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Deforestation is a recurrent problem in practically the entire world. Recovering the damage done in recent years as a result of large industries and land depredated for agriculture and livestock is a difficult task. But Thailand believes it has found the best solution, fast, simple and effective.
We’re tantalizingly close to growing organs in the lab, but the biggest remaining challenge has been creating the fine networks of blood vessels required to keep them alive. Now researchers have shown that a common food dye could solve the problem.
In the US there are currently more than 100,000 people on organ transplant waiting lists. Even if you’re lucky enough to receive a replacement, you face a lifetime on immunosuppressant drugs. That’s why scientists have long dreamed of growing new organs from patients’ own cells, which could simultaneously tackle the shortage and the risk of organ rejection.
The field of tissue engineering has seen plenty of progress. Lab-grown skin has been medically available for decades, and more recently stem cells have been used to seed scaffolds—either built form synthetic materials or made by stripping cells from natural support structures—to reproduce more complex biological tissue.
Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) is rare but one of the most serious adverse effects of antipsychotics. Here, we report a case of risperidone-associated NMS in which a successful rechallenge of risperidone was observed with a positive follow-up. A 47-year-old female with schizophrenia was treated with risperidone 4 mg/d for 8 months in 2009 and was admitted to our hospital in 2015 owing to violent behavior under persecutory delusions. Risperidone 2 mg/d was initiated and increased to 4 mg/d 54 days later. Further, long-acting injectable (LAI) risperidone 25 mg per 2 weeks was added on hospital day 15. On hospital day 116, NMS occurred and thus we discontinued all antipsychotics including LAI risperidone, then NMS improved. We resumed LAI risperidone 25 mg per 2 weeks on hospital day 148, thus we waited for 22 days before re-starting the drug treatment. She was discharged on hospital day 371, then switched to LAI paliperidone 150 mg per 4 weeks 2 months later. At the time of a follow-up 3 years later, NMS had not reoccurred. This case reports on an unusual presentation of NMS in which no hyperthermia was observed. Furthermore, this case indicated that NMS may occur in a dose-dependent manner. In conclusion, this case reported important information for clinicians with regard to antipsychotic drug rechallenges and proper dosing of APs to avoid or reverse NMS.
A 47-year-old female with schizophrenia and without other neuropsychiatric or systemic illnesses was treated with risperidone 4 mg/d for 8 months in 2009. In 2015, she was admitted owing to the violent behavior of attacking her mother-in-law under persecutory delusion with the belief that her mother-in-law was going to murder her and auditory hallucination of hearing her mother-in-law criticize her behind her back. Risperidone 2 mg/d was initiated and increased to 4 mg/d 54 days later. Further, long-acting injectable (LAI) risperidone 25 mg per 2 weeks was added on hospital day 15. She did not receive any mood stabilizers on admission, such as lithium, carbamazepine, valproate. During treatment, the patient complained of soreness and weakness of her whole body, and refused to eat or ambulate on hospital day 116, at which point she was tachycardic with a bpm of 116, but afebrile (36.4°C) with stable blood pressure (113÷72 mm Hg).
New research published in Nature Scientific Reports (opens in new window) has found that a hormone produced by plants under stress can be applied to crops to alleviate the damage caused by salty soils. The team of researchers from Western Sydney University and the University of Queensland identified a naturally-occurring chemical in plants that reduces the symptoms of salt stress in plants when applied to soil, enabling the test plants to increase their growth by up to 32 times compared with untreated plants.
Salinity is a huge issue across the world, affecting more than 220 million hectares of the world’s irrigated farming and food-producing land. Salinity occurs when salty irrigation water is repeatedly applied to crops, leading to progressively increasing levels of salt in the soil which reduces crop yields, increases susceptibility to drought and damages soil microbiology. Scientists have long tried to find ways to breed salt-tolerance or develop methods that remove salt, and this new research is promising in its potential ability to reduce the damage in crop plants that results from salt.
“We identified a compound called ACC that occurs naturally in plants when they become stressed by drought, heat or salty conditions,” said Dr. Hongwei Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow in Soil Biology and Genomics at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University.
In the future, your local fast food joint might know your order before you even get to the drive-thru window.
Fast food giant McDonald’s has installed AI-powered kiosks in 700 of its restaurants during an initial trial period. The menus are capable of suggesting menu items that sell best depending on the time of day, the weather, or that are currently trending — think ice cream on hot summer days — as well as add-on items depending on your current order.
It’s a glimpse of a future in which AI does substantial legwork in food service — but also one in which human cashiers could become obsolete.
A Mongolian couple died from the bubonic plague after eating raw marmot meat, sparking a quarantine that trapped tourists for days, officials said Monday.
According to AFP, the couple died May 1 in a remote area of the country’s Bayan-Ölgii province, which borders China and Russia.
A six-day quarantine of 118 people who had come in contact with the couple, including locals and a number of foreign tourists, had been lifted as of Tuesday, Ariuntuya Ochirpurev, a World Health Organization official, told the BBC.
Even in this “age of the genome,” much about genes remains shrouded in mystery. This is especially true for “cryptic mutations”—mutated genes that are hidden, and have unexpected effects on traits that are only revealed when combined with other mutations. Learning from one infamous cryptic mutation in particular, researchers from CSHL share important lessons for breeding or gene editing in crops.
This story starts with the Campbell Soup Company and a field of tomatoes in the mid 20th century. One particular tomato plant had an unexpected beneficial trait: the fruits separated from the vine right where the green cap and stem touch the rest of the fruit. It turned out that this spontaneous natural mutant was ideal for large-scale production.
Other tomato varieties would break away at a joint-like nub in their fruit stems, leaving the pointed green caps on the fruits. With stems still present, these capped tomatoes would get easily bruised in the machine-picking process or end up puncturing one another in transit. However, the lucky Campbell Soup mutant didn’t have these problems. It was jointless, and perfect for a growing, automated industry. Unsurprisingly, breeders called the gene mutation that drives this beneficial trait jointless-2 (j2).
Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said.
Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France.
“The situation is catastrophic,” said Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the studies.
The farms take donated bodies and bury them or leave them on the surface to decompose. Researchers can also set up and study specific circumstances, for example by placing bodies in water or in a vehicle in the farm. The world’s first and most famous farm opened in 1981 in Knoxville, Tennessee; at least six more sites have opened in the United States. In recent years, researchers have set up body farms in Australia and the Netherlands, and Canada will open one this year.
Sites that allow the study of human remains have long existed in the United States and have started to appear recently in other countries.
