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Category: health – Page 235

No country met WHO air quality standards in 2021, survey shows

SHANGHAI, March 22 (Reuters) — Not a single country managed to meet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) air quality standard in 2021, a survey of pollution data in 6,475 cities showed on Tuesday, and smog even rebounded in some regions after a COVID-related dip.

The WHO recommends that average annual readings of small and hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 should be no more than 5 micrograms per cubic metre after changing its guidelines last year, saying that even low concentrations caused significant health risks.

But only 3.4% of the surveyed cities met the standard in 2021, according to data complied by IQAir, a Swiss pollution technology company that monitors air quality. As many as 93 cities saw PM2.5 levels at 10 times the recommended level.

An artificial intelligence invents 40,000 chemical weapons in just 6 hours

A.I. is only beginning to show what it can do for modern medicine.

In today’s society, artificial intelligence (A.I.) is mostly used for good. But what if it was not?

Naive thinking “The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery,” wrote the researchers in their paper. “We have spent decades using computers and A.I. to improve human health—not to degrade it. We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade, as our aim had always been to avoid molecular features that could interfere with the many different classes of proteins essential to human life.”

Full Story:

Researchers from Collaborations Pharmaceuticals tweaked artificial intelligence to look for chemical weapons, and impressively enough the machine learning algorithm found 40,000 options in just six hours.

Bacteria in the Nose Can Sneak Into the Brain — May Increase Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease

New research from Griffith University has shown that a bacterium commonly present in the nose can sneak into the brain and set off a cascade of events that may lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

Associate Professor Jenny Ekberg and colleagues from the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research at Menzies Health Institute Queensland and Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, have discovered that the bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can invade the brain via the nerves of the nasal cavity.

Katie Baca-Motes — Co-Founder, Scripps Research Digital Trials Ctr — Re-Engineering Clinical Trials

Re-engineering clinical trials around participants — katie baca-motes, co-founder, scripps research digital trials center, scripps research.

Katie Baca-Motes, MBA, (https://www.scripps.edu/science-and-medicine/translational-i…aca-motes/) is Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, and Co-Founder of the Scripps Research Digital Trials Center (https://digitaltrials.scripps.edu/).

Katie leads various initiatives, including launching their new Digital Trials Center, focusing on expanding the institute’s portfolio of decentralized clinical trial initiatives including: DETECT, a COVID-19 research initiative, PowerMom, a maternal health research program and PROGRESS, an upcoming T2 Diabetes/Precision Nutrition program, as well as overseeing the institute’s role in the NIH “All of Us” Research Program as a Participant Center.

The Scripps Research Translational Institute (SRTI), was founded in 2007 with the aim of individualizing healthcare by leveraging the remarkable progress being made in human genomics and combining it with the power of wireless digital technologies.

The Scripps Research Digital Trials Center, a part of SRTI, leads groundbreaking studies that address the world’s most pressing health concerns, by pioneering “site-less” clinical trials, leveraging rapidly evolving digital health technologies to re-engineer the clinical trial experience around the participant, rather than the research site.

Continue reading “Katie Baca-Motes — Co-Founder, Scripps Research Digital Trials Ctr — Re-Engineering Clinical Trials” | >

DocGo unveils first all-electric, zero-emission ambulance in the U.S.

The last-mile mobile health services provider, DocGo, has announced the delivery of its new all-electric, zero-emissions ambulance that eliminates the pollution of a standard gasoline ambulance.

The all–electric vehicle will be the first of its kind to be registered in the U.S. The new vehicle has been developed in partnership with Leader Emergency Vehicles in South El Monte, CA, and marks the first step towards “Zero Emission,” the company’s latest sustainability mission to have an all-electric fleet by 2032.

DocGo stated that its new vehicle produces 1/10th of the pollutants expelled by a standard gas-powered ambulance. In addition to being less harmful to the planet, the electric ambulance has the potential to lower patient transportation costs due to lower fuel costs and maintenance needs.

A talk by David Pearce for the Stepping into the Future conference 2022

Synopsis: No sentient being in the evolutionary history of life has enjoyed good health as defined by the World Health Organization. The founding constitution of the World Health Organization commits the international community to a daringly ambitious conception of health: “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing”. Health as so conceived is inconsistent with evolution via natural selection. Lifelong good health is inconsistent with a Darwinian genome. Indeed, the vision of the World Health Organization evokes the World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanists aspire to a civilization of superhappiness, superlongevity and superintelligence; but even an architecture of mind based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss cannot yield complete well-being. Post-Darwinian life will be sublime, but “complete” well-being is posthuman – more akin to Buddhist nirvana. So the aim of this talk is twofold. First, I shall explore the therapeutic interventions needed to underwrite the WHO conception of good health for everyone – or rather, a recognisable approximation of lifelong good health. What genes, allelic combinations and metabolic pathways must be targeted to deliver a biohappiness revolution: life based entirely on gradients of well-being? How can we devise a more civilized signalling system for human and nonhuman animal life than gradients of mental and physical pain? Secondly, how can genome reformists shift the Overton window of political discourse in favour of hedonic uplift? How can prospective parents worldwide – and the World Health Organization – be encouraged to embrace genome reform? For only germline engineering can fix the problem of suffering and create a happy biosphere for all sentient beings.

The End of Suffering – Genome Reform and the Future of Sentience – David Pearce

Could gene therapy soon curb muscle loss in the elderly?

Researchers at NTNU have managed to restore muscle function in older mice with muscle loss using advanced gene therapy. The hope is that this method might eventually be used on humans to prevent severe loss of muscle mass.

“Gene therapy is the most effective method to be able to give these people the same health benefits you normally get with physical exercise,” says Moreira, who has been involved in the new research. He is part of the Cardiac Exercise Research Group (CERG).

Researchers Discover How the Human Brain Separates, Stores, and Retrieves Memories

NIH-funded study identifies brain cells that form boundaries between discrete events.

Researchers have identified two types of cells in our brains that are involved in organizing discrete memories based on when they occurred. This finding improves our understanding of how the human brain forms memories and could have implications in memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and published in Nature Neuroscience.

“This work is transformative in how the researchers studied the way the human brain thinks,” said Jim Gnadt, Ph.D., program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the NIH BRAIN Initiative. “It brings to human neuroscience an approach used previously in non-human primates and rodents by recording directly from neurons that are generating thoughts.”

Drugs pollute rivers, add to resistance crisis

Drugs are polluting rivers and adding to the resistance crisis as well as affecting riverine ecosystems.

Pharmaceutical pollution in the world’s rivers is threatening environmental and human health and the attainment of UN goals on water quality, with developing countries the worst affected, a global study warns.

Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) could be contributing to antimicrobial resistance in microorganisms, and may have unknown long-term effects on human health, as well as harming aquatic life, according to the report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

APIs – the chemicals used to make pharmaceutical drugs – can reach the natural environment during their manufacture, use and disposal, according to the study.

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