Lifeboat Foundation

Evolution might have played a trick on women’s immune systems.

Inserting air into hot glass to form a bubble has been used to make glass objects since Roman times. In new work, researchers apply these same glass blowing principles on a microscopic scale to make specialized miniature cone-shaped lenses known as axicons.

Axicons are used to shape laser light in a way that is beneficial for optical drilling, imaging and creating optical traps for manipulating particles or cells. These lenses have been known for more than 60 years, but their fabrication, especially when small, is not easy.

“Our technique has the potential of producing robust miniature axicons in glass at a low cost, which could be used in miniaturized imaging systems for biomedical imaging applications, such as optical coherence tomography, or OCT,” said research team member Nicolas Passilly from FEMTO-ST Institute in France.

In the past 10 days, officials have recorded nearly 100 new cases of Ebola in the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a sign of fluctuating transmission throughout North Kivu and Ituri provinces, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in an update.

Today, the DRC will likely confirm another 18 new cases, which will raise the outbreak total to 2,265. As of yesterday, there were 1,510 deaths, and 269 suspected cases are still being investigated.

Cerebral organoids are artificially grown, 3D tissue cultures that resemble the human brain. Now, researchers from Japan report functional neural networks derived from these organoids in a study publishing June 27 in the journal Stem Cell Reports. Although the organoids aren’t actually “thinking,” the researchers’ new tool—which detects neural activity using organoids—could provide a method for understanding human brain function.

“Because they can mimic cerebral development, cerebral organoids can be used as a substitute for the human brain to study complex developmental and neurological disorders,” says corresponding author Jun Takahashi, a professor at Kyoto University.

However, these studies are challenging, because current cerebral organoids lack desirable supporting structures, such as blood vessels and surrounding tissues, Takahashi says. Since researchers have a limited ability to assess the organoids’ neural activities, it has also been difficult to comprehensively evaluate the function of neuronal networks.

It’s no surprise that using human embryos for biological and medical research comes with many ethical concerns. Correct though it is to proceed with caution in these matters, the fact is that much science would benefit from being able to study human biology more accurately.

Researchers at Oregon State University have developed an improved technique for using magnetic nanoclusters to kill hard-to-reach tumors.

There are certain enzymes — proteins — plaques that help cause Alzheimer’s, just recently in fact {which I as most could have told them} the gut microbes and mouth microbes are found to assist in Dementia and Alzheimers. But I and Hippocrates as others have been declaring that fact for quite some time… Respect AEWR wherein the amazing gathered data of mankind has yielded the many causes and a cure for aging…

For decades, research into Alzheimer’s has made slow progress, but now a mother and daughter team think they have finally found a solution – a vaccine that could inoculate potential sufferers.

Circa 2017

The deep learning tool can identify all the small mutations that make you unique, more accurately than every existing method.

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