Aimee Mullins on TED and TEDMED – a tribute to prosthetic technology and power of will

TED is known for bringing together some of the world’s top thinkers at conferences around the world to deliver short presentations on “ideas worth spreading.” Here Aimee Mullins, a record-breaing athlete, model and activist, is sharing her experiences and difficulties she had to go though when she was competing in running. Oh, did you know that she has both of her legs amputated below the knee, when she was 1 year old?

This is a terrific story about how technology can augment our lives and make truly unbelievable things come true. Thanks to prosthetic limb technologies people like Aimee Mullins are able not only to cope with their disabilities, but to achieve amazing results in all aspects of life. I am pretty sure that technology will keep improving and at some point of time we may even have better limbs than our natural ones. Just imagine, legs that never get tired and hands that never say you bluf when you play poker. I’m fantasizing right now of course, but I do love the concept of self improvent using technological advances.

And here is Aimee’s presentation at the TEDMED conference last year. Really inspiring.

New drug design technique could dramatically speed discovery process

The problem of drug design is crucial in biology of aging. It is very likely that when scientists are able to figure out the right combination of interventions in aging processes, the pharmaceutical therapies will differ a lot from one person to another. That is, of course, true for personalized medicine as well. This means pharmaceutical companies would have to figure out the way how to design and manufacture drugs of different properties in large amount. Thus, this new technique is of great value.

Scientists at Ohio State University are taking the trial and error out of drug design by using powerful computers to identify molecular structures that have the highest potential to serve as the basis for new medications.