Lifeboat Foundation

Our complicated emotional lives can often feel like a prison. Insecurities, depression and anxiety can all hold us back in life. But what if we could just eliminate the mental states that we don’t want? Or enhance the moods we do? There’s every reason to believe that this may be commonplace in the future. In fact, a lot of the technology that could achieve this already exists.

More than half of us will have experienced an extended period of sadness or low mood during our lives, and about a fifth will have been diagnosed with major depression, although these figures depend a lot on the culture in which you live. The fact that mood disorders are so common – and also so difficult to treat – means that research into the future of mood modulation is constantly evolving.

If you go to a doctor in the UK with suspected depression today, you will start on a pathway of care including “talking cures” such as cognitive behavioural therapy, or drug treatments including serotonin re-uptake inhibitors like Prozac. People who do not respond to these treatments may progress to heavier regimes or combinations of drug treatments. Since most psychoactive drug treatments are associated with side effects, there is pressure to develop new treatment options that are better tolerated by most people.

Nobel Prize in physics in 2018 and professor emeritus at the École polytechnique, Gérard Mourou is a scientist that nothing can stop. After revolutionizing ophthalmic surgery with the invention of a new laser technique, the physicist launched a challenging scientific project, which only a researchers of this fame could imagine: the transmutation of radioactive waste by high-power laser. Andra met him to find out more.

It is on the plateau of Saclay, south of Paris, that we meet Gérard Mourou. Here at École Polytechnique, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been working in his laboratory for many years. His enthusiasm remains intact when it comes to addressing the issue of lasers. His research on the subject represents the project of a lifetime. “For a long time, the power of lasers was limited, due to the risk of destroying them. Alongside Donna Strickland, with whom I share the Nobel Prize, we invented the technique of CPA (Chirped Pulse Amplification): the laser emits an ultrashort pulse that we will stretch a colossal factor before amplifying it. Thanks to the CPA one can produce considerable power, to the order of the petawatt (10e15W), without destroying the laser. This represents the equivalent of a hundred times the world electricity grid, ” explains Gérard Mourou.

For the physicist, this new invention opens perspectives in several areas, starting with ophthalmic surgery. An application that came to light as a result of an unlikely combination of circumstances: One of my students was aligning the laser for an experiment when it got the pulse in the eye. We went to the hospital where an intern found that the damage to the retina was absolutely perfect. This laser was the cleanest knife possible…

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Papers referenced in the video:
Association between low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality in statin non-users: a prospective cohort study in 14.9 million Korean adults.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35218344/

Continue reading “The Association For Low LDL With An Increased CVD Mortality Risk Is Impacted” »

A new approach to producing realistic expressions of pain on robotic patients could help to reduce error and bias during physical examination.

A team led by researchers at Imperial College London has developed a way to generate more accurate expressions of pain on the face of medical training robots during physical examination of painful areas.

Findings, published today in Scientific Reports, suggest this could help teach trainee doctors to use clues hidden in patient facial expressions to minimize the force necessary for physical examinations.

Researchers have found an effective target in the brain for electrical stimulation to improve mood in people suffering from depression. As reported in the journal Current Biology on November 29, stimulation of a brain region called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) reliably produced acute improvement in mood in patients who suffered from depression at the start of the study.

Those effects were not seen in patients without mood symptoms, suggesting that the brain stimulation works to normalize activity in mood-related neural circuitry, the researchers say.

“Stimulation induced a pattern of activity in brain regions connected to OFC that was similar to patterns seen when patients naturally experienced positive mood states,” says Vikram Rao, of the University of California, San Francisco. “Our findings suggest that OFC is a promising new stimulation target for treatment of mood disorders.”

A universal cure for cancer would be a truly historic achievement in medicine, and it seems that scientists may have found it… by accident.

Go to http://Brilliant.org/SciShow to try out Brilliant’s Daily Challenges. The first 200 subscribers get 20% off an annual Premium subscription.

Continue reading “Scientists May Have Found a Way to Treat All Cancers…” »

A Stanford University-led research team has set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest DNA sequencing technique using AI computing to accelerate workflow speed.

The research, led by Dr Euan Ashley, professor of medicine, genetics and biomedical data science at Stanford School of Medicine, in collaboration with Nvidia, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Google, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of California, achieved sequencing in just five hours and two minutes.

The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved speeding up every step of genome sequencing workflow by relying on new technology. This included using nanopore sequencing on Oxford Nanopore’s PromethION Flow Cells to generate more than 100 gigabases of data per hour, and Nvidia GPUs on Google Cloud to speed up the base calling and variant calling processes.

The world continues to undercount COVID-19 cases and deaths. Seen here is a mass cremation in New Delhi.

Death count of 6 million is likely three times less than the actual number. Case count of 456 million could be 5 to 20 times higher.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new computational tool that allows users to conduct simulations of multi-functional magnetic nanoparticles in unprecedented detail. The advance paves the way for new work aimed at developing magnetic nanoparticles for use in applications from drug delivery to sensor technologies.

“Self-assembling magnetic nanoparticles, or MNPs, have a lot of desirable properties,” says Yaroslava Yingling, corresponding author of a paper on the work and a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State. “But it has been challenging to study them, because computational models have struggled to account for all of the forces that can influence these materials. MNPs are subject to a complicated interplay between external magnetic fields and van der Waals, electrostatic, dipolar, steric, and hydrodynamic interactions.”

Many applications of MNPs require an understanding of how the nanoparticles will behave in complex environments, such as using MNPs to deliver a specific protein or drug molecule to a targeted cancer affected cell using external magnetic fields. In these cases, it is important to be able to accurately model how MNPs will respond to different chemical environments. Previous computational modeling techniques that looked at MNPs were unable to account for all of the chemical interactions MNPs experience in a given colloidal or biological environment, instead focusing primarily on physical interactions.