Lifeboat Foundation

B rain surgery is one of the most delicate, invasive procedures in medicine. Many times, anesthesia is not involved; sometimes, an electrode is inserted into the brain for deep brain stimulation.

Research published Thursday in the journal Cell promises a safer alternative to these otherwise intrusive ways to get in your head: stimulating neurons deep in the brain without any invasive procedures. The procedure, called temporal interference stimulation, is the latest invention of MIT neuroscientist and engineer Edward Boyden.

“Brief stimulation of the brain can actually cause the brain to clean up the amyloid plaques that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Boyden tells Inverse. He feels that his new technology can help with a number of neurological conditions without many of the hazards inherent to invasive techniques.

Continue reading “Therapeutic Mind Control Worked In Rats. Are Humans Next?” »

Could AI soon diagnose cancer? New system that ‘doctors can rely on’ is 93% accurate in identifying tumours.

• US firm IBM says its Watson system is capable of accurately identify tumours
• The computer crunches through medical images and patient records quickly
• It compares them to past cases and medical journals to come to a conclusion
• Doctors at 55 hospitals around the world have been using the AI to help them

By Richard Gray for MailOnline

Increasing autophagy in macrophages is a promising avenue of research aiming at heart disease and other age-related diseaeses.

Today we thought it was a good time to take a look at a new study that demonstrates that increasing autophagy is a good approach to slowing aging and could be the foundation for a variety of therapies to treat age-related diseases.

What is Autophagy?

Continue reading “Boosting Autophagy to treat heart disease” »

It’s durable, exponentially scalable, and it’ll last millennia, if not millions of years.

Ah, my sweet summer child. What do you know of inflammation? Inflammation is for the winter, when genes uncoil in your blood and messengers send codes containing the blueprints for proteins to protect you from the harsh diseases of the cold. Inflammation is for those long nights, when the sun hides its face, or rain clouds block the sky, and trillions of little T-cells are born to fight the diseases of cold and flu season.

At least, that’s the news from a new study showing that DNA reacts to the seasons, changing your body’s chemistry depending on the time of year.

The findings, published today in Nature Communications ^1^, show that as many as one-fifth of all genes in blood cells undergo seasonal changes in expression. Genes often are seen as immutable, but a lot of our body’s workings depend upon which genes are translated when. In the winter, the study found, your blood contains a denser blend of immune responders, while summer veins swim with fat-burning, body-building, water-retaining hormones. These seasonal changes could provide insight into inflammatory diseases like hypertension, and autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes.

Continue reading “Your DNA Changes With the Seasons, Just Like the Weather” »

Scientists might have found a cure for allergies.

The age of the cyborg may be closer than we think. Rapidly improving medical robotics, wearables, and implants means many humans are already part machine, and this trend is only likely to continue.

It is most noticeable in the field of medical prosthetics where high-performance titanium and carbon fiber replacements for limbs have become commonplace. The use of “blades” by Paralympians has even raised questions over whether they actually offer an advantage over biological limbs.

Continue reading “What Happens When Cyborg Tech Goes Beyond Medicine?” »

From portable genome sequencers until genetic tests revealing distant relations with Thomas Jefferson, genomics represents a fascinatingly innovative area of healthcare. As the price of genome sequencing has been in free fall for years, the start-up scene is bursting from transformative power. Let’s look at some of the most amazing ventures in genomics!

A mantra of these data-rife times is that within the vast and growing volumes of diverse data types, such as sensor feeds, economic indicators, and scientific and environmental measurements, are dots of significance that can tell important stories, if only those dots could be identified and connected in authentically meaningful ways. Getting good at that exercise of data synthesis and interpretation ought to open new, quicker routes to identifying threats, tracking disease outbreaks, and otherwise answering questions and solving problems that previously were intractable.

Now for a reality check. “Today’s hardware is ill-suited to handle such data challenges, and these challenges are only going to get harder as the amount of data continues to grow exponentially,” said Trung Tran, a program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). To take on that technology shortfall, MTO last summer unveiled its Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) program, which has now signed on five performers to carry out HIVE’s mandate: to develop a powerful new data-handling and computing platform specialized for analyzing and interpreting huge amounts of data with unprecedented deftness. “It will be a privilege to work with this innovative team of performers to develop a new category of server processors specifically designed to handle the data workloads of today and tomorrow,” said Tran, who is overseeing HIVE.

The quintet of performers includes a mix of large commercial electronics firms, a national laboratory, a university, and a veteran defense-industry company: Intel Corporation (Santa Clara, California), Qualcomm Intelligent Solutions (San Diego, California), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, Washington), Georgia Tech (Atlanta, Georgia), and Northrop Grumman (Falls Church, Virginia).