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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,134

Skin healing processes and spacewalk preparations filled the work schedule aboard the International Space Station on Friday. The Expedition 67 crew members are also readying a U.S. space freighter for its return to Earth next week.

Four astronauts aboard the orbiting lab practiced surgical techniques to heal wounds in microgravity on Friday in the Kibo laboratory module. The quartet split up in groups of two with NASA astronaut Bob Hines joining ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti for the first practice session during the morning. In the afternoon, NASA Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren and Jessica Watkins began their session studying how to take biopsies and suture wounds inside the Life Science Glovebox.

During the middle of the day, the foursome had time set aside time for gathering frozen research samples inside science freezers and preparing them for departure back to Earth inside the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship. Dragon is due to leave the station on Aug. 18 loaded with over 4,000 pounds of station supplies and science experiments after 33 days docked to the Harmony module’s forward port. The commercial cargo craft will parachute to a splashdown off the coast of Florida the next day for retrieval by NASA and SpaceX personnel.

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Human Augmentation Examples. What are examples of augmentations to the human body? Should we allow such augmentation methods and technologies? What are dangers, and risks involved? How can society benefit from these developments?

On Brave New World conference 2020 I gave this webinar with the title: ‘The Human Body. The Next Frontier’.

Please leave a comment if you like the video or when you have a question!

Content:
0:00 Start.
0:29 Introduction by moderator Jim Stolze.
1:05 My story.
2:54 Jetson Fallacy (by professor Michael Bess)
3:43 Examples: data, genetic modification, and neuroscience.
6:09 Benefits.
7:09 Risks and dangers.
8:28 Stakeholders: companies, countries, and military organizations.
11:54 Solutions: regulation, debate, and stories.
14:42 My conclusion.
15:03 End.

🙌 Hire me:
Keynote or webinar: https://peterjoosten.org.

🚀 Want to know more:

Continue reading “HUMAN AUGMENTATION EXAMPLES — Webinar at Brave New World | Peter Joosten MSc” | >

A group of scientists from the University College London has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that can detect drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD), a subtle anomaly in the brain that leads to epileptic seizures. This is a promising step for scientists toward detecting and curing epilepsy in its early stages.

To develop the algorithm, the Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project (MELD) gathered more than 1,000 patients’ MRI scans from 22 international epilepsy centers, which reports where anomalies are in cases of drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD), a major reason behind epilepsy.

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Specific proteins in prokaryotes detect viruses in unexpectedly direct ways.

Bacteria use a variety of defense strategies to fight off viral infection. STAND ATPases in humans are known to respond to bacterial infections by inducing programmed cell death in infected cells. Scientists predict that many more antiviral weapons will be discovered in the microbial world in the future. Scientists have discovered a new unexplored microbial defense system in bacteria.

Researchers uncovered specific proteins in prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) that detect viruses in unexpectedly direct ways, recognizing critical parts of the viruses and causing the single-celled organisms to commit suicide to stop the infection within a microbial community, according to a press release published in the official website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Thursday.

The discovery was made by a team of scientists led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

“This work demonstrates a remarkable unity in how pattern recognition occurs across very different organisms,” said Feng Zhang, senior author and James, and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT.

“It’s been very exciting to integrate genetics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and structural biology approaches in one study to understand this fascinating molecular system.”

Bacteria use a variety of defense strategies to fight off viral infection, and some of these systems have led to groundbreaking technologies, such as CRISPR-based gene editing.

Continue reading “MIT researchers discover bacteria’s new antiviral defense system” | >

Monocytes, a type of white blood cell, are alone capable of facilitating faster wound healing, says study.

Scientists from the University of Calgary, Canada, have discovered a promising new approach to treating bacterial skin infections. The research showed that monocytes alone are capable of facilitating faster wound healing. The researchers’ next step is to better understand how immune cells like neutrophils function during infection. Researchers have discovered a promising new approach to treating bacterial skin infections.

A team of scientists from the University of Calgary, Canada, revealed new insights which could lead to advancements in the treatment of bacterial infections and wounds, according to a study published in Nature science journal on Friday.

“It is exciting that we have made a fundamental discovery that could improve infections and tissue repair in humans, especially hard-to-treat cases,” said the study’s first author Dr. Rachel Kratofi in the press release. “Translating our research from bench to bedside will require many more experiments and involve a model more closely related to human disease.”

The research showed that monocytes alone are capable of facilitating faster wound healing. Monocytes contribute to wound healing by regulating leptin levels and blood vessel growth. They also produce ghrelin, a hormone that aids in wound healing. Historically, researchers believed that neutrophils and monocytes (white blood cells) were both recruited to clear bacteria from an infected site on the skin. When these cells work together, they serve as our bodies first line of defense against the immune system. The connection between metabolic hormones and tissue repair Ghrelin is produced by the stomach when you are hungry, whereas leptin is produced by fat cells after you eat a meal and feel full. This ghrelin-leptin balance has long been recognized as important for metabolism and diet. Still, its relationship to immune mechanisms and tissue repair has been unknown until now. Kratofil was able to visualize the immune response to Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) bacteria in an animal model using intravital microscopy, which allows observation of live cells and is a specialization of the university’s Kubes Lab.

Full Story:

Continue reading “Researchers find new method to treat wounds and skin infections” | >

This article tells of possible way to increase brain intelligence through a certain mutation which in theory could be altered for biological singularity like effects in the future.

Humans carrying the CORD7 (cone-rod dystrophy 7) mutation possess increased verbal IQ and working memory. This autosomal dominant syndrome is caused by the single-amino acid R844H exchange (human numbering) located in the 310 helix of the C2A domain of RIMS1/RIM1 (Rab3-interacting molecule 1). RIM is an evolutionarily conserved multi-domain protein and essential component of presynaptic active zones, which is centrally involved in fast, Ca2+-triggered neurotransmitter release. How the CORD7 mutation affects synaptic function has remained unclear thus far. Here, we established Drosophila melanogaster as a disease model for clarifying the effects of the CORD7 mutation on RIM function and synaptic vesicle release.

To this end, using protein expression and X-ray crystallography, we solved the molecular structure of the Drosophila C2A domain at 1.92 Å resolution and by comparison to its mammalian homolog ascertained that the location of the CORD7 mutation is structurally conserved in fly RIM. Further, CRISPR/Cas9-assisted genomic engineering was employed for the generation of rim alleles encoding the R915H CORD7 exchange or R915E, R916E substitutions (fly numbering) to effect local charge reversal at the 310 helix. Through electrophysiological characterization by two-electrode voltage clamp and focal recordings we determined that the CORD7 mutation exerts a semi-dominant rather than a dominant effect on synaptic transmission resulting in faster, more efficient synaptic release and increased size of the readily releasable pool but decreased sensitivity for the fast calcium chelator BAPTA.

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Circa 2015

“Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Thousands of alterations to a cell’s genome occur every day due to spontaneous changes and damage by radiation, free radicals and carcinogenic substances — yet DNA remains astonishingly intact.

To keep genetic materials from disintegrating, a range of molecular systems monitor and repair DNA, in processes that the three award-winning scientists helped map out.

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This extensive research actually details the possibility of unknown origins of these elongated human skulls which many think to this day are some form of exterrestial in origin or at the very least unknown in origin which actually nearly uproots most know origin stories.

Modern European genetic structure demonstrates strong correlations with geography, while genetic analysis of prehistoric humans has indicated at least two major waves of immigration from outside the continent during periods of cultural change. However, population-level genome data that could shed light on the demographic processes occurring during the intervening periods have been absent. Therefore, we generated genomic data from 41 individuals dating mostly to the late 5th/early 6th century AD from present-day Bavaria in southern Germany, including 11 whole genomes (mean depth 5.56×). In addition we developed a capture array to sequence neutral regions spanning a total of 5 Mb and 486 functional polymorphic sites to high depth (mean 72×) in all individuals. Our data indicate that while men generally had ancestry that closely resembles modern northern and central Europeans, women exhibit a very high genetic heterogeneity; this includes signals of genetic ancestry ranging from western Europe to East Asia. Particularly striking are women with artificial skull deformations; the analysis of their collective genetic ancestry suggests an origin in southeastern Europe. In addition, functional variants indicate that they also differed in visible characteristics. This example of female-biased migration indicates that complex demographic processes during the Early Medieval period may have contributed in an unexpected way to shape the modern European genetic landscape. Examination of the panel of functional loci also revealed that many alleles associated with recent positive selection were already at modern-like frequencies in European populations ∼1,500 years ago.

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Realistic and complex models of brain cells, developed at Cedars-Sinai with support from our scientists and our #openscience data, could help answer questions a… See more.

Cedars-Sinai investigators have created bio-realistic and complex computer models of individual brain cells—in unparalleled quantity.

Their research, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports, details how these models could one day answer questions about neurological disorders—and even human intellect—that aren’t possible to explore through biological experiments.

“These models capture the shape, timing and speed of the electrical signals that neurons fire in order to communicate with each other, which is considered the basis of brain function,” said Costas Anastassiou, PhD, a research scientist in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai, and senior author of the study. “This lets us replicate brain activity at the single-cell level.”

The models are the first to combine data sets from different types of laboratory experiments to present a complete picture of the electrical, genetic and biological activity of single neurons. The models can be used to test theories that would require dozens of experiments to examine in the lab, Anastassiou said.

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