MSU’s expertise in fish biology, genetics helping researchers rewrite evolutionary history and shape future health studies.
The network of nerves connecting our eyes to our brains is sophisticated and researchers have now shown that it evolved much earlier than previously thought, thanks to an unexpected source: the gar fish.
Michigan State University’s Ingo Braasch has helped an international research team show that this connection scheme was already present in ancient fish at least 450 million years ago. That makes it about 100 million years older than previously believed.
Using Artificial Intelligence And Plant Biology, To Re-Connect People and Plants, For Health & Wellness — Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CTO, Brightseed.
Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Brightseed, a novel life sciences company, merging the tools of plant biology and artificial intelligence, with a goal of enabling a healthier future by re-illuminating and re-activating the connections between people and plants.
Dr. Chae is a seasoned R&D technology developer and has designed advanced discovery methodologies for food technology, agricultural biotech, bio-medicine, and synthetic biology. He has been a principal scientist of multiple discoveries, including machine-learning driven discovery of novel nutritional bio-actives in plants and computationally guided identification of plant-based proteins for food.
With as Ph.D in Plant Biology, Computational and Genomic Biology, from University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Chae was also a founding member of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, and did Post-Doctoral Research at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.
Prior to Brightseed, Dr. Chae served as the VP of R&D at Hampton Creek, a company developing and marketing plant-based alternatives to conventionally-produced food products.
“Before we began this study, we had extensive data showing that spaceflight completely reprogrammed Salmonella at every level to become a better pathogen,”
Astronauts face many challenges to their health, due to the exceptional conditions of spaceflight. Among these are a variety of infectious microbes that can attack their suppressed immune systems.
Now, in the first study of its kind, Cheryl Nickerson, lead author Jennifer Barrila, and their colleagues describe the infection of human cells by the intestinal pathogen Salmonella Typhimurium during spaceflight. They show how the microgravity environment of spaceflight changes the molecular profile of human intestinal cells and how these expression patterns are further changed in response to infection. In another first, the researchers were also able to detect molecular changes in the bacterial pathogen while inside the infected host cells.
The results offer fresh insights into the infection process and may lead to novel methods for combatting invasive pathogens during spaceflight and under less exotic conditions here on earth.
There are many places on the earth, where natural background radiation exposures are elevated significantly above about 2.5 mSv/year. The studies of health effects on populations living in such places are crucially important for understanding the impact of low doses of ionizing radiation. This article critically reviews some recent representative literature that addresses the likelihood of radiation-induced cancer and early childhood death in regions with high natural background radiation. The comparative and Bayesian analysis of the published data shows that the linear no-threshold hypothesis does not likely explain the results of these recent studies, whereas they favor the model of threshold or hormesis. Neither cancers nor early childhood deaths positively correlate with dose rates in regions with elevated natural background radiation.
“Our new data suggest that the upregulation of Neuregulin-responsive genes in animals with severely repetitive behaviors reflects gene changes in the striosomal neurons that control the release of dopamine,” Crittenden explains. “Dopamine can directly impact whether an animal repeats an action or explores new actions, so our study highlights a potential role for a striosomal circuit in controlling action-selection in health and in neuropsychiatric disease.”
Graybiel lab identifies genes linked to abnormal repetitive behaviors often seen in models of addiction and schizophrenia.
Extreme repetitive behaviors such as hand-flapping, body-rocking, skin-picking, and sniffing are common to a number of brain disorders including autism, schizophrenia, Huntington’s disease, and drug addiction. These behaviors, termed stereotypies, are also apparent in animal models of drug addiction and autism.
In a new study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research have identified genes that are activated in the brain prior to the initiation of these severe repetitive behaviors.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) just published a report titled Fossil Fuel Foolery, which identified 10 tactics that the fossil fuel industry used as excuses for not accepting accountability for its impacts on the environment and human health. DesmogBlog noted that the industry used a long list of deceptive tactics that concealed environmental destruction harming Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as low-income communities. Not surprising — the fossil fuel industry only cares about money, and if the planet and human health stand in the way of that, so be it.
The article gave a snapshot of the report findings, and one of the most disturbing things I took notice of was the common tactic that the NAACP described as “co-opt community leaders and organizations and misrepresent the interests and opinions of communities,” sometimes with financial support, to “neutralize or weaken public opposition.”
In short, fossil fuel companies and utilities pour donations on churches, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations to pretty much secure the local community buy-in on projects that generate pollution. The article said it plainly: “to stifle the push towards renewable energy.” And that also includes misrepresenting the community through one or two hired hands.
A team of researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology along with partners at the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, both in China, has developed a tiny robot that can ferry cancer drugs through the blood-brain barrier (BBB) without setting off an immune reaction. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their robot and tests with mice. Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, with the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have published a Focus piece in the same journal issue on the work done by the team in China.
For many years, medical scientists have sought ways to deliver drugs to the brain to treat health conditions such as brain cancers. Because the brain is protected by the skull, it is extremely difficult to inject them directly. Researchers have also been stymied in their efforts by the BBB—a filtering mechanism in the capillaries that supply blood to the brain and spinal cord that blocks foreign substances from entering. Thus, simply injecting drugs into the bloodstream is not an option. In this new effort, the researchers used a defense cell type that naturally passes through the BBB to carry drugs to the brain.
To build their tiny robots, the researchers exposed groups of white blood cells called neutrophils to tiny bits of magnetic nanogel particles coated with fragments of E. coli material. Upon exposure, the neutrophils naturally encased the tiny robots, believing them to be nothing but E. coli bacteria. The microrobots were then injected into the bloodstream of a test mouse with a cancerous tumor. The team then applied a magnetic field to the robots to direct them through the BBB, where they were not attacked, as the immune system identified them as normal neutrophils, and into the brain and the tumor. Once there, the robots released their cancer-fighting drugs.
Michael I. Jordan explains why today’s artificial-intelligence systems aren’t actually intelligent.
THE INSTITUTE Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley.
He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning—the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI—or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web. Machine learning also can provide new services to humans in domains such as health care, commerce, and transportation, by bringing together information found in multiple data sets, finding patterns, and proposing new courses of action.
“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.”
Bipolar disorder affects millions of Americans, causing dramatic swings in mood and, in some people, additional effects such as memory problems.
While bipolar disorder is linked to many genes, each one making small contributions to the disease, scientists don’t know just how those genes ultimately give rise to the disorder’s effects.
However, in new research, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found for the first time that disruptions to a particular protein called Akt can lead to the brain changes characteristic of bipolar disorder. The results offer a foundation for research into treating the often-overlooked cognitive impairments of bipolar disorder, such as memory loss, and add to a growing understanding of how the biochemistry of the brain affects health and disease.
A handful of passports are already in the works, including two in Las Vegas. It is not yet clear if any Las Vegas businesses will limit access solely to vaccinated guests.
Las Vegas is no stranger to exclusive VIP lists, but there’s a new way of limiting guest access coming to town: vaccine passports.
These digital credential systems can show whether someone has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and can help businesses limit access to those who have been inoculated. The systems were designed to increase health and safety at various venues, but experts warn of pushback over concerns on privacy and personal choice.
“What we’re seeing throughout the pandemic is people guarding their personal rights, and I think a lot of people will find that intrusive in their day to day,” said Jonathan Day, an associate professor of hospitality and tourism management at Purdue University.
