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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1148

An emerging way to treat diabetes is to repair or replace the cells in the body that naturally produce insulin. Swedish researchers have now identified a molecule that helps stimulate the growth of new insulin-producing cells, and uncovered how it works, opening up new potential diabetes treatments.

Diabetes is characterized by issues with insulin, the hormone that regulates blood glucose levels and allows the body’s cells to access it for energy. In type 1 diabetes, beta cells in the pancreas that normally produce insulin can’t make enough to meet demand, often because those cells have been destroyed by the immune system.

Treatment currently relies on administering insulin shots, but an emerging branch of study centers on finding ways to replenish the insulin production of those beta cells. Previous breakthroughs have included creating artificial beta cells that can pick up the slack, or using stem cells to grow new ones.

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Using retrospective radiocarbon birth dating, an international team of scientists shows that the human liver stays young throughout life and is on average less than three years old.

As one of the major organs of the body, the liver performs many essential biological functions. Almost all the blood in a person’s body passes through the liver, where waste products, worn-out cells, and toxins are filtered. It also produces bile, a solution that helps digest fats and eliminate waste products. Those are just a couple of the major duties it performs — more ore than 500 vital functions have been identified with the liver.

The liver is an essential organ that takes care of detoxifying our bodies. It is prone to injury because it is constantly exposed to toxic substances. To overcome this, the liver has a unique capacity among organs to regenerate itself after damage. Because a lot of the body’s ability to heal and regenerate itself decreases as we age, scientists were wondering if the liver’s capacity to renew also diminishes with age.

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Circa 2020

You’ve no doubt heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the massive particle accelerator straddling the border between France and Switzerland. The large size of this instrument allows scientists to do cutting-edge research, but particle accelerators could be useful in many fields if they weren’t so huge. The age of room-sized (and larger) colliders may be coming to an end now that researchers from Stanford have developed a nano-scale particle accelerator that fits on a single silicon chip.

Full-sized accelerators like the LHC push beams of particles to extremely high speeds, allowing scientists to study the minutiae of the universe when two particles collide. The longer the beamline, the higher the maximum speed. Keeping these beams confined requires extremely powerful magnets, as well. It all adds up to a bulky piece of equipment that isn’t practical for most applications. For example, cancer radiation treatments with a particle accelerator could be much safer and more effective than traditional methods.

The team from Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory didn’t set out to build something as powerful as an accelerator that takes up a whole room. The chip features a vacuum-sealed tunnel 30 micrometers long and thinner than a human hair. You can see one of the channels above — electrons travel from left to right, propelled by 100,000 infrared laser pulses per second, all of them carefully synchronized to create a continuous electron beam.

Continue reading “Researchers Create Particle Accelerator on a Chip” | >

Tel Aviv University researchers have published a new study in Nature outlining how a type of white blood cell can be engineered to secrete anti-human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antibodies. Based on the results of this study, the team are hopeful that they will be able to produce a one-time medication for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and other diseases.

Gene therapy for HIV

The introduction of treatments such as anti-retroviral therapy (ART) for HIV has helped patients diagnosed with the infection to live longer and healthier lives. Patients are required to take the medicine daily in order to reduce the amount of virus in the body (viral load) so that it is undetectable. If a viral load is undetectable, patients with HIV have effectively zero risk of transmitting the virus. However, a one-time treatment for HIV, which can develop into AIDS, is still desirable to improve HIV patients’ quality of life.

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Can AI enable us to live forever? In A.rtificial I.mmortality, filmmaker Ann Shin sets out on a journey, exploring the latest AI and biotech with scientists and visionaries who foresee a ‘post-biological’ world where humans and AI merge. Will AI be the best, or the last thing we ever do?

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Continue reading “Artificial Immortality” | >

Ken OtwellIt’s an awkward situation. Was the engineer continuing to do his job? Was his public claim about internal corporate technology interfering with his duties or causing harm to Google? Was it breaking a voluntary non-disclosure?

Kevin CuevasWith neurocyte based computing, it is a question worth exploring since we are already blurring that line anyway.

Neurons are amazing little microbes capable of learning and making decisions. Modern AI tries to take inspiration from living neurons, but why settle for the synthetic version? By growing human neurons directly connected to a computer it’s possible to make a living AI of sorts capable of even complex tasks like flying a plane in a simulation.

Continue reading “Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer” | >

In cancer, healthy cells turn into malignant ones with very different characteristics, such as the ability to divide in an uncontrolled manner. In recent decades, much research has uncovered various molecular alterations responsible for this conversion from healthy to tumor tissue. But until now, scientists have known very little about the opposite process – reversing a cancer cell, turning it into a physiological, noncancerous one, and what factors might mediate this process.

“We know that one strategy that human tumors have to dodge the effectiveness of drugs is to change their appearance, becoming another similar cancer but insensitive to the drug used,” the team said. “For example, leukemias of the lymphoid lineage are switched to the myeloid strain to escape treatment.”

With this idea in mind, they wanted to know more about the molecular pathways involved in this cellular transformation. They studied an in vitro model (experiment performed outside of a living organism, usually in a test tube or petri dish) in which leukemia cells can be forced to turn into a type of harmless immune cells called macrophages.

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