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Category: health – Page 268

Artificial pieces of brain use light to communicate with real neurons

Researchers have created a way for artificial neuronal networks to communicate with biological neuronal networks. The new system converts artificial electrical spiking signals to a visual pattern than is then used to entrain the real neurons via optogenetic stimulation of the network. This advance will be important for future neuroprosthetic devices that replace damages neurons with artificial neuronal circuitry.

A prosthesis is an artificial device that replaces an injured or missing part of the body. You can easily imagine a stereotypical pirate with a wooden leg or Luke Skywalker’s famous robotic hand. Less dramatically, think of old-school prosthetics like glasses and contact lenses that replace the natural lenses in our eyes. Now try to imagine a prosthesis that replaces part of a damaged brain. What could artificial brain matter be like? How would it even work?

Creating neuroprosthetic technology is the goal of an international team led by by the Ikerbasque Researcher Paolo Bonifazi from Biocruces Health Research Institute (Bilbao, Spain), and Timothée Levi from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo and from IMS lab, University of Bordeaux. Although several types of artificial neurons have been developed, none have been truly practical for neuroprostheses. One of the biggest problems is that neurons in the brain communicate very precisely, but electrical output from the typical electrical neural network is unable to target specific neurons. To overcome this problem, the team converted the electrical signals to light. As Levi explains, “advances in optogenetic technology allowed us to precisely target neurons in a very small area of our biological neuronal network.”

Researchers construct complex synthetic microbiome

This can help engineer microbiome-based therapies in the future.

Researchers at Standford University have built from scratch the most complex and well-defined synthetic microbiome that will help us better understand the connections between the microbiome and human health, a university press release said.

The microbiome is a community of microorganisms that are found to cohabit in a given environment. The human gut has its own set of microorganisms that are markedly different from those on the skin.

The microbial community of over 100 bacterial species could help scientists learn more about the connections between the microbiome and human health.

Lassa Fever: Symptoms Of Ebola-like Virus As First UK Death Confirmed

Lassa fever is like ebola and there is an outbreak in Nigeria. It is transmissible through inhalation.

The death of a patient in the UK suffering from Lassa fever has heightened concern around the illness after a third case was reported.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said it was contacting individuals who had been in close contact with the infected patients after the death was confirmed last week.

Commenting on the recent cases detected in the UK, which were linked to travel to west Africa, Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical advisor at UKHSA, said: Cases of Lassa fever are rare in the UK and it does not spread easily between people.

Explained: New York City declares poliovirus a public emergency disaster

NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Nsikan Akpan, health and science editor at WNYC/Gothamist, about the poliovirus emergecy disaster declaration in New York state.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared polio a state disaster emergency on Friday. The first polio case in nearly a decade was identified back in July. The virus can cause paralysis. Nsikan Akpan runs the health and science desk at WNYC/Gothamist. He joins us now. Welcome to the program.

Nigeria’s rising Yellow fever epidemic

Yellow fever epidemics are happening across Nigeria spreading state by state. The yellow fever is another haemorgic disease like ebola.

Over 160 million people, more than half of Nigeria’s current estimated population, are at risk of yellow fever in the country, reports by the World Health Organisation Africa Region have recently highlighted. Lately, the yellow fever virus has become of serious global health concern more because the wakes of its historic outbreaks are trailed by devastating outcomes.

The WHO says the virus is spreading rapidly across Africa, warning that the rising trend could cause an epidemic in Nigeria particularly, mainly because of its large population. Consequently, it issued an advisory for travellers to and out of Nigeria to consult their healthcare provider on precautionary measures required against the virus if need be.

The Yellow fever virus is endemic in tropical areas of Africa and Central and South America. The disease is a potentially fatal disease, as half of its patients in the toxic phase die within seven to 10 days.

Psilocybin therapy seems to help some people give up drinking alcohol

Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, may help people with alcohol dependencies abstain from drinking. Nearly half of those who took the drug as part of a 12-week therapy programme no longer drank more than eight months later, according to results from the largest trial to date on psilocybin and addiction.

Michael Bogenschutz at NYU Langone Health in New York and his colleagues recruited 95 adults who were diagnosed with alcohol dependence. None of the participants had any major psychiatric conditions or had used psychedelics in the past year.

Everyone in the group went through a 12-week therapy programme. Most weeks, they had a roughly 1-hour long session with a therapist and a psychiatrist where they received cognitive behavioural therapy for alcohol use disorder.

Trust in AI-based preventive healthcare low among users

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can perform preventive healthcare activities such as health screening, routine check-up and vaccination with expert-level accuracy that can turn out to be cost-effective in the long run. Yet, a new research found that individuals show less trust in preventive care interventions suggested by AI than when the same interventions are prompted by human health experts.

The researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore studied 15,000 users of a health mobile application and found that emphasising the involvement of a human health expert in an AI-suggested intervention could improve its acceptance and effectiveness.

These findings suggest that the human element remains important even as the healthcare sector increasingly adopts AI to screen, diagnose and treat patients more efficiently. The findings could also contribute to the design of more effective AI-prompted preventive care interventions, said the researchers.

Top 10 Interesting ML Dissertations from Ph.D. Students

Choosing interesting dissertation topics in ML is the first choice of Master’s and Doctorate scholars nowadays. Ph.D. candidates are highly motivated to choose research topics that establish new and creative paths toward discovery in their field of study. Selecting and working on a dissertation topic in machine learning is not an easy task as machine learning uses statistical algorithms to make computers work in a certain way without being explicitly programmed. The main aim of machine learning is to create intelligent machines which can think and work like human beings. This article features the top 10 ML dissertations for Ph.D. students to try in 2022.

Text Mining and Text Classification: Text mining is an AI technology that uses NLP to transform the free text in documents and databases into normalized, structured data suitable for analysis or to drive ML algorithms. This is one of the best research and thesis topics for ML projects.

Recognition of Everyday Activities through Wearable Sensors and Machine Learning: The goal of the research detailed in this dissertation is to explore and develop accurate and quantifiable sensing and machine learning techniques for eventual real-time health monitoring by wearable device systems.

Scientists Have Made a Human Microbiome From Scratch

Our bodies are home to hundreds or thousands of species of microbes — nobody is sure quite how many. That’s just one of many mysteries about the so-called human microbiome.

Our inner ecosystem fends off pathogens, helps digest food and may even influence behavior. But scientists have yet to figure out exactly which microbes do what or how. Many studies suggest that many species have to work together to do each of the microbiome’s jobs.

To better understand how microbes affect our health, scientists have for the first time created a synthetic human microbiome, combining 119 species of bacteria naturally found in the human body. When the researchers gave the concoction to mice that did not have a microbiome of their own, the bacterial strains established themselves and remained stable — even when the scientists introduced other microbes.

Researchers Discover a Gene That Makes Your Muscles Significantly Stronger

Researchers have discovered a gene that increases muscle strength when activated by exercise, opening the door to the creation of therapeutic treatments that replicate some of the benefits of working out.

The University of Melbourne-led research, which was published in Cell Metabolism, demonstrated how various forms of exercise alter the molecules in our muscles and led to the identification of the new C18ORF25 gene, which is activated by all forms of exercise and is responsible for enhancing muscle strength. Animals lacking C18ORF25 have weaker muscles and worse exercise performance.

Dr. Benjamin Parker, project leader, said that by activating the C18ORF25 gene, the research team could observe muscles grow significantly stronger without necessarily becoming larger.

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