People with type O-blood are considered “universal donors” because their blood doesn’t have any antigens or proteins, meaning anybody’s body will be able to accept it in an emergency.
But why are there different blood types? Researchers don’t fully know, but factors such as where someone’s ancestors are from and past infections which spurred protective mutations in the blood may have contributed to the diversity, according to Dr. Douglas Guggenheim, a hematologist with Penn Medicine. People with type O blood may get sicker with cholera, for example, while people with type A or B blood may be more likely to experience blood clotting issues. While our blood can’t keep up with the different biological or viral threats going around in real time, it may reflect what’s happened in the past.
“In short, it’s almost like the body has evolved around its environment in order to protect it as best as possible,” Guggenheim says.
For the first time ever, doctors have successfully transplanted a kidney from a pig to a human — and, they say, the organ functioned normally.
The procedure occurred between a genetically-altered pig and a brain dead human patient at NYU Langone Health, according to The New York Times. The pig was genetically engineered to grow a kidney that would be accepted by a human body. The organ was then attached to the patient’s blood vessels in the upper leg, outside of the abdomen, where the researchers observed it functioning normally.
“It was better than I think we even expected,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, told the NYT. Montgomery helped perform the procedure in September and told the paper that it “looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately.”
Genentech’s Gregory Rippon, M.D., associates a few different phrases with the challenging nature of Alzheimer’s disease drug development: “cautious optimism,” “steady progress,” “an exercise in per | Genentech has been working on gantenerumab for 20 years, and, while it’s tempting to try to rush the clinical process, the Roche unit is slowly but surely following the evidence.
Coming off multiple country approvals for his “patent free” Covid vaccine, Scientist, Researcher, Author, Science Explainer, Dr. Peter Hotez, MD, Ph.D. Baylor College of Medicine, drops by for an episode of Progress, Potential, And Possibilities.
Dr. Hotez is an internationally recognized physician-scientist with expertise in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development. He leads the only product development partnership for developing new vaccines for hookworm, schistosomiasis and Chagas disease, and is just coming off a major win for emergency use approval of his team’s Corbevax protein sub-unit COVID-19 vaccine, of which he, and previous guest to the show, Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, were recently nominated for a Nobel Prize.
Dr. Hotez is the author of more than 400 original papers, as well as the books Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases — The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development, Blue Marble Health — An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad, and Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-science.
A pair of researchers working in the Personal Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London has taught a robot to put a surgical gown on a supine mannequin. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Fan Zhang and Yiannis Demiris described the approach they used to teach the robot to partially dress the mannequin. Júlia Borràs, with Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining the difficulties in getting robots to handle soft material and the work done by the researchers on this new effort.
As researchers and engineers continue to improve the state of robotics, one area has garnered a lot of attention—using robots to assist with health care. In this instance, the focus was on assisting patients in a hospital setting who have lost the use of their limbs. In such cases, dressing and undressing falls to healthcare workers. Teaching a robot to dress patients has proven to be challenging due to the nature of the soft materials used to make clothes. They change in a near infinite number of ways, making it difficult to teach a robot how to deal with them. To overcome this problem in a clearly defined setting, Zhang and Demiris used a new approach.
The setting was a simulated hospital room with a mannequin lying face up on a bed. Nearby was a hook affixed to the wall holding a surgical gown that is worn by pushing arms forward through sleeves and tying in the back. The task for the robot was to remove the gown from the hook, maneuver it to an optimal position, move to the bedside, identify the “patient” and its orientation and then place the gown on the patient by lifting each arm one at a time and pulling the gown over each in a natural way.
Walmart has teamed up with Zipline to launch a trial for an on-demand drone delivery service.
Early next year, Walmart will service customers within a 50-mile radius of their headquarters in Arkansas, promising to deliver health and wellness products within an hour of purchase. They hope to expand to include general merchandise in the future. If the trial is successful, it could be the start of a nationwide drone delivery service.
“Trial deliveries will take place near Walmart’s headquarters here in Northwest Arkansas using Zipline’s proprietary technology which is, simply put, really cool,” Tom Ward, a Senior VP at Walmart, wrote in a blog post. The stork-like delivery service would drop a package at your doorstep with a mini-parachute attached.
From guerilla gardening to pop-up parks, tactical urbanism is catching the world by storm. The growing movement is characterized by the temporary altering of city infrastructure through citizen-led initiatives. These efforts are inexpensive and intended to improve the functionality, safety, and enjoyability of neighborhoods and gathering places.
At its core, tactical urbanism is a commitment to community carried out by residents who care about the health of their cities. It was born out of frustrations with the slow and complex process of city-approved infrastructure improvements, and it’s turned into a channel for activists to accelerate change in their communities.
The Growing, Tactical Urbanism Movement
The people who live, work, and socialize in a city are often the most in tune to its infrastructure needs. However, traditional methods of urban planning can leave citizens feeling disconnected from how changes are implemented in their own communities.
Macrophages travel through our arteries, gobbling fat the way Pac-man gobbled ghosts. But fat-filled macrophages can narrow blood vessels and cause heart disease. Now, UConn Health researchers describe in Nature Cardiovascular Research how deleting a protein could prevent this and potentially prevent heart attacks and strokes in humans.
Macrophages are large white blood cells that cruise through our body as a kind of clean-up crew, clearing hazardous debris. But in people with atherosclerosis—fatty deposits and inflammation in their blood vessels— macrophages can cause trouble. They eat excess fat inside artery walls, but that fat causes them to become foamy. And foamy macrophages tend to encourage inflammation in the arteries and sometimes bust apart plaques, freeing clots that can cause heart attack, stroke, or embolisms elsewhere in the body.
Changing how macrophages express a certain protein could prevent that kind of bad behavior, reports a team of researchers from UConn Health. They found that the protein, called TRPM2, is activated by inflammation. It signals macrophages to start eating fat. Since inflammation of the blood vessels is one of the primary causes of atherosclerosis, TRPM2 gets activated quite a bit. All that TRPM2 activation pushes macrophage activity, which leads to more foamy macrophages and potentially more inflamed arteries. The way that TRPM2 activated macrophage activity was surprising, says Lixia Yue, a UConn School of Medicine cell biologist.
The U.S. still imports lithium from other countries like Argentina, Chile, Russia, and China. Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheaper solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But this may soon change – for an unexpected reason.
DWR’s Salton Sea Unit supports the California Natural Resources Agency’s Salton Sea Management Program (SSMP), created by then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s Salton Sea Task Force to address the urgent public and ecological health issues resulting from the drying and shrinking of the Salton Sea. The issues include air quality impacts from dust emissions and loss of important wildlife habitat.
While the SSMP is a long-range program, its immediate focus is on the development and implementation of the Phase I: 10-Year Plan. We support the SSMP and the Phase I Plan by providing planning, engineering, and environmental expertise for design and implementation of dust-suppression and habitat projects. The Phase I Plan includes projects that will be completed as early as the end of 2022. Proposition 1 provided $80 million in funding for SSMP implementation.
Scientists at Northwestern Medicine are using new advances in CRISPR gene-editing technology to uncover new biology that could lead to longer-lasting treatments and new therapeutic strategies for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.
Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the human body. How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins—and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2—hijack the body’s cells to replicate and spread across systems?
