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For a while now, we’ve known there’s a complex interplay between our hormones, guts, and mental health, but untangling the most relevant connections within our bodies has proved challenging.

New research has found a single enzyme that links all three, and its presence may be responsible for depression in some women during their reproductive years.

Wuhan University medical researcher Di Li and colleagues compared the blood serum of 91 women aged between 18 and 45 years with depression and 98 without. Incredibly, those with depression had almost half the serum levels of estradiol – the primary form of estrogen our bodies use during our fertile years.

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The human body is made up of thousands of tiny lymphatic vessels that ferry white blood cells and proteins around the body, like a superhighway of the immune system. It’s remarkably efficient, but if damaged from injury or cancer treatment, the whole system starts to fail. The resulting fluid retention and swelling, called lymphedema, isn’t just uncomfortable—it’s also irreversible.

When fail, typically their ability to pump out the fluid is compromised. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new treatment using nanoparticles that can repair lymphatic pumping. Traditionally, researchers in the field have tried to regrow lymphatic vessels, but repairing the pumping action is a unique approach.

“With many patients, the challenge is that the lymphatic vessels that still exist in the patient aren’t working. So it’s not that you need to grow new vessels that you can think of as tubes, it’s that you need to get the tubes to work, which for lymphatic vessels means to pump,” said Brandon Dixon, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “That’s where our approach is really different. It delivers a drug to help lymphatic vessels pump using a nanoparticle that can drain into the diseased vessels themselves.”

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“AlphaFold was a huge advance in protein structure prediction. We were inspired by the advances they made, which led to a whole new wave of using deep learning,” said Professor David Baker, a biochemist and computational biologist at the University of Washington.

“The advantage of ESMFold is that it is very fast, and so can be used to predict the structures of a larger set of proteins than AlphaFold, albeit with slightly lower accuracy, similar to that of RoseTTAFold,” Dr. Baker said, referring to a tool that emerged from his lab in 2021.

DeepMind open-sourced the code for AlphaFold2, making it freely available to the community. Nearly all proteins known to science—about 214 million—can be looked up in the public AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Meta’s ESM Metagenomic Atlas includes 617 million proteins.

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Researchers at Yale have for the first time, using a process known as quantum error correction, substantially extended the lifetime of a quantum bit—a long-sought-after goal and one of the trickiest challenges in the field of quantum physics.

Led by Yale’s Michael Devoret, the experiment proves—decades after its were proposed—that quantum error correction works in practice. Quantum error correction is a process designed to keep quantum information intact for a period of time longer than if the same information were stored in hardware components without any correction.

The results were published March 22 in Nature.

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The technology I want to talk about today is something out of this world, but also a bit controversial There is a startup in Australia who are actually growing live human neurons and then integrating it into traditional computer chips… mind-blowing stuff!

My Gear:
Camera Sony Alpha 7 III: https://amzn.to/3dmv2O6
Lens Sony 50mm F1.8: https://amzn.to/3weJoJo.
Mic Sennheiser: https://amzn.to/3IKW5Ax.
Music from my videos: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/908oe4

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AnastasiInTech

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A leading neuroscientist claims that a pong-playing clump of about a million neurons is “sentient”. What does that mean? Why did they teach a lab-grown brain to play pong? To study biological self-organization at the root of life, intelligence, and consciousness. And, according to their website, “to see what happens.”

CORRECTIONS/Clarifications:
- The cells aren’t directly frozen in liquid nitrogen — they are put in vials and stored in liquid nitrogen: https://www.atcc.org/products/pcs-201-010
- The sentience of some invertebrates, like octopuses, is generally agreed upon. Prominent scientists affirmed non-human consciousness in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness: https://philiplow.foundation/consciousness/

DISCLAIMER: The explanations in this video are those proposed by the researchers, or my opinion. We are far from understanding how brains, or even neurons, work. The free energy principle is one of many potential explanations.

Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/IhmCurious.

Continue reading “Lab-Grown Brain Learns Pong — Is This Biological Neural Network “Sentient”?” | >

Growing brains can be a tricky process, but growing ones that can make muscles move? That’s an incredible feat. Here’s how scientists did it.

How Close Are We to Farming Human Body Parts? — https://youtu.be/oRHxX9OW9ow.

Cerebral organoids at the air-liquid interface generate nerve tracts with functional output.
https://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/cerebral-organoids-at-the-air…al-output/
“The capacity for this model to be used to investigate the way in which neurons connect up within the brain and with the spinal cord could have important implications for our understanding of a range of diseases. In particular defects in neuronal connectivity are thought to underlie various psychiatric illnesses, including schizophrenia, autism, and depression. ”

Cerebral organoids at the air–liquid interface generate diverse nerve tracts with functional output.

Continue reading “This Lab-Grown Brain Made a Muscle TWITCH, Here’s How” | >