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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,940

Deep brain stimulation for patients with chronic anorexia is safe and might improve symptoms

BMI is coming fast and will replace many devices we have today. Advances we making in deep brain development are huge markers that pushes the BMI needle forward for the day when IoT, Security, and big data analytics is a human brain’s and a secured Quantum Infrastructure and people (not servers sitting somewhere) owns and manages their most private of information. I love calling it the age of people empowerment as well as singularity.

Small study in 16 people suggests technique is safe and might help improve mood, anxiety and wellbeing, while increasing weight.

Deep brain stimulation might alter the brain circuits that drive anorexia nervosa symptoms and help improve patients’ mental and physical health, according to a small study published in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Spiky Nanostructures Capture Life’s Fine Details

A new day for imaging.

Optical microscopes that use lenses to bounce photons off objects have trouble distinguishing nanometer-scale objects smaller than the imaging beam’s wavelength, such as proteins and DNA. An innovative ‘hyperlens’ designed at A* STAR can overcome optical diffraction limits by capturing high-resolution information held by short-lived or evanescent waves lurking near a target’s surface.

Hyperlens devices — composed of thin stacks of alternate metal and plastic layers — have raised prospects for capturing living biological processes in action with high–speed optics. Key to their operation are oscillating electrons, known as surface plasmons, that resonate with and enhance evanescent waves that appear when photons strike a solid object. The narrow wavelengths of evanescent beams give nanoscale resolution to images when the hyperlens propagates the images to a standard microscope.

Mass-production of current hyperlenses has stalled however because of their intricate fabrication— up to 18 different layer depositions may be required, each with stringent requirements to avoid signal degradation. “For perfect imaging, these layers need precisely controlled thickness and purity,” says Linda Wu, from the A* STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology. “Otherwise, it’s hard to magnify the object sufficiently for a conventional microscope to pick up.”

The history of ORAU

For all of my friends working in the fight for the cure for cancer; meet the world’s oldest full blown research institute on cancer. Oak Ridge Associate University (ORAU) was established in 1946 to study the fall out of the A-Bomb — its labs, its workers, and its victims in Japan. Many private citizens living in the surrounding areas of Oak Ridge TN, Los Alamos NM, Hanford WA where the enrichment and testing existed where also (unfortunately) exposed, and as a result ORAU’s research was expanded in the late 40s to including civilians living in these regions.

Fast forward to today, ORAU has one of the world’s most extensive set of records on cancer, cancer fallout, treatments, etc. in the world. I highly encourage many research medical teams and labs who are working to reverse aging, precision medicine, etc. that is also targeting cancer that you may wish to connect with ORAU as they do share insights with other researchers often. I often consider ORAU like the world’s library on cancer, carcinogen, etc. that are tied to cancer.

My own family has been working with the team at ORAU since 1949. Sharing for awareness in hopes that it helps their own efforts in anti-aging, precision medicine, Quantum Biology/ Biosystems, etc.

ORAU began in 1946 when Dr. William G. Pollard established the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies. Read a narrative history of ORAU, view a timeline of our six decades of accomplishments and meet some of the faces of our past leaders.

Swedish nuclear physicist just got the world’s first approved birth control app

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.

New Tech Makes Brain Implants Safer and Super Precise

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.

Switched-on DNA spark nano-electronic applications

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.

Study Reveals Essential Role of Sympathetic Nerves in Muscle Health

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.

OCD-like behavior linked to genetic mutation, study finds

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.

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