A mouse study shows that persistent social stress alters gut bacteria in ways that raise the likelihood of immune system attacks on the body’s own tissues.
Read more
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2138
New York City is set to get a new radiation-treatment center, nearly a decade in the making, that uses proton beams to treat cancerous tumors.
Called the New York Proton Center, it is a for-profit partnership of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Montefiore Health System and Mount Sinai Health System, managed by the ProHEALTH company. Financing for the center was provided in part by the hospitals.
Item”].
Read more
BENSALEM, Pa. (CBS) — It could be the difference between life and death. A mobile rescue squad was unveiled Thursday in Bucks County.
Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a stroke. Survival depends on quick treatment. Now, instead of racing to the hospital, a mini, specialized hospital on wheels can come to you.
“We’re the first university medial center in our region to have this,” Jefferson neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Rosenwasser said.
Read more
An ever-increasing number of research groups are developing tiny robots, capable of performing targeted drug-delivery inside the body. One of the latest such devices incorporates a flapping whale-flukes-like tail, along with wings that fold up or down as needed.
Read more
These studies show that older adults who frequently pick up a puzzle tended to have the short-term memory capacity of someone eight years their junior and the grammatical reasoning of someone ten years younger.
“We hope this will encourage people to consider how they challenge their brain on a regular basis, and perhaps consider taking up puzzles or evidence-based brain training games as part of a lifestyle approach to keep their brains healthy,” Corbett tells Inverse.
Corbett’s study is one of a few showing that frequent engagement with puzzles has lasting effects on memory and cognitive decline, the slow loss of memory and other problem-solving skills that accompany aging (and is also a feature of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s). Other studies include the Bronx Aging study, which showed that dementia patients who did crossword puzzles started to lose their memory about 2.54 years later than those who didn’t do crosswords.
Read more
Air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths every year, worldwide. According to a State of Global Air report, air pollution is the fifth greatest global mortality risk.
“Air pollution is the fifth highest cause of death among all health risks, ranking just below smoking; each year, more people die from air pollution related disease than from road traffic injuries or malaria.”
No wonder, then, that when Google.org issued an open call to organizations around the world to submit ideas for how they could use AI for societal challenges, Google chose one of the 20 winning organizations as one that was out to address pollution.
Read more
Physicists have demonstrated a new way to obtain the essential details that describe an isolated quantum system, such as a gas of atoms, through direct observation. The new method gives information about the likelihood of finding atoms at specific locations in the system with unprecedented spatial resolution. With this technique, scientists can obtain details on a scale of tens of nanometers—smaller than the width of a virus.
Experiments performed at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a research partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, use an optical lattice—a web of laser light that suspends thousands of individual atoms—to determine the probability that an atom might be at any given location. Because each individual atom in the lattice behaves like all the others, a measurement on the entire group of atoms reveals the likelihood of an individual atom to be in a particular point in space.
Published in the journal Physical Review X, the JQI technique (and a similar technique published simultaneously by a group at the University of Chicago) can yield the likelihood of the atoms’ locations at well below the wavelength of the light used to illuminate the atoms—50 times better than the limit of what optical microscopy can normally resolve.
Read more
This therapy can aid in several other cases, and one day it may help patients diagnosed with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.
Kristopher Boesen’s life changed in a minute after he survived a car accident. The young man lost control over his car, and crashed it into a tree and lamp post. The terrible accident almost took his life, but Kristopher survived. Unfortunately, he was paralyzed from the neck down, and doctors were almost convinced that he will never regain the control over his body.
Read more
Nina Khera writes about the aging processes and why she took an interest in aging research and why she thinks young people should too.
Aging is a series of processes in which the body’s ability to perform functions gradually decreases. The Hallmarks of Aging includes such things as an increase in senescent cells and a decrease in stem cells, but decreasing NAD+ and increasing free radicals matter as well. This article will cover a few root causes of aging and their total impact on humanity.
Senescent cells
One root cause of aging is senescent cells. These are aged or damaged cells that normally would initiate the self-destruct sequence known as apoptosis to dispose of themselves, but, for some reason, they evade this process and stay alive in the body.
