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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1375

A previous study led by Lee found losing just 16 minutes of sleep could impact job performance. Her previous findings also show that minor sleep loss can decrease daily mindfulness, which is a critical recourse for managing stress and maintaining healthy routines.

Summary: Three consecutive nights of sleep loss can have a negative impact on both mental and physical health. Sleep deprivation can lead to an increase in anger, frustration, and anxiety. Additionally, those who experienced sleep loss reported a change in physical wellbeing, including gastrointestinal and respiratory problems.

Source: USF

All it takes is three consecutive nights of sleep loss to cause your mental and physical well-being to greatly deteriorate.

Continue reading “How a Series of Sleep Loss Impacts Mental and Physical Wellbeing” | >

This mapping of aetiological sources of cross-disorder overlap can guide future research aiming to identify specific mechanisms contributing to risk of physical conditions in people with ADHD, which could ultimately inform preventive and lifestyle intervention efforts. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing the presence of physical conditions in patients with ADHD.

Swedish Research Council; Swedish Brain Foundation; Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare; Stockholm County Council; StratNeuro; EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme; National Institute of Mental Health.

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They’re tiny machines that work on the nanoscale, being up to 100000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. These machines, otherwise known as nanorobotics, are set to augment the human race in unforeseen ways.

However, this microscopic technology has remained in the prototype phase for the past two decades, failing to truly live up to its promise, and lagging due to difficult manufacturing processes, a lack of standardization, and scant reviews of the available literature.

Picture a scenario where you’re ill and need to see your doctor. However, instead of giving you a pill or a shot, your doctor injects you with a swarm of tiny robots.

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High-risk neuroblastoma is an aggressive childhood cancer with poor treatment outcomes. Despite intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, less than 50 percent of these children survive for five years. While the genetics of human neuroblastoma have been extensively studied, actionable therapeutics are limited.

Now researchers in the Feng lab at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), in collaboration with scientists in the Simon lab at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), have not only discovered why this cancer is so aggressive but also reveal a promising therapeutic approach to treat these patients. These findings appear online in the journal Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

“Our work pinpoints a targeted therapy for treating this group of at-risk patients, likely leading to improved survival,” said corresponding author Hui Feng, MD, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and medicine at BUSM.

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To create high-resolution, 3D images of tissues such as the brain, researchers often use two-photon microscopy, which involves aiming a high-intensity laser at the specimen to induce fluorescence excitation. However, scanning deep within the brain can be difficult because light scatters off of tissues as it goes deeper, making images blurry.

Two-photon imaging is also time-consuming, as it usually requires scanning individual pixels one at a time. A team of MIT and Harvard University researchers has now developed a modified version of two-photon imaging that can image deeper within tissue and perform the imaging much more quickly than what was previously possible.

This kind of imaging could allow scientists to more rapidly obtain high-resolution of structures such as vessels and individual neurons within the brain, the researchers say.

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Novameat is eyeing the expansion of its plant-based 3D-printed steaks since launching its cutting-edge technology three years ago.

A Spanish start-up creating 3D-printed plant-based steaks is eyeing an expansion onto the mass market.

It follows a successful launch last year, and the company has plans to produce 500kg of the vegan meat products per hour.

Since developing the cutting-edge biotechnology in 2018, the company revealed scaling production goals. It hopes to soon offer products to restaurants across Spain.

Continue reading “Plant-Based Startup’s 3D-Printed Steaks Set For Mass Market” | >

The researchers explain that the development involves a new and very strong biological material, similar to collagen, which is non-toxic and causes no harm to the body’s tissues. The researchers believe that this new nanotechnology has many potential applications in medicine, including harvesting clean energy to operate devices implanted in the body (such as pacemakers) through the body’s natural movements, eliminating the need for batteries.

The study was led by Prof. Ehud Gazit of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, along with his lab team, Dr. Santu Bera and Dr. Wei Ji.

Also taking part in the study were researchers from the Weizmann Institute and a number of research institutes in Ireland, China and Australia. As a result of their findings, the researchers received two ERC-POC grants aimed at using the scientific research from the ERC grant that Gazit had previously won for applied technology. The research was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

Prof. Gazit, who is also Founding Director of the Blavatnik Center for Drug Discovery, explains: Collagen is the most prevalent protein in the human body, constituting about 30% of all of the proteins in our body. It is a biological material with a helical structure and a variety of important physical properties, such as mechanical strength and flexibility, which are useful in many applications. However, because the collagen molecule itself is large and complex, researchers have long been looking for a minimalistic, short and simple molecule that is based on collagen and exhibits similar properties. About a year and a half ago, in the journal Nature Materials, our group published a study in which we used nanotechnological means to engineer a new biological material that meets these requirements.

Continue reading “New nanotech will enable a ‘healthy’ electric current production inside the human body” | >

Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

The need for social distancing led restaurants and grocery stores to seek technological help. That may improve productivity, but could also cost jobs.

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