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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1924

Back in 1991, scientists were amazed when they made the discovery…

In the eerie environment inside the abandoned Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, researchers remotely piloting robots spotted pitch black fungi growing on the walls of the decimated No. 4 nuclear reactor and even apparently breaking down radioactive graphite from the core itself. What’s more, the fungi seemed to be growing towards sources of radiation, as if the microbes were attracted to them!

More than a decade later, University of Saskatchewan Professor Ekaterina Dadachova (then at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York) and her colleagues acquired some of the fungi and found that they grew faster in the presence of radiation compared to other fungi. The three species tested, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, Cryptococcus neoformans and Wangiella dermatitidis, all had large amounts of the pigment melanin, which is found – among many places – in the skin of humans. People with a darker skin tone have much more of it. Melanin is known to absorb light and dissipate ultraviolet radiation, but in the fungi, it seemed to also be absorbing radiation and converting it into chemical energy for growth, perhaps in a similar fashion to how plants utilize the green pigment chlorophyll to attain energy from photosynthesis.

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Overall, India’s science ministry, which oversees the department of science and technology; biotechnology; and scientific and industrial research, received 144 billion rupees in the 2020–21 budget, a 10.8% increase over promised funds in the 2019–20 budget.

Latest budget includes more than a billion dollars in funding for quantum computing, communications and cryptography.

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Amid mounting concern about a novel coronavirus spreading from China, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have developed a preliminary set of predictive 3D protein structures of the virus to aid research efforts to combat the disease.

The models are based on the genomic sequence of the novel coronavirus and a protein found in the virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which closely resembles the new virus.

The researchers plan to use the models to accelerate countermeasure design, using a combination of machine learning, biological experiments and simulation on supercomputers.

As global concern continues to rise about a novel coronavirus spreading from China, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers has developed a preliminary set of predictive 3D protein structures of the virus to aid research efforts to combat the disease.

Continue reading “Lawrence Livermore researchers release 3D protein structure predictions for the novel coronavirus” | >

Most modern electronic devices rely on tiny, finely-tuned electrical currents to process and store information. These currents dictate how fast our computers run, how regularly our pacemakers tick and how securely our money is stored in the bank.

In a study published in Nature Physics, researchers at the University of British Columbia have demonstrated an entirely new way to precisely control such electrical currents by leveraging the interaction between an electron’s spin (which is the quantum it inherently carries) and its orbital rotation around the nucleus.

“We have found a new way to switch the electrical conduction in materials from on to off,” said lead author Berend Zwartsenberg, a Ph.D. student at UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (SBQMI). “Not only does this exciting result extend our understanding of how electrical conduction works, it will help us further explore known properties such as conductivity, magnetism and superconductivity, and discover new ones that could be important for quantum computing, data storage and energy applications.”

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Roboticists at the California Institute of Technology launched an initiative called RoAMS, which uses the latest research in robotic walking to create a new kind of medical exoskeleton. With the ability to move dynamically, using neurocontrol interfaces, these exoskeletons allow users to balance and walk without the crutches. Learn more in the latest IEEE Spectrum article! https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8946313 #RoAMS #exoskeletons

Bipedal robots have long struggled to walk as humans do-balancing on two legs and moving with that almost-but-not-quite falling forward motion that most of us have mastered by the time we’re a year or two old. It’s taken decades of work, but robots are starting to get comfortable with walking, putting them in a position to help people in need.

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He remarks that we are at Kittyhawk as far as life extension goes. Most folks, including the Wright brothers, did not see a widespread use for aircraft at the time. Today in life extension the scientists working on it really do know what they are chasing.

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Continue reading “Dr. Michael Fossel, President of Telocyte” | >

We developed a Waon therapy (soothing warm therapy) and have previously reported that repeated Waon therapy improves hemodynamics, peripheral vascular function, arrhythmias, and clinical symptoms in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Waon therapy on the prognosis of CHF patients.

We studied 129 patients with CHF in NYHA functional class III or IV who were admitted to our hospital between January 1999 and March 2001. In the Waon therapy group, 64 patients were treated with a far infrared-ray dry sauna at 60 °C for 15 min and then kept on bed rest with a blanket for 30 min. The patients were treated daily for 5 days during admission, and then at least twice a week after discharge. In the control group, 65 patients, matched for age, gender, and NYHA functional class, were treated with traditional CHF therapy. The follow-up time was scheduled for 5 years.

Recent, complete follow-up data on each patient were obtained. The overall survival rate was 84.5% (Kaplan–Meier estimate). Twelve patients died in the control group and 8 patients died in the Waon therapy group at 60 months of follow-up. Cardiac events due to heart failure or cardiac death occurred in 68.7% of the control group but only 31.3% of the Waon therapy group (P < 0.01) at 60 months of follow-up.

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Fragrance helps learning even during sleep!

Effortless learning during sleep is the dream of many people. The supportive effect of smells on learning success when presented both during learning and sleep was first proven in an extensive sleep laboratory study. Researchers at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center, the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP) and the Faculty of Biology at the University of Freiburg have now shown that this effect can be also achieved very easily outside the lab. For the study, pupils in two school classes learned English vocabulary—with and without scent sticks during the learning period and also at night. The students remembered the vocabulary much better with a scent. The study was published in the Nature Group’s Open Access journal Scientific Reports on 27 January 2020.

“We showed that the supportive effect of fragrances works very reliably in and can be used in a targeted way,” said study leader PD Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier, head of the Perception and Cognition Research Group at the Freiburg-based IGPP and scientist at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center in Germany.

The smell of roses when learning and sleeping

Continue reading “The scent of a rose improves learning during sleep” | >

The drug, known as DSP-1181, was created by using algorithms to sift through potential compounds, checking them against a huge database of parameters, including a patient’s genetic factors. Speaking to the BBC, Exscientia chief executive Professor Andrew Hopkins described the trials as a “key milestone in drug discovery” and noted that there are “billions” of decisions needed to find the right molecules for a drug, making their eventual creation a “huge decision.” With AI, however, “the beauty of the algorithm is that they are agnostic, so can be applied to any disease.”

We’ve already seen multiple examples of AI being used to diagnose illness and analyze patient data, so using it to engineer drug treatment is an obvious progression of its place in medicine. But the AI-created drugs do pose some pertinent questions. Will patients be comfortable taking medication designed by a machine? How will these drugs differ from those developed by humans alone? Who will make the rules for the use of AI in drug research? Hopkins and his team hope that these and myriad other questions will be explored in the trials, which will begin in March.

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