Whether it is steamed idli, Gujarati snack, panki; Parsi’s patra ni machchi, Assam’s bhapot diya maach or the elaborate Onam Sandhya from Kerala, the humble banana leaf has found its way into many cuisines.
It is also very versatile as food can be steamed, grilled and deep-fried. It can also be used as a serving plate and packaging material.
While banana leaves have been an integral part of the desi food and traditions, did you know there are health benefits to it as well?
Posted in biotech/medical, health, neuroscience, singularity
Step one for uploading your brain after the singularity… keep it cognitively functional until then.
It’s been estimated that one in three cases of dementia is preventable. You can’t do anything right now to stop or reverse the underlying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, but you can do something about hypertension and vascular disease risk factors.
#dementia #alzheimer #doctor #healthylifestyle #health #intermittentfasting
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced the invention of a nanowire, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, which can be cheaply grown by common bacteria and can be tuned to “smell” a vast array of chemical tracers—including those given off by people afflicted with different medical conditions, such as asthma and kidney disease.
Thousands of these specially tuned wires, each sniffing out a different chemical, can be layered onto tiny, wearable sensors, allowing health-care providers an unprecedented tool for monitoring potential health complications. Since these wires are grown by bacteria, they are organic, biodegradable and far greener than any inorganic nanowire.
To make these breakthroughs, which were detailed in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectrics, senior authors Derek Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, and Jun Yao, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, needed to look no farther than their own noses.
New textiles developed at Aalto University change shape when they heat up, giving designers a wide range of new options. In addition to offering adjustable esthetics, responsive smart fabrics could also help monitor people’s health, improve thermal insulation, and provide new tools for managing room acoustics and interior design.
The new fabrics weave together old technology and a new approach. Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) were developed in the 1980s. LCEs are a smart material that can respond to heat, light, or other stimuli, and they’ve been used as thin films in soft robotics. Although LCEs have been made into fibers, so far they haven’t been made into textiles.
In collaboration with researchers at the University of Cambridge, a team from the Multifunctional Materials Design research group at Aalto, led by Prof. Jaana Vapaavuori, has now used LCE yarns to make woven fabric using conventional textile crafting techniques and tested how the fabric behaved. The findings were published in Advanced Materials.
Advancing Biomedical R&D & Clinical Development In Saudi Arabia — Dr. Abdelali Haoudi, Ph.D., Managing Director, Biotechnology Park, King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs.
Dr. Abdelali Haoudi, Ph.D. (https://kaimrc-biotech.org.sa/dr-abdelali-haoudi/) currently leads Strategy and Business Development functions, and is also Managing Director of the Biotechnology Park, at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, at the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs. He is also Distinguished Scholar at Harvard University-Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Haoudi is an international Research & Development and Innovation Executive with over 25 years experience, having held several senior positions in Research and Development and Innovation. He has vast experience in science and technology policy development, strategy and business development, corporate development and international partnerships development.
Dr. Haoudi has held several senior and prestigious positions in the academia, government and private sectors globally, including North America, North Africa, Europe and Middle East. Some of the key positions include Founding Vice President for Research, Executive Director for Biomedical Research Institute, and Chairman, at the National Research Fund at Qatar Foundation.
Dr. Haoudi was also Research Professor of cancer and infectious diseases at the University of Virginia and Eastern Virginia Medical School and a fellow of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has held several other positions in elite research and education institutions including Visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School (USA) and a fellow at Institute Pasteur (France).
Materials scientists are often inspired by nature and therefore use biological compounds as cues to design advanced materials. It is possible to mimic the molecular structure and functional motifs in artificial materials to offer a blueprint for a variety of functions. In a new report in Science Advances, Tae Hyun Kim and a research team at the California Institute of Technology and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in the U.S. and South Korea, created a flexible biomimetic thermal sensing polymer, abbreviated BTS, which they designed to mimic ion transport dynamics of pectin; a plant cell wall component.
The researchers used a versatile synthetic procedure and engineered the properties of the polymer to be elastic, flexible and stretchable in nature. The flexible polymer outperformed state-of-the-art temperature sensing materials such as vanadium oxide. Despite mechanical deformations, the thermal sensor-integrated material showed high sensitivity and stable functionality between 15° and 55° Celsius. The properties of the flexible BTS polymer made it well suited to map temperature variations across space-time and facilitate broadband infrared photodetection relevant for a variety of applications.
Organic electronic materials are competitive alternatives to conventional silicon-based microelectronics due to their cost-effective, multifunctional nature. Materials scientists seek to tailor the properties of such materials at the molecular level for a range of sensing applications for wearable and implantable devices with specific characteristics such as flexibility and elasticity. At present, there is an increasing demand for all-organic electronic devices to form a range of soft and active materials. For instance, organic thermal sensors are suited for remote health care and robotics, albeit with limitations.
Universitätsklinikum Erlangen is the first in the world to use CAR T-cells to successfully treat a patient suffering from a severe case of muscle inflammation (myositis). The disease is triggered by a malfunction in the immune system that leads to inflammation of the muscles, and the risk of developing a very severe form of the disease is high. The Lancet has now published news of the successful treatment in a case report.
When the 41 year old Mr. S. noticed a dramatic deterioration in this health last year, he initially put it down to a viral infection. However, his health took a dramatic turn for the worse when he was suddenly no longer to move more than a few feet and was barely able to stand up. His symptoms were caused by a severe autoimmune disease affecting his muscles, joints, skin and lungs belonging to the group of anti-immune muscle inflammatory diseases (myositis). The diagnosis: anti-synthetase syndrome.
The name anti-synthetase syndrome is derived from the observation that the enzymes required for the synthesis of amino acids known as aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases are attacked in error by the immune system. This severely impacts the function of various cells.
😗 year 2017.
Psychiatrists and other behavioral health professionals need to better understand the relationship between cannabis and mental disorders so that they can respond to increasing medical and recreational marijuana use among their patients. More than half of states now allow for medical use, and 8 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult personal or recreational use.
Knowledge about herbal cannabis, the endocannabinoid system, and cannabinoid pharmacology is rapidly expanding. However, compared with the literature on non-medical cannabis use, the scientific literature on therapeutic use of cannabis is underdeveloped, as noted in a recent systematic review of medical cannabis and mental health.1 Although herbal cannabis has a long history of medicinal use, its federal prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 with Drug Enforcement Administration Schedule I status has focused the federally supported cannabis research agenda for half a century on the potential harms rather than on the historically acknowledged therapeutic benefits of this complex plant.
Medicinal potential of cannabis
For the sake of this discussion, herbal cannabis refers to plant material derived from the flowering tops of Cannabis indica, sativa, or ruderalis biotypes. Indica, sativa, and indica-sativa hybrid strains are commonly available on the medicinal cannabis market.
Summary: Blocking the activity of the reactor called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor in T cells resulted in both a decrease in inflammation and recovery in mouse models of multiple sclerosis.
Source: University of Virginia.
University of Virginia Health neuroscientists have discovered a potential way to disrupt the chronic inflammation responsible for multiple sclerosis.
