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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,222

LIGO starts its fourth round of searching for gravitational waves and black holes

After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black holes and neutron stars.

“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release.

Lazzarini said the engineering tests leading up to today’s official start of Observing Run 4, or O4, have already revealed a number of candidate events that have been shared with the astronomical community.

MIT’s New CRISPR-Based Gene-Editing Technique Transforms Cancer Mutation Studies

With the new method, scientists can explore many cancer mutations whose roles are unknown, helping them develop new drugs that target those mutations.

MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Decoding the Aging Process: The Impact of Blood Dilution on Biological Age (Irina Conboy at EARD)

In short blood dilution is very, very good for you.

In this talk, Dr. Irina Conboy discusses the role of repair and regeneration in lifespan and healthspan, contending that these factors, rather than entropy and time progression, truly govern our aging process. She describes the research her team is pursuing, investigating whether improving the efficiency of bodily repair in older individuals could effectively make them younger. She suggests that biological age could potentially be reversed and discusses heterochronic parabiosis and plasma dilution as potential ways to accomplish that. Conboy highlights recent research suggesting that old blood has a greater impact on cellular health and function than young blood. She presents her team’s experimental research on the rejuvenation effects of plasma dilution, demonstrating its significant impact on reducing senescence, neuroinflammation, and promoting neurogenesis in the brains of old mice.

00:00:00 — Importance of repair and regeneration in aging.
00:04:45 — Young blood vs. old blood, heterochronic parabiosis.
00:10:17 — Plasma dilution is key.
00:15:49 — Kiana Aran’s blood heterochronicity on a chip.
00:17:56 — The role of senescence in parabiosis and blood exchange.
00:27:53 — Measurements of biological age.
00:36:57 — Systemic calibration is globally rejuvenative.
00:37:30 — Conclusions.

About the Speaker:
Irina Conboy is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Bioengineering. Her discovery of the rejuvenating effects of young blood through parabiosis in a seminal paper published in Nature in 2005 paved the way for a thriving field of rejuvenation biology. The Conboy lab currently focuses on broad rejuvenation of tissue maintenance and repair, stem cell niche engineering, elucidating the mechanisms underlying muscle stem cell aging, directed organogenesis, and making CRISPR a therapeutic reality.

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Researchers recreate the machine which cleans up the waste inside a cell

Autophagy is the process by which cells break down waste and gunk inside them.

There’s a cleaning process happening in our bodies daily. Derived from Greek, the process is called autophagy, which means self-eating.

It plays a vital role in immunity and host defense. In the human body, self-eating is the process by which our cells break down, remove abnormal proteins and old waste macromolecules and organelles in its cytoplasm, and kill invading microorganisms.

This wireless ultrasound patch can sense deep tissue vital signs

The device can track body signals from tissues as deep as 164 mm for up to twelve hours at a time.

A team of researchers and scientists from the University of California San Diego have developed a stick-on ultrasound patch, also called an ultrasonic system-on-patch (USoP), which a person can wear on the go as the device gives insight on the blood pressure, heart rate, and other physiological signs of the subject wearing it.

As per the press release, the USoP tracks these body signals from tissues as deep as 164 mm for up to twelve hours at a time.

Lin et al.

As per the press release, the USoP tracks these body signals from tissues as deep as 164 mm for up to twelve hours at a time.

Paralysed man walks again via thought-controlled implants

A paralysed man has regained the ability to walk smoothly using only his thoughts for the first time, researchers said on Wednesday, thanks to two implants that restored communication between brain and spinal cord.

The patient Gert-Jan, who did not want to reveal his surname, said the breakthrough had given him “a freedom that I did not have” before.

The 40-year-old Dutchman has been paralysed in his legs for more than a decade after suffering a spinal cord injury during a bicycle accident.

ChatGPT is giving therapy. A mental health revolution may be next

face_with_colon_three This new gold rush with AI will bring new jobs for even Psychiatry and Therapists which is already leading to new bots with human like therapists in texts. This could lead to even better mental health for the global population.

“Psychotherapy is very expensive and even in places like Canada, where I’m from, and other countries, it’s super expensive, the waiting lists are really long,” Ashley Andreou, a medical student focusing on psychiatry at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera.

“People don’t have access to something that augments medication and is evidence-based treatment for mental health issues, and so I think that we need to increase access, and I do think that generative AI with a certified health professional will increase efficiency.”

The prospect of AI augmenting, or even leading, mental health treatment raises a myriad of ethical and practical concerns. These range from how to protect personal information and medical records, to questions about whether a computer programme will ever be truly capable of empathising with a patient or recognising warning signs such as the risk of self-harm.

Study reveals unique molecular machinery of woman who can’t feel pain

The biology underpinning a rare genetic mutation that allows its carrier to live virtually pain-free, heal more rapidly and experience reduced anxiety and fear, has been uncovered by new research from UCL.

The study, published in Brain, follows up the team’s discovery in 2019 of the FAAH-OUT gene and the that cause Jo Cameron to feel virtually no pain and never feel anxious or afraid. The new research describes how the mutation in FAAH-OUT “turns down” FAAH gene expression, as well as the knock-on effects on other molecular pathways linked to and mood. It is hoped the findings will lead to new drug targets and open up new avenues of research in these areas.

Jo, who lives in Scotland, was first referred to pain geneticists at UCL in 2013, after her doctor noticed that she experienced no pain after major surgeries on her hip and hand. After six years of searching, they identified a that they named FAAH-OUT, which contained a rare genetic mutation. In combination with another, more common mutation in FAAH, it was found to be the cause of Jo’s unique characteristics.

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