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Category: biotech/medical – Page 867

The ARC nerve-stimulation system could help quadriplegic patients move their arms again

How well that translation occurs remains to be seen while the patient learns and adapts to the new system. “The implant procedures involving the Onward ARC-IM and Clinatec BCI went smoothly,” Dr. Bloch said in an press release. “We are now working with the patient to use this cutting-edge innovation to recover movement of his arms, hands, and fingers. We look forward to sharing more information in due course.”

“If the therapy continues to show promise, it is possible it could reach patients by the end of the decade,” Onward CEO Dave Marver said in a statement to Engadget. “It is important to note that we do not expect people with spinal cord injury to wait that long for Onward to commercialize an impactful therapy — we hope to commercialize our external spinal cord stimulation solution, ARC-EX Therapy, to restore hand and arm function in the second half of 2024.”

Onward Medical among a quickly expanding field of BCI-based startups working to apply the fledgling technology to a variety of medical maladies. Those applications include loss of limb and self-regulatory function due to stroke, traumatic brain or spinal cord injury, physical rehabilitation from those same injuries, as well as a critical means of communication for people living with Locked-In Syndrome.

Risk for

Risk for community-onset C. difficile infection varies widely with choice of antibiotic.

The rising incidence of hospital-and community-acquired Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) reinforces the need for more-effective prevention. Researchers performed a retrospective case-control study to examine relative risk for community-acquired CDI (CA-CDI) in patients receiving different oral antibiotics. Using administrative claims databases from 2001–2021 that included commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid records, they matched each CA-CDI case with five control patients for a total of 159,404 cases and 797,020 controls.

For cases occurring within 30 days of antibiotic exposure, the highest risk for CA-CDI occurred with clindamycin (adjusted odds ratio, 25.4) and the lowest with minocycline (AOR, 0.79; the only 1 of 27 oral antibiotics with an AOR 1.0). Other high-risk antibiotics were cefixime (AOR, 12.0), cefdinir (11.0), cefuroxime (9.6), cefpodoxime (9.2), amoxicillin-clavulanate (8.5), and ciprofloxacin (6.8). Older beta-lactams were lower risk (penicillin AOR, 1.8; amoxicillin, 2.0; cephalexin, 2.9; cefadroxil, 2.8). The lowest-risk antibiotic classes were the macrolides, sulfonamides, and tetracyclines. For all antibiotic classes, different agents had discernible differences in AOR for CA-CDI. A sensitivity analysis assessing relative risk for CA-CDI over multiple exposure periods up to 180 days found that the relative hierarchy of risk for the different antibiotics remained the same for each exposure period, and that overall risk progressively declined with time.

The authors acknowledge multiple limitations of their analysis, including use of administrative claims data to identify CA-CDI and outpatient claims data to identify antibiotic exposure and lack of information on inpatient antibiotic usage. Still, the large study population allowed for a more-precise definition of relative risk than in prior studies, not only showing a wide variation among beta-lactam antibiotics but also indicating that the risk associated with fluoroquinolone antibiotics falls between that of the older and newer cephalosporin classes.

Architecture for Preventing Cognitive Decline: Contributions from Neuroscience to Healthy Aging

Cognitive decline is a growing public health concern that affects millions of people around the world. Amid an aging population, strategies that help prevent or mitigate cognitive deterioration become increasingly relevant to support healthy aging and maintaining independence for longer. Studies in the field of neuroscience applied to architecture (neuroarchitecture) have shown that the physical environment, both internal and external, public and private, plays a fundamental role in this aspect [1]. In this sense, architects and urban planners can direct their projects to create solutions that significantly contribute to this objective.

The human brain is a very plastic organ. In other words, it transforms functionally and structurally according to how it is stimulated. Although this plasticity is much more intense during the development period, it continues to exist throughout our lives [2,3]. Therefore, keeping the brain stimulated during adulthood and aging is key to keeping cognition functioning at its best. In this context, recent studies indicate that certain stimuli help in the development of a cognitive reserve [4]. This, in turn, is the brain’s resilience capacity, which helps it to remain functional even throughout aging and even when some neurodegenerative diseases arise [5].

Nanopore sequencing and DNA barcoding method gives hope of personalized medicine

With the ability to map dozens of biomarkers at once, a new method could transform testing for conditions including heart disease and cancer.

Currently, many diseases are diagnosed from blood tests that look for one (such as a protein or other small molecule) or, at most, a couple of biomarkers of the same type.

The new method, developed by scientists at Imperial College London in a research collaboration with Oxford Nanopore Technologies (Oxford Nanopore), can analyze dozens of biomarkers of different types at the same time. This would potentially allow clinicians to gather more information about a patient’s disease.

Can a new Luddite rebellion rise against Big Tech? ‘We’re in a place where trouble could find us pretty quickly,’ author says

Not all wages are bad. If you’re a doctor or nurse you can earn decent. Even a PC tech can earn around $24 an hour or more and cyber security 100k and if you are an engineer you can earn a lot. If you work in a gas station however you won’t earn much. If you are in assembly not much either. It takes skills to earn money. Plus the politicians determine the wages too, it’s not all on big tech. Some tech companies pay more than others of course but knowing AI will increase your wages. They have courses on ChatGPT online now. Even if you run a farm you earn the most money. They’re afraid of progress or I dunno what. Yes we proceed with caution but it’s not like we stop. China won’t nor Russia nor the Middle East etc and even if we’re not in conflict we’ll be left behind.

New book re-examines textile workers’ uprising against the use of technology to erase jobs centuries ago in light of similar problems stemming from AI.

Gene Targeting Turns Mice into Long-Distance Runners

Running could be for everyone even at Olympic levels with biocomputing and crispr.

Citation: (2004) Gene Targeting Turns Mice into Long-Distance Runners. PLoS Biol 2(10): e322. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.

Copyright: © 2004 Public Library of Science. This is an open-access distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Have you ever noticed that long-distance runners and sprinters seem specially engineered for their sports? One’s built for distance, the other speed. The ability to generate quick bursts of power or sustain long periods of exertion depends primarily on your muscle fiber type ratio (muscle cells are called fibers), which depends on your genes. To this extent, elite athletes are born, not made. No matter how hard you train or how many performance-enhancing drugs you take, if you’re not blessed with the muscle composition of a sprinter, you’re not going to break the 100-meter world record in your lifetime. (In case you’d like to try, that’s 9.78 seconds for a man and 10.49 seconds for a woman.)

Study shows that perception is driven by variability of neural activity in the sensory cortex

The brain is a sophisticated biological system known to produce different experiences and perceptions via complex dynamics. Different brain regions and neural populations commonly work in tandem, communicating with each other to ultimately produce specific behaviors and sensations.

Researchers at University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the neural dynamics underpinning this communication between neural populations. Their findings, gathered in Nature Neuroscience, show that the probability that mice will perceive something is linked to a variability of neural activity in the brain region that processes the incoming stimulus information.

“Generally, we are interested in how the brain processes information,” James Rowland and Thijs Van der Plas, co-authors of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “The brain receives inputs from the senses which reflect what is happening in the world around it. It must then make sense of this information and use it to make decisions and take actions. To achieve this, the brain is built on a principle of division of labor, where different regions are specialized to perform distinct tasks.”

Q&A: ‘Crystal ribcage’ technology pioneers new approaches to lung health

It’s no secret that our lungs play a vital role in our daily lives—ensuring we can breathe, fend off infections, and adapt to various challenges. Despite their importance, the organs still puzzle many medical experts, especially when they’re affected by diseases. While traditional tools like MRI and CT scans are helpful when a patient is experiencing a lung-related illness, they can still fall short in providing the detailed, real-time information needed to understand the intricacies of lung health.

Enter the groundbreaking innovation known as the crystal ribcage. Developed by researchers in Boston University’s College of Engineering, Pulmonary Center, Center for Multiscale and Translational Mechanobiology, and Neurophtonics Center, the technology is poised to revolutionize not only our understanding of lung function but also holds immense potential for other organs and treatments.

In new research, published this month in Nature Methods, the crystal ribcage acts as a clear, protective shield for a mouse’s lungs, allowing scientists to get a close view of how these organs work in real-time, and at a cellular level. What makes this technology special is that it doesn’t disrupt the lung’s natural processes—breathing and continue as usual while the researchers observe.

Stacking order and strain boosts second-harmonic generation with 2D Janus hetero-bilayers

A group of researchers from Tohoku University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rice University, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have proposed a new mechanism to enhance short-wavelength light (100–300 nm) by second harmonic generation (SHG) in a two-dimensional (2D), thin material composed entirely of commonplace elements.

Since UV with SHG plays an important role in semiconductor lithography equipment and medical applications that do not use fluorescent materials, this discovery has important implications for existing industries and all optical applications.

Details of the research were published in the journal ACS Nano on August 29, 2023. The study was selected to be featured on the cover.