Posted in aging, biotech/medical, business, environmental, futurism, government, health, innovation, posthumanism, transhumanism
Posted in biotech/medical, genetics
True genetic isolation is hard to pull off. Human populations tend to mix when they are in close proximity.
Consider the Hui people. These are Muslims who live across China and speak the local Chinese dialect of their locale. The Hui claim descent from Central Asians and Persians who arrived in China around 1,000 years ago. But the vast majority of their genomes are no different from the Han Chinese. Physically they are impossible to distinguish from Han Chinese unless you take note of their attire.
How can that be when they are so culturally different? For example, as Muslims the Hui do not eat pork and consider it unclean. In contrast, for the majority Han pork is dietary staple.
Many cultures have found religious experiences with creatures and this soronan desert road has naturally occurring dmt with has actually created many religious organizations for centuries.
Our Vice Mexico team went to the Sonora desert in search of the Bufo Alvarius, an endemic toad species that contains a very high dosage of 5-MEO-DMT in it´s body. 5-MEO-DMT is said to be the most potent hallucinogenic in the world.
Our guide through this trip was Octavio Rettig, a doctor who has studied this toad for more than eight year and has brought the medicine — as he calls the substance — all over the world.
We went to Punta Chueca, Sonora, where we hanged out with the indigenous community who has been taking 5-MEO-DMT from the toad since pre-hispanic times. We met Grandpa Pancho — one of the elders of the town — and travelled with him to the sacred island of Isla Tiburón. There we had a small ceremony where we tried the substance for the very first time.
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Researchers in Germany have discovered a new mechanism by which Alzheimer’s disease impairs memory recall – and, importantly, found a way to reverse it in mice. Neurons encoded with existing memories are being drowned out by noise from neurons encoding new experiences, and silencing these allowed the mice to regain lost memories.
The hippocampus is the region of the brain responsible for encoding experiences into memories, by building networks of neurons that store the information. When we recall a previous situation, those same neurons are activated. But when Alzheimer’s strikes, the hippocampus is usually one of the first brain regions to go. This manifests as the familiar memory loss and confusion that patients suffer from.
It was previously thought that the disease impairs the neurons containing memories so that they can’t be activated during recall, and eventually the memory they hold is lost. But the new study, from researchers at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), found a different mechanism at work.
A technological advancement that may prove crucial in the long-term success of dental implants has been developed by University of Queensland researchers.
Dr. Karan Gulati, NHMRC Early Career Fellow from the UQ School of Dentistry, said modifying dental implants with ‘nanopores’ will help protect against one of the leading causes of implant failure.
“Poor integration between the implant and the surrounding tissue is one of the leading causes of dental implant failure,” Dr. Gulati said. “If the sealing between the implant and the surrounding gum tissue fails it can result in bacteria entering the implant and causing infection.”
The aim of this study is to evaluate if the sweat produced by COVID-19 persons (SARS-CoV-2 PCR positive) has a different odour for trained detection dogs than the sweat produced by non COVID-19 persons. The study was conducted on 3 sites, following the same protocol procedures, and involved a total of 18 dogs. A total of 198 armpits sweat samples were obtained from different hospitals. For each involved dog, the acquisition of the specific odour of COVID-19 sweat samples required from one to four hours, with an amount of positive samples sniffing ranging from four to ten. For this proof of concept, we kept 8 dogs of the initial group (explosive detection dogs and colon cancer detection dogs), who performed a total of 368 trials, and will include the other dogs in our future studies as their adaptation to samples scenting takes more time.
The percentages of success of the dogs to find the positive sample in a line containing several other negative samples or mocks (2 to 6) were 100p100 for 4 dogs, and respectively 83p100, 84p100, 90p100 and 94p100 for the others, all significantly different from the percentage of success that would be obtained by chance alone.
We conclude that there is a very high evidence that the armpits sweat odour of COVID-19+ persons is different, and that dogs can detect a person infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
One day, cell and gene therapies will be as common as small molecules and antibody-based therapies are today, according to panelists at BIO’s June 8 virtual session, “The Next Generation of Medicine: Cell Therapies, Gene Therapies and Beyond.”
Because cell and gene therapies have the potential to address complex biological issues such as dysregulation, translocation and mutations, they can use that power to change what the body is doing.
“So, while small molecules and antibody therapies will still be around 30 years from now, they will be less important. Cell and gene therapies will dominate,” James Sabry, global head of pharma partnering at Roche, said.
Can lost species ever become un-extinct? Many scientists believe it’s only a matter of time before many extinct animals again walk the Earth through cloning.
