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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1312

“We then go on to show that dopamine is not a reward molecule at all. It instead helps encode information about all types of important and relevant events and drive adaptive behavior—regardless of whether it is positive or negative.”

Summary: A new study finds dopamine increases responses to stressful stimuli, not just pleasurable ones. The findings could have implications for the treatment of mental health disorders and addiction.

Source: Vanderbilt University

Pioneering research shows that dopamine levels increase in response to stressful stimuli, and not just pleasurable ones, potentially rewriting facts about the “feel-good” hormone—a critical mediator of many psychiatric diseases. This discovery is cause to rethink treatment for psychiatric disease and addiction.

Continue reading “True Behavior of Dopamine Will Reshape How We Treat Psychiatric Diseases and Addiction” | >

Kathy Patten, a grandmother from Baltimore, suffered a heart attack and spent 45 long minutes clinically dead. But some intense CPR actually managed to bring her back to life, giving her a second chance that local news stations are calling a “medical miracle.”

Patten has reportedly made an almost full recovery, something that is exceedingly rare. While TV dramas give the impression that CPR is often successful, the reality is grim. Only around 10.6 percent of those who experience cardiac arrest are later discharged from the hospital, according to a 2018 study, though those numbers fluctuate depending the severity and timing of the incident.

“I’m so grateful God gave me a second chance,” Patten told CBS affiliate WJZ-TV. “I’m just going to be the best person I can be. It’s very scary, coming back is a second chance of life.”

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That fossil wasn’t enough to confirm Africa as our homeland. Since that discovery, paleoanthropologists have amassed many thousands of fossils, and the evidence over and over again has pointed to Africa as our place of origin. Genetic studies reinforce that story. African apes are indeed our closest living relatives, with chimpanzees more closely related to us than to gorillas. In fact, many scientists now include great apes in the hominid family, using the narrower term “hominin” to refer to humans and our extinct cousins.

In a field with a reputation for bitter feuds and rivalries, the notion of humankind’s African origins unifies human evolution researchers. “I think everybody agrees and understands that Africa was very pivotal in the evolution of our species,” says Charles Musiba, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver.

Paleoanthropologists have sketched a rough timeline of how that evolution played out. Sometime between 9 million and 6 million years ago, the first hominins evolved. Walking upright on two legs distinguished our ancestors from other apes; our ancestors also had smaller canine teeth, perhaps a sign of less aggression and a change in social interactions. Between about 3.5 million and 3 million years ago, humankind’s forerunners ventured beyond wooded areas. Africa was growing drier, and grasslands spread across the continent. Hominins were also crafting stone tools by this time. The human genus, Homo, arrived between 2.5 million and 2 million years ago, maybe earlier, with larger brains than their predecessors. By at least 2 million years ago, Homo members started traveling from Africa to Eurasia. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, our species, emerged.

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“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible.”

Watch four “amateur astronauts” and a floating stuffed dog go to space.

The four crew members — Shift4 Payments founder Jared Isaacman, scientist Sian Proctor, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee Hayley Arceneaux, and aeronautical engineer Chris Sembroski — are the first all-civilian crew to fly aboard a private vehicle to low-Earth orbit.

“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible,” said Isaacman, a billionaire who founded the retail payment processing company Shift4 Payments in 1999.

Continue reading “Watch: Civilian astronauts depart Earth on Inspiration4 mission” | >

Space has seen a number of high-profile, incredibly rich tourists in the past few months. The so-called “billionaire space race” kicked off in July, when Richard Branson rode his Virgin Galactic space plane to the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Shortly after, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode his rocket a little further. Whether they made it to “space,” though, has been hotly debated. Most space watchers agree these short suborbital trips aren’t quite the same as getting into low Earth orbit.

There will be no debate about the Inspiration4 mission. This flight takes the crew of four higher than Bezos or Branson and is different from those flights in key ways, even if it was bankrolled by another billionaire in Isaacman.

When SpaceX announced the mission in February, Isaacman bought up the entire flight and donated three of the Crew Dragon seats to “individuals from the general public.” He offered up two seats to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, handpicking Arceneaux, a childhood cancer survivor who now works as a physician’s assistant at the hospital and acts as the medical officer on Inspiration4.

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We need robots as workers it would speed up things maybe a thousand fold. Humans are not made for the grueling labor that robots can do easily. Unless we give workers like ironman suits humans do better work as coders or the ones repairing the machines.

Logistics managers are battling the pandemic, a labor shortage, and huge demand to get goods to your front door.

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Researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University have discovered a new multi-enzyme complex that reprograms metabolism and overcomes “cellular senescence,” when aging cells stop dividing.

In their study published today in Molecular Cell, the researchers show that an named HTC (hydride transfer complex) can inhibit cells from aging.

“HTC protects cells from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen that normally leads to their death,” said senior author Gerardo Ferbeyre, an UdeM biochemistry professor and principal scientist at the CRCHUM, the university’s affiliated teaching hospital research center.

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The pandemic marks another grim milestone: 1 in 500.

Americans have died of covid-19.

The idea, he said, was to prevent “the humanitarian disaster” that occurred in New York City, where ambulance sirens were a constant as hospitals were overwhelmed and mortuaries needed mobile units to handle the additional dead.

The goal of testing, mask-wearing, keeping six feet apart and limiting gatherings was to slow the spread of the highly infectious virus until a vaccine could stamp it out. The vaccines came but not enough people have been immunized, and the triumph of science waned as mass death and disease remain. The result: As the nation’s covid death toll exceeded 663,000 this week, it meant roughly 1 in every 500 Americans had succumbed to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Continue reading “The pandemic marks another grim milestone: 1 in 500 Americans have died of covid-19” | >

Common side effects of covid-19 vaccination listed by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) include a sore arm, fever, fatigue, and myalgia.1 Changes to periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding are not listed, but primary care clinicians and those working in reproductive health are increasingly approached by people who have experienced these events shortly after vaccination. More than 30 000 reports of these events had been made to MHRA’s yellow card surveillance scheme for adverse drug reactions by 2 September 2,021 across all covid-19 vaccines currently offered.

Most people who report a change to their period after vaccination find that it returns to normal the following cycle and, importantly, there is no evidence that covid-19 vaccination adversely affects fertility. In clinical trials, unintended pregnancies occurred at similar rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.2 In assisted reproduction clinics, fertility measures and pregnancy rates are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.

Read related article.

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Dementia has many faces, and because of the wide range of ways in which it can develop and affect patients, it can be very challenging to treat. Now, however, using supercomputer analysis of big data, researchers from Japan were able to predict that a single protein is a key factor in the damage caused by two very common forms of dementia.

In a study published this month in Communications Biology, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have revealed that the HMGB1 is a key player in both frontotemporal lobar and Alzheimer , two of the most common causes of dementia.

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration can be caused by mutation of a variety of genes, which means that no one treatment will be right for all patients. However, there are some similarities between frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer disease, which led the researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) to explore whether these two conditions cause damage to the brain in the same way.

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