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The discovery could open the door to new treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Cutting 1 teaspoon of salt from your diet each day can lower your top blood pressure reading just as much as a typical hypertension medication, even if you don’t have high blood pressure, a new study found.

A teaspoon of salt is 2,300 milligrams — that’s the top daily limit for people over 14 recommended by the latest U.S. nutritional guidelines. However, the American Heart Association recommends a diet with less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day.

Swooping magnetic fields that confine plasma in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks could help improve the efficiency of complex machines that produce microchips. This innovation could lead to more powerful computers and smart phones, near-essential devices that make modern society possible.

Engineers use high-energy light emitted by plasma, the electrically charged fourth state of matter, to create small structures on the surfaces of silicon wafers during their transformation into microchips. These tiny components enable a range of devices, including consumer electronics, video games, medical machinery, and telecommunications. Improving the generation of this light could extend the life of vital parts within the machines and make the manufacture of microchips more efficient.

“These findings could change the microchip industry,” said Ben Israeli, lead author of the paper publishing the results in Applied Physics Letters. Israeli is a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which is managed by Princeton University.

Pulmonary edema is often caused by congestive heart failure. When the heart cannot pump efficiently, blood can back-up into the veins that take blood through the lungs. This causes shortness of breath.

Pulmonary edema is an abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs. This buildup of fluid leads to shortness of breath.

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In a recent study published in eClinicalMedicine, researchers assess the use of fecal microbiota transplantation to enhance the efficacy of anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) therapy for patients with microsatellite stable metastatic colorectal cancer.

Study: Fecal microbiota transplantation plus tislelizumab and fruquintinib in refractory microsatellite stable metastatic colorectal cancer: an open-label, single-arm, phase II trial (RENMIN215). Image Credit: Peakstock / Shutterstock.com.

Continue reading “Fecal microbiota transplantation boosts survival in metastatic colorectal cancer treatment” »

A new biologic “patch” that is activated by a person’s natural motion could be the key to fixing herniated disks in people’s backs, according to researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the CMC VA Medical Center (CMCVAMC).

Combining years of work from many different projects, the “tension-activated repair patches” (TARPs) provide controlled release of an anti-inflammatory molecule called anakinra from microcapsules over time, which helped disks in a large animal model regain the tension they need to reverse herniation and prevent further degeneration. This pre-clinical research is detailed in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine.

“Currently there is no curative treatment for disk herniation, and the best thing out there is just like sticking a plain rubber plug into a hole in a tire. It will stay for a while but it won’t make a great seal,” said co-senior author Robert Mauck, Ph.D., a professor in Orthopaedic Surgery and director of the McKay Laboratory for Orthopaedic Surgery Research at Penn and research career scientist and co-director of the Translational Musculoskeletal Research Center at the CMCVAMC.

An artificial sensory system that is able to recognize fine textures—such as twill, corduroy and wool—with a high resolution, similar to a human finger, is reported in a Nature Communications paper. The findings may help improve the subtle tactile sensation abilities of robots and human limb prosthetics and could be applied to virtual reality in the future, the authors suggest.

Humans can gently slide a finger on the surface of an object and identify it by capturing both static pressure and high-frequency vibrations. Previous approaches to create artificial tactile sensors for sensing physical stimuli, such as pressure, have been limited in their ability to identify real-world objects upon touch, or they rely on multiple sensors. Creating a real-time artificial sensory system with high spatiotemporal resolution and sensitivity has been challenging.

Chuan Fei Guo and colleagues present a flexible slip sensor that mimics the features of a human fingerprint to enable the system to recognize small features on surface textures when touching or sliding the sensor across the surface. The authors integrated the sensor onto a prosthetic human hand and added machine learning to the system.

Scientists from Centogene, a company focused on rare and neurodegenerative diseases, along with their collaborators at University College London and elsewhere have published a study that links the Acyl-CoA Binding Domain Containing 6 (ACBD6) gene to new forms of early-onset dystonia and parkinsonism. The study is published in Brain in a paper titled, “Bi-allelic ACBD6 variants lead to a neurodevelopmental syndrome with progressive and complex movement disorders.”

Using whole exome sequencing data from 45 patients—23 males and 22 females between the ages of 1 and 50 years old—the researchers identified several novel and ultra-rare bi-allelic predicted loss-of-function variants in ACBD6, which are linked to a unique neurodevelopmental syndrome. The condition is accompanied by complex and progressive cognitive and movement disorders such as dystonia in 94% of cases and parkinsonism in older patients or about 32% of cases.

To test the association between ACBD6 and the syndrome, the researchers used zebrafish and frog knockouts. According to tests described in the paper, they observed similar phenotypes to those of affected individuals such as movement disorders, seizures, and facial dysmorphology in the zebrafish models. Their observations of the effects in zebrafish suggest “a combination of muscle and neuronal degeneration leading to movement abnormalities” resulting from the loss of the gene. When they assessed the effects of inactivating the gene in frogs, they observed reported failures in cell movement during gastrulation as a result of the gene’s loss.

Scientists discovered a strange virus called MiniFlayer that latches onto a larger virus called MindFlayer in soil collected in Maryland.