Ray Blanco:

In World First, Man Leaves Hospital With Titanium Heart

It looks like it’s straight out of a comic book, but BiVACOR is a real, functioning titanium heart. The metal device is ultimately intended as a replacement for human donor organs, but was first utilized last year as a stopgap for hospital patients awaiting transplants. 

According to its creators and St. Vincent’s Hospital representatives in Sydney, Australia, the groundbreaking invention recently marked a major milestone: a man survived for over 100 days with his BiVACOR implant, and was even temporarily discharged from the medical facility with it still pumping blood inside him.

The titanium device’s underlying principles were first envisioned in 2001 by a biomedical engineer named Daniel Timms. Timms, a plumber’s son, started by mimicking a human circulatory system using hardware store pipes and valves, but over the next 25 years, developed what would become BiVACOR. 

The end-result works without any actual valves and relies on a single moving part. This magnetically levitating rotor spins between two chambers while never coming into contact with the titanium frame itself, and thus eliminates the risk of gradual corrosion or malfunctions.

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James Altucher:

Directly Converting Skin Cells to Brain Cells Yields 1,000% Success

MIT scientists have developed a way to convert skin cells directly into brain cells extremely efficiently, without needing to go through the intermediate step of converting them to stem cells.

Cooking up a batch of stem cells to treat illness or injury used to involve the ethically hairy practice of harvesting them from embryonic tissue. But in 2006, Japanese scientists identified a way to revert mature cells back into stem cells. From there, these induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be coaxed to become whatever cell type is needed for a specific treatment.

However, this Nobel prize-winning discovery isn’t without its own problems. In the original study less than 0.1% of cells made it all the way through, although that’s been drastically improved in the almost 20 years since, with some methods closing in on 100%.

Now, scientists at MIT have found a way to cut out the middleman, bypassing the stem cell step and going straight from one cell type to another. Better yet, it boasts an incredible efficiency of over 1,000%. In other words, for every one source cell, you’re getting 10 or more target cells.

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Greg Guenthner:

Gold Breaks $3,000!

Gold is jumping to one new all-time high after another. Yet most investors would rather own the greatest companies in the world than a shiny rock you bury in your backyard. It makes sense on the surface: Gold and U.S. stocks have marched higher together since last March.

That relationship changed last month. The S&P 500 has dropped more than 10% since mid-February on its way to a new 6-month low. Meanwhile, gold is up a cool 1.50% over the same timeframe.

Dig a little deeper, and rocks have bested stocks since last spring. Over the twelve months preceding the U.S. benchmark’s February peak, gold rose almost 50% versus the S&P’s 22% gain. Gold has been the clear choice despite being unloved and under-owned…

Perhaps most investors will consider gold a missed opportunity now that it’s trading above $3K. I don’t. But when it comes to metals and mining stocks, a strong bid beneath silver takes a close second. And let's not count out the other base metals…

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