Posted in biotech/medical
In this episode of Lifespan News:
Chemotherapy with light
AI Identifies Senescent Cells and Tests New Drugs
Alpha-Ketoglutarate Delays Age‐Related Fertility Decline
A Genetic Pathway for Preventing Hearing Loss
Investigating the Link Between COVID-19 and Telomeres
Australian scientists have discovered a new way to analyze microscopic cells, tissues and other transparent specimens, through the improvement of an almost 100-year-old imaging technique.
La Trobe University researchers have led a four-year collaboration to make “the invisible visible” by using custom-designed nanomaterials to enhance the sensitivity of phase contrast microscopy, an imaging technique commonly used by scientists to study biological specimens.
The discovery, detailed in Nature Photonics, will benefit a broad range of researchers and has the potential to advance research into the understanding and detection of disease.
A tiny implant offers a new weight loss option, and a gastric bypass alternative, for people suffering from obesity.
The device uses light to stimulate the nerve responsible for regulating food intake. A tiny glow from the implant and users don’t feel as hungry — instead, they feel full.
Researchers at Texas A&M say that this dime-sized device could provide a far less invasive surgical option than the so-called stomach stapling surgery — which is currently a last resort surgery for obese patients. This could be a viable option for a gastric bypass alternative.
Automation ‘to keep people safe’
Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics said four models, including Sophia will start to be mass produced in the first half of 2021.
This coincides with a rise in automation documented worldwide as robotics technologies are used to allow everyday tasks to be carried out amidst social distancing restrictions.… See More.
Circa 2018
Frogs partly regrew their hind legs after a dose of the female sex hormone progesterone was applied to the wound site for just one day.
Circa 2018
Biologists are keen to understand how a type of flatworm known as a planarian uses powerful stem cells to regenerate an entire body from a headless sliver of itself.
HOUSTON — (Jan. 252021) — Wireless communication directly between brains is one step closer to reality thanks to $8 million in Department of Defense follow-up funding for Rice University neuroengineers.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the team’s proof-of-principle research toward a wireless brain link in 2018, has asked for a preclinical demonstration of the technology that could set the stage for human tests as early as 2022.
“We started this in a very exploratory phase,” said Rice’s Jacob Robinson, lead investigator on the MOANA Project, which ultimately hopes to create a dual-function, wireless headset capable of both “reading” and “writing” brain activity to help restore lost sensory function, all without the need for surgery.
Using CRISPR technology, researchers are tracking the lineage of individual cancer cells as they proliferate and metastasize in real-time.
When cancer is confined to one spot in the body, doctors can often treat it with surgery or other therapies. Much of the mortality associated with cancer, however, is due to its tendency to metastasize, sending out seeds of itself that may take root throughout the body. The exact moment of metastasis is fleeting, lost in the millions of divisions that take place in a tumor. “These events are typically impossible to monitor in real time,” says Jonathan Weissman, MIT professor of biology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research member.
Now, researchers led by Weissman, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have turned a CRISPR tool into a way to do just that. In a paper published on January 212021, in Science, Weissman’s lab, in collaboration with Nir Yosef, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and Trever Bivona, a cancer biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, treats cancer cells the way evolutionary biologists might look at species, mapping out an intricately detailed family tree. By examining the branches, they can track the cell’s lineage to find when a single tumor cell went rogue, spreading its progeny to the rest of the body.
Researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) in Japan show that melatonin and its metabolites promote the formation of long-term memories in mice and protect against cognitive decline.
Researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) showed that melatonin’s metabolite AMK can enhance the formation of long-term memories in mice. Memory of objects were tested after treatment with melatonin or two of its metabolites. Older mice that normally performed poorly on the memory task showed improvements as dosage increased. The metabolite AMK was found to be the most important as melatonin failed to improve memory if it was blocked from metabolizing into AMK.
Walk down the supplement aisle in your local drugstore and you’ll find fish oil, ginkgo, vitamin E, and ginseng, all touted as memory boosters that can help you avoid cognitive decline. You’ll also find melatonin, which is sold primarily in the United States as a sleep supplement. It now looks like melatonin marketers might have to do a rethink. In a new study, researchers led by Atsuhiko Hattori at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) in Japan have shown that melatonin and two of its metabolites help memories stick around in the brain and can shield mice, and potentially people, from cognitive decline.
