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Summary: Understanding how changes in the brain relate to changes in well-being is key to developing new targets for the treatment of mental health disorders.

Source: University of Oxford.

Associate Professor Miriam Klein-Flügge and colleagues looked at brain connectivity and mental health data from nearly 500 people. In particular, they looked at the connectivity of the amygdala—a brain region well known for its importance in emotion and reward processing.

Summary: Study reveals a strong connection between certain bacteria residing in the gut and metabolites, small molecules found in the blood.

Source: Uppsala University.

There are strong links between bacteria living in the gut and the levels of small molecules in the blood known as metabolites. Such is the finding of a new study led by researchers from Uppsala University and Lund University, which is now published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a gene marker that may lead to a more effective, precision treatment for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). The researcher’s findings are published in Nature Cancer.

“Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is one of the most lethal cancers,” says the paper’s senior author Zhenkun Lou, Ph.D. Dr. Lou says while Poly-ADP-ribose-polymerase inhibitors (PARPi) are now an FDA-approved option for standard maintenance therapy for patients with metastatic PDAC who harbor pathogenic germline BRCA1/2 mutations, only about 10 percent of patients with PDAC harbor pathogenic mutations of the homologous recombination (HR) genes. “This leaves most patients missing out on this encouraging treatment strategy,” says Dr. Lou.

In this study, Dr. Lou and his colleagues found that the protein METTL16 may be a new biomarker for PARPi treatment, and that PDAC with elevated expression of METTL16, may benefit from PARPi treatment.

Quantum computers and communication devices work by encoding information into individual or entangled photons, enabling data to be quantum securely transmitted and manipulated exponentially faster than is possible with conventional electronics. Now, quantum researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have demonstrated a method for encoding vastly more information into a single photon, opening the door to even faster and more powerful quantum communication tools.

Typically, quantum communication systems “write” information onto a photon’s spin . In this case, photons carry out either a right or left circular rotation, or form a quantum superposition of the two known as a two-dimensional qubit.

It’s also possible to encode information onto a photon’s orbital angular —the corkscrew path that light follows as it twists and torques forward, with each photon circling around the center of the beam. When the spin and angular momentum interlock, it forms a high-dimensional qudit—enabling any of a theoretically infinite range of values to be encoded into and propagated by a single photon.

I am registering Posthuman as a religion in UK, and MVT (although evidence based) as a “religious belief” — which seems consistent with.gov requirements, since the Posthuman Movement started 1988 in UK. Why shouldn’t rational folk benefit from the same financial benefits awarded to promoters of Supernaturalism and religious daftness? Perhaps Transhumans should also consider this, or jointly with https://Posthuman.org? Any USA citizens interested in this approach? https://www.gov.uk/…/charitable…/charitable-purposes…


Posthuman Psychology, MVT research, World Philosophy, Software development.

Summary: The pioneering “soleus pushup” effectively elevates muscle metabolism for hours, even when sitting.

Source: University of Houston.

From the same mind whose research propelled the notion that “sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little,” comes a groundbreaking discovery set to turn a sedentary lifestyle on its ear: The soleus muscle in the calf, though only 1% of your body weight, can do big things to improve the metabolic health in the rest of your body if activated correctly.

Researchers said the reason for this is because of “remarkable advances” in medical research and cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment. Between August 1, 2021 and July 31, 2022, for example, the Food and Drug Administration approved eight new anticancer therapeutics, 10 already approved therapeutics for use for new cancer types and two new diagnostic imaging agents.

“We have now a revolution in immune therapies. And when you put that together with the combination of targeted therapies, chemo and radiation therapy, we now have patients that would have died within two years of a diagnosis living 15, 20, 25, 30 years, essentially cured of their malignancies,” AACR President Lisa Coussens said.

However, this progress is not equal, and many populations “continue to shoulder a disproportionate burden of cancer,” the report says.

Engineered living materials promise to aid efforts in human health, energy and environmental remediation. Now they can be built big and customized with less effort.

Bioscientists at Rice University have introduced centimeter-scale, slime-like colonies of engineered that self-assemble from the bottom up. They can be programmed to soak up contaminants from the environment or to catalyze biological reactions, among many possible applications.

The creation of autonomous —or ELMs—has been a goal of bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin since long before she joined Rice in 2019.