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Category: health – Page 212

“Data science is also absolutely key to our research at the Quadram Institute into the gut microbiome and its influence on human health, all of which is mediated by the complex interactions of micro-organisms, the food we eat, and the environment of the gastro-intestinal tract itself.”

E[datascientist] leverages AI and network science in order to surface scientific connections and explore multi-causal relationships, for example to better understand the microbiome. The platform also improves the digitisation, and reduces the siloisation, of legacy scientific R&D systems, which can be used in tandem with datasets from publicly available databases, all in a standardised format. In this way e[datascientist] supports the entire R&D workflow, accelerating the generation of novel insights and ultimately reducing time to market.

Eagle Genomics plans to continue to be engaged in discussions with a range of other organisations to ensure that its platform continues to become a burgeoning global life sciences knowledge discovery hub.

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A new smart type of food packaging promises to eliminate food poisoning by killing harmful bacteria.

According to scientists, the packaging destroys hazardous bacteria like E.coli, Salmonella, and Listeria, allowing meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables to last longer.

“Food safety and waste have become a major societal challenge of our times with immense public health and economic impact which compromises food security. One of the most efficient ways to enhance food safety and reduce spoilage and waste is to develop efficient, biodegradable non-toxic food packaging materials,” Philip Demokritou of Harvard Chan School, who co-led the work, said in a statement.

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In fact, it’s not even the first time that IBM has tried — unsuccessfully — to unload the project, in yet another sign that corporate expectations for AI are continuing to crash into reality.

“Health care always is going to turn out to be more subtle, as well as more regulated for the right reasons, than it is in other areas,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in an Axios and HBO interview last year. “And to me, that’s natural. It is a decision that may impact somebody’s life or death. You got to be more careful. So in health care, it turns out maybe we were too optimistic.”

The sale, if it actually goes through this time, would affect millions of patients and entire government healthcare strategies.

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Houston, TX — Oct 8, 2020 - In a letter published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of physicians from Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, and the University of California, San Francisco, describe a remarkable case of a Type 1 diabetes (T1D) patient, who no longer needs insulin to maintain optimal blood sugar levels. The physicians employed a precision/personalized medicine approach to specifically target the underlying genetic mutation, which was the primary driver of this patient’s diabetes.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a T1D patient who has experienced a complete reversal of insulin-dependence and we are excited by the prospect that that could be a viable therapeutic strategy for a subset of T1D patients” said corresponding author Dr. Lisa R. Forbes, deputy director for clinical services and community outreach for the Texas Children’s William T. Shearer Center for Human Immunobiology and assistant professor of Pediatrics, Immunology, Allergy and Retrovirology at Baylor.

T1D is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little to no insulin, a hormone that maintains sugar levels in the blood. Currently, the treatment options available to T1D patients consist of managing blood sugar levels with insulin, diet and exercise to prevent further complications.

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Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.

The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.

“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”

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Chief information security officers’ (CISOs) greatest challenge going into 2022 is countering the speed and severity of cyberattacks. The latest real-time monitoring and detection technologies improve the odds of thwarting an attack but aren’t foolproof. CISOs tell VentureBeat that bad actors avoid detection with first-line monitoring systems by modifying attacks on the fly. That’s cause for concern, especially with CISOs in financial services and health care.

Enterprises are in react mode

Enterprises fail to get the most value from threat monitoring, detection, and response cybersecurity strategies because they’re too focused on data collection and security monitoring alone. CISOs tell VentureBeat they’re capturing more telemetry (i.e., remote) data than ever, yet are short-staffed when it comes to deciphering it, which means they’re often in react mode.

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Our gut microbiome helps us out every day by processing the fiber we can’t digest. The bacteria ferment the fiber into key chemicals known as short-chain fatty acids, or SCFAs, that are essential for human health. SCFAs fight inflammation, help kill dangerous bacteria, protect the lining of the gut, and can even help prevent cancer.

In a new study, the John Denu lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery has learned that the fatty acids butyrate and propionate also activate p300, a crucial human enzyme that promotes the unspooling of DNA. This unwound DNA allows more genes to become active and expressed, which ultimately affects human health.

A study by Wisconsin Institute for Discovery researchers challenges long-held beliefs, with potential implications for physiological processes and diseases such as propionic acidemia, autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.

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