All GLP-1 drugs, which include popular brands like Ozempic and Wegovy, will soon carry new labels warning people taking the medications about a possible side effect that could lead to permanent vision loss.
Why you should care:
The Food and Drug Administration explained the labels will alert patients to a potential eye condition known as non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy. While doctors do not know what causes the rare condition, it can lead to decreased blood flow through the optic nerve.
A connective tissue disorder with wide-ranging symptoms, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome can lead to serious complications and harm from a medical system that doesn’t understand it.
Researchers have demonstrated a new password authentication technique for use in virtual reality (VR) settings, which allows users to choose directions rather than numbers. The approach supports the same number of possible combinations as a six-digit numeric password, but is much easier for users to remember.
“Passwords are a widely used element of the authentication process, giving users privacy and security,” says Yuxuan Huang, first author of a paper on the work and a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University. “However, people often forget passwords or choose ones that are easy to remember, but less secure.
Immersive VR environments offer another approach, using directions or interactions with the environment in lieu of numbers and letters when entering a password, says Huang. This approach allows users to make use of their environmental context to help remember the password. Our goal was to make use of this approach to develop an authentication process that is memorable, but that also provides users with an efficient login process.
Unusually large handaxes weighing up to 3 kilograms have puzzled archaeologists because they are so unwieldy, but their function may have been purely symbolic
Could memory be more fundamental to consciousness than we realize?
Victoria Trumbull revisits Augustine and Henri Bergson to explore memory as the continuity underlying mental life. She challenges the idea that remembering is simply retrieving stored information, examining how the past remains active in present experience and what this might reveal about the soul.
0:00 Rehabilitating the Philosophical Idea of the Soul 4:10 The Soul as Vital Activity Rather Than a Fixed Definition 6:53 Augustine, Bergson, and the Philosophy of Memory 11:33 Memory as a Foundation of Consciousness 14:10 How Memory Connects Past, Present, and Future 18:35 Memory Loss and the Limits of the Storage Model 22:52 Bergson’s Memory Images and Pure Memory.
Victoria Trumbull is a philosopher, researcher, and writer whose work concerns the nature of the mind and the relationship between time, memory, and the soul. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford and is the author of On the Memory of the Soul: Augustine and Bergson’s Metaphysics.
More from Victoria Trumbull on Closer To Truth: Closer To Truth: The Podcast: • Closer To Truth: The Podcast Understanding Consciousness — Closer To Truth — Core Topic: • Understanding Consciousness — Closer To Tr… Closer To Truth contributor page: https://closertotruth.com/contributor… to Closer To Truth: / @closertotruthtv Join the Community:
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Scientists have discovered that fasting for just 24 hours increases a beneficial gut bacterium that helps the intestines regenerate after radiation damage. The preclinical findings could pave the way for new treatments that protect healthy tissue during cancer therapy, potentially without requiring patients to fast.
Researchers at City of Hope and collaborators have pioneered a new approach to preventing dangerous bloodstream infections in patients receiving donor stem cell transplants for blood cancers. The first-of-its-kind therapy delivers 16 carefully selected beneficial bacteria designed to restore the microbiome and fight harmful pathogens.
In the multicenter phase 1 clinical trial, scientists from City of Hope, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Seres Therapeutics found that the new therapy, called SER-155, was well tolerated with no treatment-related side effects. Patients who received the therapy also had fewer bloodstream infections and lower levels of harmful bacteria linked to infection.
The Seres Therapeutics–sponsored study, published in Nature Medicine, provides early evidence that live biotherapeutics—medicines made from beneficial bacteria—can be safely delivered to highly vulnerable patients and may help prevent serious infections, said senior author Marcel van den Brink, M.D., Ph.D., City of Hope chief physician executive and the Morgan and Helen Chu Presidential Chair of City of Hope National Medical Center.
