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Category: biotech/medical – Page 874

A Quebec hospital adopts a novel use of VR to help patients with anxiety, phobias and pain.

In a newswire release today, the Fondation de l’Hôtel-Dieu d’Alma (the Alma Hospital Foundation) announced the launch of a virtual reality (VR) project aimed at improving the mental health of those experiencing increasing anxiety. The Alma Hospital is a regional health centre for the area of Lac St. Jean and the Saguenay River valley to the north of Quebec City.

Jean Lamoureux, the hospital’s Executive Director states, “The number of requests for mental-health consultations is estimated to have increased by 30 to 40 percent during the pandemic. These needs are urgent…and, thanks to the innovation of Paperplane Therapeutics and TELUS, we will transform the way health services are delivered, while having a significant positive impact on patient well-being through technology.”

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Human civilization has achieved some incredible things during its short reign on this planet. Technological development over the past 5,000 years of human civilization has led our species to dominance of life on Earth and placed us on a pathway to achieving a Type I civilization.

To reach even the basic level of a “Kardashev Type 1 civilization” we must do two things:
Develop more advanced technology and share it with all responsible nations.
Make renewable energy accessible to all parts of the world.

Five hundred years ago, the Aztec civilization believed that the sun and all its power was sustained by blood from human sacrifice.
Today, we know that the sun, along with all other stars, is powered by a reaction called nuclear fusion.
Scientists and engineers have studied the Sun’s fusion process in hopes of developing a way to harness energy from fusion in machines on Earth.

What exactly is nuclear fusion, and how does it work in terms of producing electricity?

Continue reading “The Power Source of The Universe — Can Nuclear Fusion Help us Reach Type 1 Civilization?” | >

Very old brain, some ancient philosophy maybe…

A fossilised fish originally dug up more than a century ago in an English coal mine has been shown to hold the world’s oldest brain in a vertebrate animal.

CT scans revealed the new internal features including a brain and cranial nerves about 2 centimetres long.

Soft tissue such as internal organs decay very quickly and very rarely fossilise.

Continue reading “Oldest brain in a backboned animal found in fish fossil” | >

Engineers at the University of Waterloo have developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict if women with breast cancer would benefit from chemotherapy prior to surgery.

The new AI algorithm, part of the open-source Cancer-Net initiative led by Dr. Alexander Wong, could help unsuitable candidates avoid the serious side effects of chemotherapy and pave the way for better surgical outcomes for those who are suitable.

“Determining the right treatment for a given breast cancer patient is very difficult right now, and it is crucial to avoid unnecessary side effects from using treatments that are unlikely to have real benefit for that patient,” said Wong, a professor of systems design engineering.

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Advancing Geroscience & Gerotherapeutics — Dr. Nir Barzilai, MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Dr. Nir Barzilai, MD (https://www.einsteinmed.edu/faculty/484/nir-barzilai/) is the Director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research and of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. He is the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair of Aging Research, professor in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics, and member of the Diabetes Research Center and of the Divisions of Endocrinology & Diabetes and Geriatrics.

Dr. Barzilai’s research interests are in the biology and genetics of aging, with one focus of his team on the genetics of exceptional longevity, where they hypothesize and demonstrate that centenarians (those aged 100 and above) may have novel protective genes, which allow the delay of aging or for the protection against age-related diseases. The second focus of his work, for which Dr. Barzilai holds an NIH Merit award, is on the metabolic decline that occurs during aging, and his team hypothesizes that the brain leads this decline with some very interesting neuro-endocrine connections.

Continue reading “Dr Nir Barzilai, MD — Advancing Geroscience & Gerotherapeutics — Albert Einstein College of Medicine” | >

Arizona State University has officially begun a new chapter in X-ray science with a newly commissioned, first-of-its-kind instrument that will help scientists see deeper into matter and living things. The device, called the compact X-ray light source (CXLS), marked a major milestone in its operations as ASU scientists generated its first X-rays on the night of Feb. 2.

“This marks the beginning of a new era of science with compact accelerator-based X‑ray sources,” said Robert Kaindl, who directs ASU’s Compact X-ray Free Electron Laser (CXFEL) Labs at the Biodesign Institute and is a professor in the Department of Physics. “The CXLS provides hard X-ray pulses with high flux, stability and ultrashort durations, in a very compact footprint. This way, matter can be resolved at its fundamental scales in space and time, enabling new discoveries across many fields — from next-generation materials for computing and information science, to renewable energy, biomolecular dynamics, drug discovery and human health.”

Building the compact X-ray light source is the first phase of a larger CXFEL project, which aims to build two instruments including a coherent X-ray laser. As the first-stage instrument, the ASU CXLS generates a high-flux beam of hard X‑rays, with wavelengths short enough to resolve the atomic structure of complex molecules. Moreover, its output is pulsed at extremely short durations of a few hundred femtoseconds — well below a millionth of one millionth of a second — and thus short enough to directly track the motions of atoms.

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A study from researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, published today in Nature Cell Biology, details a previously unexplained type of cell death called disulfidptosis that could open the door for novel cancer therapeutic strategies.

As described in the study, disulfidptosis is triggered when cells with high levels of the SLC7A11 protein are subjected to glucose starvation. In preclinical models, treatment with glucose inhibitors induced disulfidptosis in cancer cells with high SLC7A11 expression, effectively suppressing without significant toxicity in normal tissues.

The study was led by Boyi Gan, Ph.D., and Junjie Chen, Ph.D., both professors of Experimental Radiation Oncology.

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The viruses Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) have been linked to several cancers. For the first time, UNC School of Medicine scientists have discovered that these viruses use a human protein called barrier-to-autointegration factor 1, or BAF, to evade our innate immune response, allowing the viruses to spread and cause disease.

These findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that BAF and related proteins could be therapeutic targets to prevent these viruses from spreading and leading to cancers, such as Kaposi sarcoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, multicentric Castleman disease, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and gastric cancer.

“Viruses are in a constant battle with the cellular immune system, which includes the protein cyclic GMP-AMP synthase, or cGAS, which binds to viral DNA and sounds the alarm to trigger immune responses and fight the viral invaders,” said senior author Blossom Damania, Ph.D., the Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. “We’ve discovered that KSHV and EBV use a different host cell protein, BAF, to prevent cGAS from sounding the alarm.”

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The Microsoft cofounder talked to Forbes about his work with AI unicorn OpenAI and back on Microsoft’s campus, AI’s potential impact on jobs and in medicine, and much more.

In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says. A big topic of discussion for those sessions: artificial intelligence, and the ways AI can change how we work — and how we use Microsoft software products to do it.

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