Medical Advances

For a whole lot of people, especially those in developing countries, science — and with it, medicine — isn’t readily available to the majority of citizens. But Manu Prakash wants to change that. Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, is the proprietor of “frugal science,” a term he coined to explain the movement toward building cheap versions of high tech tools. His endeavour aims to make medical devices both affordable and available to the masses…So in 2014 he created a paper microscope, aptly named the Foldscope, that costs only 50 cents to produce.

Lihong Wang creates the sort of medical technology you’d expect to find on the starship Enterprise. Wang, a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has already helped develop instruments that can detect individual cancer cells in the bloodstream and oxygen consumption deep within the body. He has also created a camera that shoots at 100 billion frames a second, fast enough to freeze an object traveling at the speed of light.

Women’s brains might be more vulnerable to the degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s disease than men’s, causing them to decline in memory and cognitive function twice as fast, according to new research that could explain why women make up two-thirds of all diagnosed Alzheimer’s cases in the US.
The finding was presented this week at the 2015 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in Washington, DC, with the team also noting that women tend to decline more dramatically than men in cognition, function, and brain size after they’ve been in surgery or under general anaesthesia.

Researchers in Finland confirmed a suspected link between the brain and lymphatic system using new imaging technology to answer the question of brain fluid draining into the lymph system without a direct link between the two. The research team at the University of Helsinki said the discovery could be significant for the way brain diseases and disorders are handled.

Like homing pigeons, humans have a nose for navigation because our brains are wired to convert smells into spatial information, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows. While humans may lack the scent-tracking sophistication of, say, a search-and-rescue dog, we can sniff our way, blindfolded, toward a location whose scent we’ve smelled only once before, according to the UC Berkeley study published today (June 17) in the journal PLOS ONE.

A major study shows new evidence that long-term smoking could cause thinning of the brain’s cortex. The cortex is the outer layer of the brain in which critical cognitive functions such as memory, language and perception take place. Interestingly, the findings also suggest that stopping smoking helps to restore at least part of the cortex’s thickness.

Arabic movie subtitles, Korean tweets, Russian novels, Chinese websites, English lyrics, and even the war-torn pages of the New York Times — research examining billions of words, shows that these sources — and all human language — skews toward the use of happy words. This Big Data study confirms the 1969 Pollyanna Hypothesis that there is a universal human tendency to “look on and talk about the bright side of life.

I have recently read 2 articles, and received a plea for pledges, regarding Alzheimers. So, I began to reflect upon how, and question why, in the quest to blaze new trails on which to diagnose or fight a disease, our scientific and research programs often do not look at the tools around them and fashion those tools to do the job just as well.