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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,847

Older, fitter adults experience greater brain activity while learning

Exercise is one of the best ways to slow down aging and its free too!

(Boston) — Older adults who experience good cardiac fitness may be also keeping their brains in good shape as well.

In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, older adults who scored high on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) tests performed better on memory tasks than those who had low CRF. Further, the more fit older adults were, the more active their brain was during learning. These findings appear in the journal Cortex. Difficulty remembering new information represents one of the most common complaints in aging and decreased memory performance is one of the hallmark impairments in Alzheimer’s disease.

Healthy young (18−31 years) and older adults (55−74 years) with a wide range of fitness levels walked and jogged on a treadmill while researchers assessed their cardiorespiratory fitness by measuring the ratio of inhaled and exhaled oxygen and carbon dioxide. These participants also underwent MRI scans which collected images of their brain while they learned and remembered names that were associated with pictures of unfamiliar faces.

End to Illness: Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing How We Prevent Disease

The TeraStructure algorithm can analyze genome sets much larger than current systems can efficiently handle, including those as big as 100,000 or 1 million genomes. Finding an efficient way to analyze genome databases would allow for personalized healthcare that takes into account any genetic mutations that could exist in a person’s DNA.

Woman In The US Dies After Infection From Bacteria Resistant To 26 Antibiotic Drugs

Last year, doctors in the United States were unable to treat a patient infected with a bacterial strain that was resistant to 26 different antibiotics. After subjecting the bacteria to multiple tests, the doctors found it to be “resistant to all available antimicrobial drugs”, and the 70-year-old patient unfortunately died from the infection.

Detailed in a newly released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, the case highlights the significant threat that the emergence of highly resistant bacteria is becoming to global public health. The woman in the report was initially admitted to a hospital in Reno, Nevada, after she had returned from an extended trip to India with an infected swelling in her right hip.

After doctors conducted tests, they found she was infected with a form of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae known as Klebsiella pneumoniae. Normally living in the gut without causing any issues, K. pneumoniae is opportunistic in its infection. It seems that in the case of the woman in this latest report, the infection entered the bone after a femur fracture in India, and then subsequently spread to her hip.

Flatworms lose their heads but not their memories

(Phys.org) —Tufts University biologists using new, automated training and testing techniques have found that planarian flatworms store memory outside their brains and, if their heads are removed, can apparently imprint these memories on their new brains during regeneration.

The work, published online in the Journal of Experimental Biology, can help unlock the secrets of how memories can be encoded in living tissues, noted Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush professor of biology at Tufts and senior author on the paper.

“As and biomedicine advance, there’s a great need to better understand the dynamics of memory and the brain-body interface. For example, what will happen to stored memory if we replace big portions of aging brains with the progeny of fresh ?” said Levin, who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in Tufts’ School of Arts and Sciences.

New 5D technique may help diagnose diseases from cell phone images

Very cool.

Scientists have developed a new 5D technique for analysing images, an advance that may make it easier to quickly find tell-tale signs of diseases from pictures taken using cell phones. Called “Hyper-Spectral Phasor” analysis, or HySP, it is much faster and far less expensive than current techniques, and may be useful for diagnosing and monitoring diseases by using cell phone images, researchers said.

Through the new imaging technology, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US have used fluorescent imaging to locate proteins and other molecules in cells and tissues. It works by tagging the molecules with dyes that glow under certain kinds of light – the same principle behind so-called “black light” images.

Fluorescent imaging can help scientists understand which molecules are produced in large amounts in cancer or other diseases, information that may be useful in diagnosis or in identifying possible targets for therapeutic drugs.

Cellular Reprogramming Rejuvenates Old Mice and Boosts Lifespans 30%

The quest for the fountain of youth is as ancient as humanity itself. Now, it appears scientists may have found the source.

Using a process designed to “reprogram” normal adult cells into pluripotent stem cells—cells that can transform into many different kinds of cells—researchers have managed to boost the life spans of mice by up to 30% and rejuvenate some of their tissues.

The treatment did not change the cell’s genetic code, but rather chemical attachments on their DNA called epigenetic marks, responsible for regulating the genome and determining how active certain genes are.

A Newly Discovered “Bizarre” Virus is Breaking the Rules of Infection

In Brief A multicomponent virus is divided into a number of different pieces. In this respect, each one is packaged separately into a viral particle. One particle of each type is needed for cell infection. And there’s a new one impacting animals.

A new type of virus has been identified, and it’s so weird, it’s challenging long-held notions of what it takes for a virus to infect and proliferate in an animal host.

Conventional wisdom states that if a single virus manages to insert its genes into a cell, the host becomes infected. But what if you chopped up that virus, and tried stuffing the pieces into an animal cell separately? It wouldn’t work, right?