Medical Advances
The miniature brain, which is not conscious, resembles that of a five-week-old fetus’ – about the size of a pencil eraser. The organ was made from adult human skin cells and is the most complete human brain model ever developed.
In this video, Ralph Smart of Infinite Waters Diving Deep shares 10 amazing scientific ideas that he thinks will change the world.
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 study tying the aging process to the deterioration of tightly packaged bundles of cellular DNA could lead to methods of preventing and treating age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The discovery, made possible through a combination of cutting-edge stem cell and gene-editing technologies, could lead to ways of countering age-related physiological declines by preventing or reversing damage to heterochromatin.
This could mean good things for people with Alzheimer’s disease.
A new study suggests that artemesinin, a derivate of the sweet wormwood plant, in combination with Iron, can Kill 98 percent of Cancer Cells within 16 Hours.
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.
There are very few common threads among experts on what causes cancer, aside from obvious lifestyle choices like smoking and alcohol. However, to think cancer is largely caused by one thing is a bit too simplistic…or is it? Turns out, it may not be that complicated. A simple fungal infection can cause cancer…Candida.
A new study has strengthened the link between exposure to fine particulate matter in the air during pregnancy and the risk of a child developing autism. The link was particularly strong when the exposure occurred during the third trimester, and the risk increased when the amount of particulate matter increased. Raanan Raz of Harvard University is lead author on the paper, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives.
