Summary: Researchers identified two FDA-approved drugs that can mitigate or even eliminate the brain fog associated with COVID-19 infection.
Source: Yale.
Individuals with long COVID, sometimes referred to as “long-haulers,” experience symptoms that may persist for weeks, months, or even years after their acute viral infection.
Many investors are jumping to inject money into the startup.
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed foundations (Gates Frontier and Bezos Expeditions) have joined other companies in investing $75 million in Synchron, the endovascular brain-computer interface (BCI) company, according to a press release by the organization published on Thursday. This is a Series C financing round led by ARCH Venture Partners that brings the total amount raised since inception to $145 million.
Many investors on board.
Additional companies investing are Reliance Digital Health Limited, Greenoaks, Alumni Ventures, Moore Strategic Ventures, and Project X join ARCH as new additional investors.
Synchron through Business Wire.
The funding will serve to support and promote the development of Synchron’s first platform product (Synchron Switch BCI), as well as the beginning of a pivotal clinical trial.
The study shows that machine-learning models can help predict COVID-19 infections.
Researchers have discovered a new way to predict which features are most useful in determining test results for COVID-19. The research team, from Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) College of Engineering and Computer Science in the U.S., used AI to predict positive or negative COVID-19 test results.
The most common techniques currently used to detect COVID-19 are blood tests, also called serology tests, and molecular tests. Since the two assessments use different methods, they vary substantially.
Materials scientists at UNSW Sydney have shown that human pluripotent stem cells in a lab can initiate a process resembling the gastrulation phase—where cells begin differentiating into new cell types—much earlier than occurs in mother nature.
For an embryo developing in the womb, gastrulation occurs at day 14. But in a dish in a lab at UNSW’s Kensington campus, Scientia Associate Professor Kris Kilian oversaw an experiment where a gastrulation-like event was triggered within two days of culturing human stem cells in a unique biomaterial that, as it turned out, set the conditions to mimic this stage of embryo development.
“Gastrulation is the key step that leads to the human body plan,” says A/Prof. Kilian.
Vitamin D plays an important role in the regulation of calcium and phosphorus absorption by the organism. It also helps keep the brain and immune system working. Researchers at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil and University College London (UCL) in the United Kingdom have now shown that vitamin D supplementation reduces the risk of dynapenia in older people by 78%.
Dynapenia is an age-associated loss of muscle strength. It can be partially explained by muscle atrophy and is a major risk factor for physical incapacity later in life. People with dynapenia are more likely to fall, need to go to hospital, be prematurely institutionalized, and die.
An article on the study is published in the journal Calcified Tissue International and Musculoskeletal Research. The study was supported by FAPESP.
In his lively tour of longevity science and pseudoscience, Ward, a British reporter, discovers that researchers are largely not as interested in immortality per se as much as in helping us live fulfilling, active lives until our final day. And while some immortalists hope the culmination of this effort will eventually lead us to never finding that day, Ward leaves the question open.
He begins at the Church of Perpetual Life, a congregation of people who, instead of seeking paradise after death, would rather avoid their demise altogether. There, Ward meets Neal VanDeRee, the church’s pastor, who practices intermittent fasting and envisions a future in which biotechnology advances faster than our bodies break down.
VanDeRee is working to reach what he and other immortalists call “escape velocity” by extending their lives until biotechnology progresses fast enough to keep them alive forever. Another immortalist, Aubrey de Grey, sees this moment as surprisingly close — within 20 to 30 years, or maybe even sooner. It’s quite a claim, but is it possible? “Either we’ll discover we can make people healthy for longer but our lifespan is quite set, as most gerontologists believe, or de Grey’s longevity escape velocity will be proven correct,” Ward writes, never quite telling us which future he is betting on.
Companies are working to avoid a “quantum winter” that could stall progress and freeze startup investments.
