Genetic errors can lead to serious health problems, but repairing the genome can be dangerous and challenging. RNA offers another option. | Videos.
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Treating Disease
Posted in biotech/medical, genetics, health
Category: health – Page 365
For a long time, biohackers have been playing with magnets by embedding then under their skin as a novelty extra-sensation. I, personally, don’t see the point, but morphological, taxonomic, and cladic freedom are at work so I celebrate their actions.
Our skin’s ability to perceive pressure, heat, cold, and vibration is a critical safety function that most people take for granted. But burn victims, those with prosthetic limbs, and others who have lost skin sensitivity for one reason or another, can’t take it for granted, and often injure themselves unintentionally.
Chemists Islam Mosa from UConn, and James Rusling from UConn and UConn Health, along with University of Toronto engineer Abdelsalam Ahmed, wanted to create a sensor that can mimic the sensing properties of skin. Such a sensor would need to be able to detect pressure, temperature, and vibration. But perhaps it could do other things too, the researchers thought.
“It would be very cool if it had abilities human skin does not; for example, the ability to detect magnetic fields, sound waves, and abnormal behaviors,” said Mosa.
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The gut microbiome is made up of billions of bacteria, and scientists have been trying to understand exactly how they affect our health, contribute to our risk of contacting diseases and how they interact with the vital organs and systems in the body, including the brain. It is quite a lot to unpick.
As countries industrialise, their air becomes dirtier – and this could have some far-reaching effects on the beneficial bacteria inside us.
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Almost everything you hear about artificial intelligence today is thanks to deep learning. This category of algorithms works by using statistics to find patterns in data, and it has proved immensely powerful in mimicking human skills such as our ability to see and hear. To a very narrow extent, it can even emulate our ability to reason. These capabilities power Google’s search, Facebook’s news feed, and Netflix’s recommendation engine—and are transforming industries like health care and education.
Our study of 25 years of artificial-intelligence research suggests the era of deep learning is coming to an end.
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An artificial intelligence solution (AI) can accurately identify precancerous changes that could require medical attention in images from a woman’s cervix. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Global Good developed the computer algorithm, which is called automated visual evaluation.
Researchers created the algorithm by using more than 60,000 cervical images from a National Cancer Institute (NCI) archive of photos collected during a cervical cancer screening study that was carried out in Costa Rica in the 1990s.
More than 9,400 women participated in that population study, with follow up that lasted up to 18 years. Because of the prospective nature of the study, the researchers said that they gained nearly complete information on which cervical changes became pre-cancers and which did not.
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A research team with the participation of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio) of the University of Valencia, together with FISABIO and CIBERESP, has carried out the first metatranscriptomic study of the gut microbiota of babies, which has allowed to unveil the metabolism of the intestinal bacterial community during the first year of life, with a level of detail unknown until now.
This work has also involved researchers from the Joint Unit in Genomics and Health of the Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research of the Valencian Community (FISABIO) and the Biomedical Research Consortium in Epidemiology and Public Health Network (CIBERESP), dependent on the Carlos III Health Institute.
The environment is very important in the first years of life, both for the baby and for the bacteria of its gut microbiota. Bacteria and humans coexist in a harmonious symbiosis: people share with them the food they eat, which helps them to metabolise (10% of the energy obtained from food is as a consequence of bacterial action). In addition, bacteria influence the development of the immune and nervous systems.
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