Toggle light / dark theme

In a new study, scientists observed several simultaneous reactions in mice given a common chemotherapy drug: Their gut bacteria and tissue changed, their blood and brains showed signs of inflammation, and their behaviors suggested they were fatigued and cognitively impaired.

The research is the first to show these combined events in the context of chemotherapy, and opens the door to the possibility that regulating could not only calm chemo side effects like nausea and diarrhea, but also potentially lessen the memory and concentration problems many cancer survivors report.

More research is needed to further understand how the chemo-modified gut influences the in a way that can have an impact on behavior. The same lab at The Ohio State University is continuing mouse studies to test the relationship and running a parallel clinical trial in .

A British engineer has found a way to filter unwanted cells from blood using magnets — and his tool could be used in clinical trials as soon as next year.

Thanks to existing research, biochemical scientist George Frodsham knew it was possible to force magnetic nanoparticles to bind to specific cells in the body. But while other researchers did so primarily to make those cells show up in images, he wondered whether the same technique might allow doctors to remove unwanted cells from the blood.

“When someone has a tumour you cut it out,” he told The Telegraph. “Blood cancer is a tumour in the blood, so why not just take it out in the same way?”

The program, called Somatic Cell Genome Editing, will be investing $190 million. (2018)


Last year, I wrote about a team of Chinese scientists having received ethical approval to perform a clinical trial of gene-editing. The goal was to test whether gene-editing may be a potential cure for cancer. The technology used for the trial is called CRISPR/Cas9, not exactly a household name. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Cas9 stands for CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme. If you read all these words a few times, it can make your head hurt. The topic is complex, but I hope in this post to make it more understandable.

After reading about CRISPR more than a few times, I think I finally get the concept. I may not have this 100% right, but following is what I believe it is about. To imagine what gene-editing is, consider editing of a video. The software shows you each frame of the video. You select a frame you want to edit and display the frame in video editing software. You make the changes to look the way you want the frame to look, and then insert the frame back into the video. For example, the original video may have contained an unneeded “um” or “ah” or “eh” which added no value to the video.

Death means an end, but one recent research challenges the idea and fuels the possibility of reviving the brain. And it has plunged the scientific community into an ethical debate.

Physical movements, thoughts, and actions are traits that define how we know the difference between what’s alive and what’s lifeless i.e. death. But beyond that, we hardly understand what death means. We’ve known that death is an eventuality and irreversible. But recent research done back in April 2019 changed all that. Consequently, science is making us rethink the definition of death and the sheer fact that it is permanent.

A neuroscientist Christof Koch recently pondered over death in an article in the Scientific American. Koch wrote, “Death, this looming presence just over the horizon, is quite ill-defined from both a scientific as well as a medical point of view.”

Carol has been suffering from back pain for 30 years.

Her MRI revealed disc degeneration, facet arthritis and nerve involvement.

Like most patients with chronic back pain she had seen multiple doctors including a spine surgeon. Carol had various treatments like opioids, physical therapy, chiropractic manipulations, epidural injecions even ablation of the arthritis nerves in our clinic. Unfortunately they were not successful.

Carol finally decided to have stem cell therapy. This was a one time procedure. After taking her OWN bone marrow stem cell from the back of her hip, we centrifuged and concentrated them.

A human trial of NMN has recently concluded, and the results are not impressive at all; however, this is perfectly fine because that was not the purpose of the study, and, despite the lackluster results, the study was a success!

This might sound strange, but perhaps the words of the study authors may make it a bit clearer why this is absolutely no cause for alarm.

We, therefore, conducted a clinical trial to investigate the safety of single NMN administration in 10 healthy men.

It’s been interesting to see the fans’ reactions regarding Marvel Studios’ next big cosmic adventure film, The Eternals. While some are excited, it seems like there are a good amount that don’t really care about it.

Personally, I’m stoked! I love the lore of The Eternals and The Celestials! Jack Kirby did some incredibly radical stuff with these characters and the story and I’m super pumped to see how Marvel and director Chloe Zhao bring his vision to life.

During a recent interview with THR, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige talked about the film and explained that it’s a big, expensive, and necessary risk for them:

Adding energy to any material, such as by heating it, almost always makes its structure less orderly. Ice, for example, with its crystalline structure, melts to become liquid water, with no order at all.

But in new experiments by physicists at MIT and elsewhere, the opposite happens: When a pattern called a charge density wave in a certain material is hit with a fast laser pulse, a whole new charge density wave is created—a highly ordered state, instead of the expected disorder. The surprising finding could help to reveal unseen properties in materials of all kinds.

The discovery is being reported today in the journal Nature Physics, in a paper by MIT professors Nuh Gedik and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, postdoc Anshul Kogar, graduate student Alfred Zong, and 17 others at MIT, Harvard University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and Argonne National Laboratory.