Lifeboat Foundation

For over a year Elina Berglund nuclear physicist has been fighting authorities and malicious headlines. Now her app will be the first in the world to be approved as a contraceptive.

“It feels incredibly exciting that there is now an approved alternative to conventional pregnancy prevention methods, and that it’s possible to replace medication with technology,” says a more than satisfied Elina Berglund, who founded Natural Cycles together with her husband Raoul Scherwizl.

The latest on Liz Parrish. This is a real reporter in Australia and he does ask her a few hard questions on using white blood cells, showing results, being the only patient and so on.

Jeremy Fernandez speaks to Liz Parrish, the CEO of BioViva — an American biotech developing treatments to slow the ageing process in humans.

Innovations in medical science are gooing to allow for greater technological utility for our surgeries. We will see more robotics and AI assistance.

When Jan Scheuermann volunteered for an experimental brain implant, she had no idea she was making neuroscience history.

Scheuermann, 54 at the time of surgery, had been paralyzed for 14 years due to a neurological disease that severed the neural connections between her brain and muscles. She could still feel her body, but couldn’t move her limbs.

Unwilling to give up, Scheuermann had two button-sized electrical implants inserted into her motor cortex. The implants tethered her brain to a robotic arm through two bunches of cables that protruded out from her skull.

Continue reading “New Tech Makes Brain Implants Safer and Super Precise” »

DNA, the stuff of life, may very well also pack quite the jolt for engineers trying to advance the development of tiny, low-cost electronic devices.

Much like flipping your light switch at home — –only on a scale 1,000 times smaller than a human hair — –an ASU-led team has now developed the first controllable DNA switch to regulate the flow of electricity within a single, atomic-sized molecule. The new study, led by ASU Biodesign Institute researcher Nongjian Tao, was published in the advanced online journal Nature Communications ( DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14471).

“It has been established that charge transport is possible in DNA, but for a useful device, one wants to be able to turn the charge transport on and off. We achieved this goal by chemically modifying DNA,” said Tao, who directs the Biodesign Center for Bioelectronics and Biosensors and is a professor in the Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Continue reading “Switched-on DNA spark nano-electronic applications” »

Contrary to what has long been believed, the role of the sympathetic nervous system in muscle tissue goes far beyond controlling blood flow by contracting or relaxing blood vessels, according to studies conducted at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil.

With support from FAPESP and the collaboration of researchers at Mannheim University and Heidelberg University in Germany, a group of Brazilian researchers led by Isis do Carmo Kettelhut and Luiz Carlos Carvalho Navegantes at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto Medical School (FMRP –USP) have demonstrated the importance of sympathetic innervation for the growth and maintenance of muscle mass and also for the control of movement.

Kettelhut is a full professor at FMRP -USP’s Biochemistry & Immunology Department. Navegantes is a professor in the same institution’s Physiology Department.

Continue reading “Study Reveals Essential Role of Sympathetic Nerves in Muscle Health” »

Got OCD; check your genes for a mutation.

A new Northwestern Medicine study found evidence suggesting how neural dysfunction in a certain region of the brain can lead to obsessive and repetitive behaviors much like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Both in humans and in mice, there is a circuit in the brain called the corticostriatal connection that regulates habitual and repetitive actions. The study found certain synaptic receptors are important for the development of this brain circuit. If these receptors are eliminated in mice, they exhibit obsessive behavior, such as over-grooming.

Continue reading “OCD-like behavior linked to genetic mutation, study finds” »

View article as PDF

In recent years, we have dramatically changed our view of human genome, from a collection of DNA base pairs that was largely quite stable to one whose very structure can change. We’ve learned that higher-order structural features, such as specific configurations of repeated base pair sequences, can predispose for DNA rearrangements.

One of the most intriguing types of DNA rearrangements is copy-number variants (CNVs), deletions or duplications of parts of the genome. While CNVs range in size from a few hundred base pairs to several mega-bases affecting the copy number of one to dozens of juxtaposed genes, they are not identifiable by conventional light microscopy. It was not until a few years ago that improved technology enabled us to perform high-resolution genome-wide surveys of CNVs in individual genomes. These surveys revealed a large amount of copy number variation (at least 12,000 CNVs overlapping more than 1,000 genes), most of which represent benign polymorphic changes. CNVs are classified as rare (occurring at a frequency of 1 percent in the population) or common; collectively they cover at least 12–13 percent of the genome in the general population.

Mapping of the human genome has gone from costing billions to merely thousands. As this trend continues we will be able to tailor drugs to individuals.