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Category: biotech/medical – Page 890

Scientists record powerful signal in the brain’s white matter

The human brain is made up of two kinds of matter: the nerve cell bodies (gray matter), which process sensation, control voluntary movement, and enable speech, learning and cognition, and the axons (white matter), which connect cells to each other and project to the rest of the body.

Historically, scientists have concentrated on the gray matter of the cortex, figuring that’s where the action is, while ignoring white matter, even though it makes up half the brain. Researchers at Vanderbilt University are out to change that.

For several years, John Gore, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science, and his colleagues have used imaging (fMRI) to detect blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signals, a key marker of brain activity, in white matter.

Many potential pathways to future pandemic influenza

Influenza viruses are believed to have sparked at least 14 human pandemics in the past 500 years; the most devastating of which began in 1918. Yet, despite intense study and considerable advances in public health, virus surveillance and virology, there is no simple answer to this pressing question: when and how will the next flu pandemic arise?

NIAID scientists including Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., consider the many potential pathways to future influenza pandemics in a new viewpoints essay in Science Translational Medicine. There are no hard and fast ‘rules’ specifying, for example, what characteristics a given avian influenza virus must possess to allow it to efficiently infect… More.

Influenza pandemics have emerged for centuries but still cannot be accurately predicted.

Inhibition of acute complement responses towards bolus-injected nanoparticles using targeted short-circulating regulatory proteins

A NIAID-funded study suggests a strategy to mitigate harmful side effects of nanoparticles in medicine. The researchers showed in animal models that a lab-made molecule safely prevented nanomedicines from activating a set of immune-system proteins called the complement system and causing negative side effects. This is significant because when nanoparticles activate complement, the resulting immune response can not only cause an adverse reaction, but also reduce the efficacy of nanomedicines.

Month after pig heart transplant, Maryland man pushing through “tough” physical therapy

It’s been a month since a Maryland man became the second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig — and hospital video released Friday shows he’s working hard to recover.

Lawrence Faucette was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant when doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine offered the highly experimental surgery.

In the first glimpse of Faucette provided since the Sept. 20 transplant, hospital video shows physical therapist Chris Wells urging him to push through a pedaling exercise to regain his strength.

Scientists Pump Up Lab-Grown Muscles for Robots With a New Magnetic Workout

Unfortunately, these precise cell arrangements are also why artificial muscles are difficult to recreate in the lab. Despite being soft, squishy, and easily damaged, our muscles can perform incredible feats—adapt to heavy loads, sense the outside world, and rebuild after injury. A main reason for these superpowers is alignment—that is, how muscle cells orient to form stretchy fibers.

Now, a new study suggests that the solution to growing better lab-grown muscles may be magnets. Led by Dr. Ritu Raman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), scientists developed a magnetic hydrogel “sandwich” that controls muscle cell orientation in a lab dish. By changing the position of the magnets, the muscle cells aligned into fibers that contracted in synchrony as if they were inside a body.

The whole endeavor sounds rather Frankenstein. But lab-grown tissues could one day be grafted into people with heavily damaged muscles—either from inherited diseases or traumatic injuries—and restore their ability to navigate the world freely. Synthetic muscles could also coat robots, providing them with human-like senses, flexible motor control, and the ability to heal after inevitable scratches and scrapes.

TruDiagnostic and Harvard announce new multi omic informed biological aging clock

A study published today by scientists from Harvard University and epigenetic research company TruDiagnostic has shed light on the reasons why our bodies are aging on a cellular level, laying the foundations for medical based treatment options to reduce the risk of age-related death and disease in highly targeted ways.

Longevity. Technology: Age is the number one risk factor for most chronic diseases and death across the world. Epigenetics (or the way our genes are put to use throughout our bodies) has emerged as a crucial method of evaluating health, and while previous DNA methylation clocks could determine how advanced one’s body has aged, they have not yet been able to provide information to the reasons why someone might have accelerated or decelerated aging outcomes.

“In our research, we set out to create the best method to quantify the biological aging process. However, aging is extremely complex,” explains Harvard Medical School Associate Professor Dr Jessica Lasky-Su. “To solve this issue of complexity, our approach was to gather data across multiple sources of information. We chose to do this by building one of the most robust aging datasets in the world by quantifying patients’ proteomics, metabolomics, clinical histories and DNA methylation.”

New Biomarker Predicts Whether Neurons Will Regenerate

Neurons, the main cells that make up our brain and spinal cord, are among the slowest cells to regenerate after an injury, and many neurons fail to regenerate entirely. While scientists have made progress in understanding neuronal regeneration, it remains unknown why some neurons regenerate and others do not.

Using single-cell RNA sequencing, a method that determines which genes are activated in individual cells, researchers from University of California San Diego School of Medicine have identified a new biomarker that can be used to predict whether or not neurons will regenerate after an injury. Testing their discovery in mice, they found that the biomarker was consistently reliable in… More.

Researchers from University of California San Diego have identified a new biomarker that can predict whether or not neurons will regenerate after an injury. The findings could help scientists develop regenerative therapies for spinal cord injuries and other neurological conditions.

Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will

Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.

Today we know epilepsy is a disease. By and large, it’s accepted that a person who causes a fatal traffic accident while in the grip of a seizure should not be charged with murder.

That’s good, says Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. That’s progress. But there’s still a long way to go.

After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has reached the… More.

You may think you chose to read this, but Stanford scientist Robert Sapolsky would disagree. He says virtually all human behavior is beyond our conscious control.

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