Using a new way to synthesize DNA, Mike Kamdar and his team at Molecular Assemblies are poised to disrupt just about any industry you can imagine.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,017
Huge bacteria-eating viruses narrow gap between life and non-life
From February 2020…
Scientists have discovered hundreds of unusually large, bacteria-killing viruses with capabilities normally associated with living organisms, blurring the line between living microbes and viral machines.
These phages — short for bacteriophages, so-called because they “eat” bacteria — are of a size and complexity considered typical of life, carry numerous genes normally found in bacteria and use these genes against their bacterial hosts.
University of California, Berkeley, researchers and their collaborators found these huge phages by scouring a large database of DNA that they generated from nearly 30 different Earth environments, ranging from the guts of premature infants and pregnant women to a Tibetan hot spring, a South African bioreactor, hospital rooms, oceans, lakes and deep underground.
“I never expected this:” Doctors and patients describe Covid-19 recovery
I agree, Michael is 100 % spot-on-as usual. Dr Ian Hale.
Shana tells Inverse she’s been battling consistent fevers and muscle aches ever since the first, and most severe, symptoms subsided.
“I go through periods of hope mixed with periods of despair. I want to be able to run again and have the energy to do physical activity, but my body isn’t letting me,” she says. “I never expected this.”
As the wave of severe Covid-19 patients tentatively flattens, patients and doctors alike are turning their attention to a new set of patient experiences. People like Shana, who have relatively mild coronavirus cases, are taking weeks if not months to recover.
3 Major Materials Science Breakthroughs—and Why They Matter for the Future
Few recognize the vast implications of materials science.
To build today’s smartphone in the 1980s, it would cost about $110 million, require nearly 200 kilowatts of energy (compared to 2kW per year today), and the device would be 14 meters tall, according to Applied Materials CTO Omkaram Nalamasu.
That’s the power of materials advances. Materials science has democratized smartphones, bringing the technology to the pockets of over 3.5 billion people. But far beyond devices and circuitry, materials science stands at the center of innumerable breakthroughs across energy, future cities, transit, and medicine. And at the forefront of Covid-19, materials scientists are forging ahead with biomaterials, nanotechnology, and other materials research to accelerate a solution.
Why the Hippocampus May Be the Most Important Region in Your Brain
Memory is the natural extension of attention and learning. The act of memory facilitates the formation, activation, and retention of circuits that contribute to the brain’s optimal functioning. Dr. Restak explains how we are the sum total of the memory we retain. Without memory, we wouldn’t know who we are.
The hippocampus, a portion of the brain located in the temporal lobe of each cerebral cortex, is the entry portal for information to be remembered. If the hippocampus is damaged, we have difficulty forming new memories.
This was demonstrated by Patient H. M., whose real name was Henry Molaison. He started having seizures when he was 10 years old. By age 20, he was completely incapacitated.
Since he could be felled with one of the sudden seizures at any time, he couldn’t work or form relationships, and lived at home with his mother. At age 27, in 1953, he underwent a new type of operation.
Physicists exploring use of Blu-ray disc lasers to kill COVID-19, other viruses
A new weapon in the arsenal against the coronavirus may be sitting in your home entertainment console. A team led by physicist Chris Barty of the University of California, Irvine is researching the use of diodes from Blu-ray digital video disc devices as deep-ultraviolet laser photon sources to rapidly disinfect surfaces and the indoor air that swirls around us.
Barty, UC Irvine distinguished professor of physics & astronomy, said that such UV light sterilizers would be cheap compared to current medical- and scientific-grade systems and that it’d be possible to deploy them almost anywhere.
“If these sources are successful, I think you could build them into a mask and clean the air that’s coming in and out of you,” he said. “Or you could set these things up in the air circulation ducts of major buildings, and the airflow that goes through could be sterilized.”
Harvard scientists are developing a coronavirus vaccine specifically for those most vulnerable: the elderly
More than 100 teams around the world are racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Dr. Ofer Levy and a group of Harvard Medical School researchers are among them, but the vaccine they’re working on is a little different. It’s specifically designed for those most vulnerable to the disease: the elderly.
“Most vaccines are developed with a one-size-fits-all concept,” Levy told Business Insider. “Academic centers and companies typically develop a vaccine assuming that you will respond to the vaccine the same way, whether you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re young or elderly, whether you live in the US or Africa, whether you give the vaccine in the summer or winter, whether you give it in the morning or the evening.”
Vaccines generally aren’t as effective for the elderly. A Harvard lab is working on a COVID-19 vaccine that would be most effective for them.
Synergistic effect of fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C against KRAS mutated cancers
Fasting-mimicking diets delay tumor progression and sensitize a wide range of tumors to chemotherapy, but their therapeutic potential in combination with non-cytotoxic compounds is poorly understood. Here we show that vitamin C anticancer activity is limited by the up-regulation of the stress-inducible protein heme-oxygenase-1. The fasting-mimicking diet selectivity reverses vitamin C-induced up-regulation of heme-oxygenase-1 and ferritin in KRAS-mutant cancer cells, consequently increasing reactive iron, oxygen species, and cell death; an effect further potentiated by chemotherapy. In support of a potential role of ferritin in colorectal cancer progression, an analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas Database indicates that KRAS mutated colorectal cancer patients with low intratumor ferritin mRNA levels display longer 3- and 5-year overall survival. Collectively, our data indicate that the combination of a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C represents a promising low toxicity intervention to be tested in randomized clinical trials against colorectal cancer and possibly other KRAS mutated tumors.