space for the last decade. To date, however, most metamaterials have been lightweight options designed for stiffness and strength.

New research from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering introduces a computational design framework to support the creation of a new class of soft, compliant, and deformable metamaterials. These metamaterials, termed 3D woven metamaterials, consist of building blocks that are composed of intertwined fibers that self-contact and entangle to endow the material with unique properties.

Silicon as strategy: the hidden battleground of the new space race

In the consumer electronics playbook, custom silicon is the final step in the marathon: you use off-the-shelf components to prove a product, achieve mass scale and only then invest in proprietary chips to create differentiation, improve operations, and optimize margins.

In the modern satellite communications (SATCOM) ecosystem, this script has been flipped. For the industry’s frontrunners, custom silicon is the starting line where the bets are high, and the rewards are even higher, not a late-stage luxury. Building custom silicon is just a small piece of the big project when it comes to launching a satellite constellation and the fact there are very limited off the shelf options.

The shift toward custom silicon is no longer a theoretical debate; it is a proven competitive requirement. To monetize the massive capital expenditure of a constellation, market leaders are already driving aggressive custom silicon programs for beamformers and modems from the very beginning. The consensus is clear: while commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) served as useful stopgaps, they have become a strategic liability that compromises price and power efficiency. If the industry is to scale to the mass market, operators must commit to bespoke silicon programs now — or risk being permanently priced out of the sky by competitors who have already optimized their hardware for the unit economics of space.

The Milky Way is embedded in a ‘large-scale sheet’ and this explains the motions of nearby galaxies

Computer simulations carried out by astronomers from the University of Groningen in collaboration with researchers from Germany, France and Sweden show that most of the (dark) matter beyond the Local Group of galaxies (which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy) must be organised in an extended plane. Above and below this plane are large voids. The observed motions of nearby galaxies and the joint masses of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy can only be properly explained with this ‘flat’ mass distribution. The research, led by PhD graduate Ewoud Wempe and Professor Amina Helmi, was published today in Nature Astronomy.

Almost a century ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that virtually all galaxies are moving away from the Milky Way. This is important evidence for the expansion of the universe and for the Big Bang. But even in Hubble’s time, it was clear that there were exceptions. For example, our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, is moving towards us at a speed of about 100 kilometres per second.

In fact, for half a century, astronomers have been wondering why most large nearby galaxies – with the exception of Andromeda – are moving away from us and do not seem to be affected by the mass and gravity of the so-called Local Group (the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and dozens of smaller galaxies).

A mesoscale optogenetics system for precise and robust stimulation of the primate cortex

Li et al. present a microLED-based mesoscale optogenetic system for centimeter-scale, million-pixel primate cortical stimulation. Optogenetically evoked saccades with accurate retinotopic organization remain stable for over a year, demonstrating precise, robust, and durable neuromodulation and charting a path toward next-generation optical brain-computer interfaces and visual prostheses.

Nothing Is Real: The Simulation Hypothesis

Are we living inside a computer simulation? The evidence is more compelling than you think.

In this deep exploration of the Simulation Hypothesis, we examine the scientific and philosophical arguments that suggest our reality might be code. From Nick Bostrom’s groundbreaking trilemma to quantum mechanics acting like a computer program, from the fine-tuned constants of physics to Elon Musk’s probabilistic arguments—we follow the evidence wherever it leads. Whether we’re simulated or not, the question reveals profound truths about consciousness, reality, and what it means to be human.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 — The Uncomfortable Question.

4:47 — Nick Bostrom’s Trilemma: The Logical Trap.

9:34 — The Ancestor Simulation Scenario.

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Experiments Hint on Time Being an Illusion

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about experimental evidence that time may be an illusion.
Links:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13386
https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/qfns-48vq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_time.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/5rtj-djfk.
https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021029
https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.7.031022
#time #physics #universe.

0:00 Time — what is it?
1:20 Time in general relativity (Einstein)
2:10 Quantum mechanics time.
2:40 The problem of time.
3:30 Page Wootters mechanism — is time emergent?
5:00 Experiments and possible proofs — entropy and quantum dots.
7:40 Large scale system.
8:30 What this suggests and how black holes can help.
9:50 Conclusions.

Enjoy and please subscribe.

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