Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,861

The first data from a repository of living human brain cells

PROFITABLY recycling waste is always a good idea. And the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, has found a way to recycle what is perhaps the most valuable waste of all—living human brain tissue. Understandably, few people are willing to donate parts of their brains to science while they are still alive. But, by collaborating with seven local neurosurgeons, the institute’s chief scientist, Christof Koch, and his colleagues, have managed to round up specimens of healthy tissue removed by those surgeons in order to get to unhealthy parts beyond them, which needed surgical ministration. Normally, such tissue would be disposed of as waste. Instead, Dr Koch is making good use of it.

The repository the cells from these samples end up in is a part of a wider project, the Allen Cell Types Database. The first data from the newly collected human brain cells were released on October 25th. The Allen database, which is open for anyone to search, thus now includes information on the shape, electrical activity and gene activity of individual human neurons. The electrical data are from 300 live neurons of various types, taken from 36 people. The shapes (see picture for example) are from 100 of these neurons. The gene-expression data come from 16,000 neurons, though those cells are post-mortem samples.

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. Because it is more complicated than animal brains in ways that (say) human livers are not more complicated than animal livers, using animal brains as analogues of human ones is never going to be satisfactory. Dr Koch’s new database may therefore help explain what is special about human brains. That will assist understanding of brain diseases and disorders. It may also shed light on one of his particular interests, the nature of consciousness.

3D printer makes first wearable ‘battery’

Imagine printing off a wristband that charges your smartphone or electric car with cheap supplies from a local hardware store.

That’s the direction materials research is heading at Brunel University London where scientists have become the first to simply and affordably 3D print a flexible, wearable ‘battery’.

The technique opens the way for novel designs for super-efficient, wearable power for phones, electric cars, medical implants like pacemakers and more.

Advanced artificial limbs mapped in the brain

EPFL scientists from the Center for Neuroprosthetics have used functional MRI to show how the brain re-maps motor and sensory pathways following targeted motor and sensory reinnervation (TMSR), a neuroprosthetic approach where residual limb nerves are rerouted towards intact muscles and skin regions to control a robotic limb.

Targeted motor and sensory reinnervation (TMSR) is a surgical procedure on patients with amputations that reroutes residual limb nerves towards intact muscles and skin in order to fit them with a limb prosthesis allowing unprecedented control. By its nature, TMSR changes the way the brain processes motor control and somatosensory input; however the detailed brain mechanisms have never been investigated before and the success of TMSR prostheses will depend on our ability to understand the ways the brain re-maps these pathways. Now, EPFL scientists have used ultra-high field 7 Tesla fMRI to show how TMSR affects upper-limb representations in the brains of patients with amputations, in particular in primary and the and regions processing more complex brain functions. The findings are published in Brain.

Targeted motor and sensory reinnervation (TMSR) is used to improve the control of upper limb prostheses. Residual nerves from the amputated limb are transferred to reinnervate and activate new muscle targets. This way, a patient fitted with a TMSR prosthetic “sends” motor commands to the re-innervated muscles, where his or her movement intentions are decoded and sent to the prosthetic limb. On the other hand, direct stimulation of the skin over the re-innervated muscles is sent back to the brain, inducing touch perception on the missing limb.

Getting to and living on Mars will be hell on your body

While NASA and SpaceX figure out how to get to Mars, they’re also thinking about how the 200-day journey and life on the red planet will affect humans. Astronauts will be dealing with nasty things like muscle atrophy and bone loss, intra-cranial pressure, psychological issues, lack of resources and long-term radiation exposure. NASA and its partners are working on things like “torpor,” a type of space hibernation, and protective Mars cave dwellings with a view. To learn more, Engadget spoke with NASA scientist Laura Kerber and Spaceworks COO John Bradford at the Hello Tomorrow symposium in Paris.

“There are a lot of challenges that are preventing us from even getting there in a healthy state,” said Bradford in a keynote speech at the event. As a human-space-exploration expert, he’s been working on a way to mitigate many of those problems by putting astronauts in a “torpor state” of prolonged hypothermia. It not only reduces the human problems but helps with technical and engineering challenges, too.

On the medical side, it addresses the so-called psycho-social challenges (you can’t get depressed if you’re asleep), reduces intra-cranial pressure, opens up new approaches like electrostimulation to reduce muscle atrophy and bone loss, and even helps minimize radiation exposure.

Researchers create new ‘letters’ to enhance DNA functions

Just like how letters are strung together to form words, our DNA is also strung together by letters to encode proteins. The genetic alphabet contains only 4 natural letters — A, C, G and T, which hold the blueprint for the production of proteins that make our bodies work. Now, researchers from the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have created a DNA technology with two new genetic letters that could better detect infectious diseases, such as dengue and Zika.

Genetic alphabet expansion technology is the introduction of artificial base pairs into DNA. The existing four genetic letters are naturally bound together in base pairs of A-T and G-C. These specific base pair formations are essential in DNA replication, which occurs in all living organisms. It is the process by which a DNA molecule is duplicated to produce two identical molecules.

“The expansion of the genetic alphabet is a significant scientific achievement. It sheds insights into DNA’s natural replication mechanism, which will help us to design unique DNA molecules and technologies. For example, our technology can be used to create novel diagnostics and therapeutic agents with superior efficacy,” said IBN Executive Director Professor Jackie Ying.

Rejuvenation May Bring Challenges to Society but are they Worse than Age-related Diseases?

Defeating age-related diseases may create challenges for society, but is that worse than not doing anything?

In these six years, I’ve spent as a rejuvenation advocate, I’ve had to deal with the traditional objections raised against the idea of longer lifespans. These objections touch a variety of different topics, but they aren’t terribly many: we’re talking about maybe a dozen of them, and these days, I hardly ever hear an objection I haven’t discussed before.

However few or many, and deserving of specific answers, these objections may be, they can all be reduced down to a single, general form: “Rejuvenation biotechnologies would cause [insert problem here], so it’s best not to go there.” And just like there are specific answers for each specific objection, there are general answers for their general form—Aubrey de Grey’s famous “two more general answers”.

These two general answers question the validity of two implicit assumptions contained in all objections, general or specific.

Scientists working toward reversible kind of gene editing

Scientists are altering a powerful gene-editing technology in hopes of one day fighting diseases without making permanent changes to people’s DNA.

The trick: Edit RNA instead, the messenger that carries a gene’s instructions.

“If you edit RNA, you can have a reversible therapy,” important in case of side effects, said Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a gene-editing pioneer whose team reported the new twist Wednesday in the journal Science.

/* */