Lifeboat Foundation

For decades, researchers have been seeking ways to help the millions of people with spinal cord injuries regain control of their limbs, with frustratingly little success. The new device provides a rare glimmer of hope. Scientists at the University of Louisville’s Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, where Meas and three other patients received their im­plants, speculate that the stimu­lation may be reawakening connections between the brain and the body. “There’s residual circuitry that we can recover that no one realized was possible to do,” says Reggie Edgerton, director of the Neuromuscular Research Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We were shocked.”

Some of the benefits, such as better bowel and bladder control and improved blood pressure, remain even when the device is switched off. Electrical stimulation isn’t a cure, of course. The patients still can’t walk. And the stimulation must be customized for each individual, a time-consuming process. But it’s an enormous advance nonetheless. Says Edgerton, “It opens up a whole new mechanism of recovery.”

Continue reading “How It Works: A System That Reverses Paralysis” »

Robots are cloning again.

Robots can evolve. Robots can reproduce. All hail our robot overlords.

Continue reading “Great, Robots Just Learned To 3D Print Themselves” »

For several years, Professor George Hanna from Imperial College London has been directing work toward the development of a test that can detect cancers of the esophagus and stomach by measuring the levels of five chemicals in a patient’s breath. These chemicals are butyric, pentanoic and hexanoic acids, butanal, and decanal, which previous research has identified as pointers to the presence of stomach or esophageal cancer.

In 2015, Professor Hanna announced the results of the first clinical study analyzing the breath samples of 210 patients. The patents exhaled into a breathalyzer-like device, which used a selected ion flow tube mass spectrometer to detect the presence of any of the five aforementioned chemicals in the breath sample. The 2015 study achieved a 90 percent accuracy rate in correctly identifying the two cancers, and a recently completed, broader study has also proven successful.

The new study collected samples from 335 people across four London hospitals. Around half of the group had been diagnosed with stomach or esophageal cancer and the other half had shown no evidence of cancer after having an endoscopy. After analyzing all the samples, the new breath test achieved an 85 percent accuracy rate, correctly identifying those both with and without cancer.

I must get this.

John F. Wasik’s new book on Nikola Tesla (Lightning Strikes: Timeless Lessons in Creativity from the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla) includes an AR app.

Looking for that perfect gift for the medical student in your life? Search no more.

Is it wise to make medical students feel like renegade fictional genius Tony Stark, magically waving human bodies apart like the holographic diagrams in the Iron Man basement lab? Should we use technology to make millennials feel like superheroes? Stop asking difficult philosophical questions and look at how cool this is.

This augmented reality app is called Project Esper. It uses hand gestures to allow the users move and study anatomy. Users can pull the human body apart and investigate the organs and limbs piece by piece. Look—just look at this magical Star Trek karate:

Luv this.

Archaeology isn’t an easy job, but it becomes easier in virtual reality, if you can walk around ancient buildings as if they were still there.

Lithodomos VR, an Australian virtual reality archaeological startup, knows this and has raised $900,000 in Australian dollars ($679,000 in U.S. dollars) in a seed funding round.

Continue reading “Australian archaeological startup raises $679,000 to rebuild ancient sites in VR” »

Someday, we will have glasses or contacts that will be able to detect tumors and notify us or even contact doctor’s office to set up the appointment for us.

Researchers have shown that they could efficiently capture and simultaneously filter out the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) permanently from cancer patients’ whole blood, which otherwise could gain access into the blood and invariably cause metastasis.

(Representative image)

Continue reading “Researchers design 3D system to detect circulating tumor cells” »

Interesting study on brain receptors.

Researchers from UZH have discovered how the perception of meaning changes in the brain under the influence of LSD. The serotonin 2A receptors are responsible for altered perception. This finding will help develop new courses of pharmacotherapy for psychiatric disorders such as depression, addictions or phobias.

Humans perceive everyday things and experiences differently and attach different meaning to pieces of music, for instance. In the case of psychiatric disorders, this perception is often altered. For patients suffering from addictions, for instance, drug stimuli are more meaningful than for people without an addiction. Or patients with phobias perceive the things or situations that scare them with exaggerated significance compared to healthy people. A heightened negative perception of the self is also characteristic of depressive patients. Just how this so-called personal relevance develops in the brain and which neuropharmacological mechanisms are behind it, however, have remained unclear.

Continue reading “LSD alters perception via serotonin receptors” »

Scientists, have identified a brain hormone that can trigger fat burning in the gut.

Researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in the US found a brain hormone that specifically and selectively stimulates f at metabolism, without any effect on food intake.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, in animal models could have implications for future pharmaceutical development.

Continue reading “Scientists Identify A Brain Hormone That Can Trigger Fat Burning” »