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Continue reading “Blood Test #4 in 2022: Supplements, Diet” »
A process that involves the “murder” of living, newly-generated cells has been discovered for the first time in recent research conducted at the University of Haifa. The research, which was described in the esteemed journal Science Advances, discovered that throughout the cellular differentiation process in fruit flies, phagocytic cells consume and destroy healthy living cells.
“We found that phagocytes can function as ‘murderers.’ It is well-known that phagocytic cells swallow and dissolve dead cells, but we show for the first time that they also kill newly-created normal cells. Essentially we have characterized a new mechanism of cell death. The more we know the mechanisms of cell death, the better we understand how to cope with various diseases, particularly cancer”, explained Professor Hilla Toledano, head of the Department of Human Biology at the University of Haifa and author of the study.
The origin of several bodily tissues, including skin, hair, stomach, and testicles, may be traced back to stem cells. By continuously supplying new cells to replace the old ones, these powerful stem cells enable tissue replenishment. Each stem cell in this process splits into two cells, one of which is retained for use in the future and the other of which develops to take the place of the lost cell in the tissue.
Many efforts have been made to image the spatiotemporal electrical activity of the brain with the purpose of mapping its function and dysfunction as well as aiding the management of brain disorders. Here, we propose a non-conventional deep learning–based source imaging framework (DeepSIF) that provides robust and precise spatiotemporal estimates of underlying brain dynamics from noninvasive high-density electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. DeepSIF employs synthetic training data generated by biophysical models capable of modeling mesoscale brain dynamics. The rich characteristics of underlying brain sources are embedded in the realistic training data and implicitly learned by DeepSIF networks, avoiding complications associated with explicitly formulating and tuning priors in an optimization problem, as often is the case in conventional source imaging approaches. The performance of DeepSIF is evaluated by 1) a series of numerical experiments, 2) imaging sensory and cognitive brain responses in a total of 20 healthy subjects from three public datasets, and 3) rigorously validating DeepSIF’s capability in identifying epileptogenic regions in a cohort of 20 drug-resistant epilepsy patients by comparing DeepSIF results with invasive measurements and surgical resection outcomes. DeepSIF demonstrates robust and excellent performance, producing results that are concordant with common neuroscience knowledge about sensory and cognitive information processing as well as clinical findings about the location and extent of the epileptogenic tissue and outperforming conventional source imaging methods. The DeepSIF method, as a data-driven imaging framework, enables efficient and effective high-resolution functional imaging of spatiotemporal brain dynamics, suggesting its wide applicability and value to neuroscience research and clinical applications.
In an ancillary study of the Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL), we tested whether supplemental vitamin D3 would result in a lower risk of fractures than placebo. VITAL was a two-by-two factorial, randomized, controlled trial that investigated whether supplemental vitamin D3 (2000 IU per day), n−3 fatty acids (1 g per day), or both would prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease in men 50 years of age or older and women 55 years of age or older in the United States. Participants were not recruited on the basis of vitamin D deficiency, low bone mass, or osteoporosis. Incident fractures were reported by participants on annual questionnaires and adjudicated by centralized medical-record review. The primary end points were incident total, nonvertebral, and hip fractures. Proportional-hazards models were used to estimate the treatment effect in intention-to-treat analyses.
Among 25,871 participants (50.6% women [13,085 of 25,871] and 20.2% Black [5106 of 25,304]), we confirmed 1991 incident fractures in 1,551 participants over a median follow-up of 5.3 years. Supplemental vitamin D3, as compared with placebo, did not have a significant effect on total fractures (which occurred in 769 of 12,927 participants in the vitamin D group and in 782 of 12,944 participants in the placebo group; hazard ratio, 0.98; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.89 to 1.08; P=0.70), nonvertebral fractures (hazard ratio, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.87 to 1.07; P=0.50), or hip fractures (hazard ratio, 1.01; 95% CI, 0.70 to 1.47; P=0.96). There was no modification of the treatment effect according to baseline characteristics, including age, sex, race or ethnic group, body-mass index, or serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. There were no substantial between-group differences in adverse events as assessed in the parent trial.
Vitamin D3 supplementation did not result in a significantly lower risk of fractures than placebo among generally healthy midlife and older adults who were not selected for vitamin D deficiency, low bone mass, or osteoporosis. (Funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases; VITAL ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01704859.)
NEW YORK (AP) — Officials in New York City declared a public health emergency due to the spread of the monkeypox virus Saturday, calling the city “the epicenter” of the outbreak.
The announcement Saturday by Mayor Eric Adams and health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said as many as 150,000 city residents could be at risk of infection. The declaration will allow officials to issue emergency orders under the city health code and amend code provisions to implement measures to help slow the spread.
In the last two days, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency declaration and the state health department called monkeypox an “imminent threat to public health.”
Summary: Study reveals how somatostatin and copper affect amyloid beta in Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
Source: KAIST
With nearly 50 million dementia patients worldwide, and Alzheimers’s disease is the most common neurodegenerative disease. Its main symptom is the impairment of general cognitive abilities, including the ability to speak or to remember.
Continue reading “How a Neurotransmitter May Be the Key in Controlling Alzheimer’s Toxicity” »
Millions of people are administered general anesthesia each year in the United States alone, but it’s not always easy to tell whether they are actually unconscious.
A small proportion of those patients regain some awareness during medical procedures, but a new study of the brain activity that represents consciousness could prevent that potential trauma. It may also help both people in comas and scientists struggling to define which parts of the brain can claim to be key to the conscious mind.
“What has been shown for 100 years in an unconscious state like sleep are these slow waves of electrical activity in the brain,” says Yuri Saalmann, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology and neuroscience professor. “But those may not be the right signals to tap into. Under a number of conditions—with different anesthetic drugs, in people that are suffering from a coma or with brain damage or other clinical situations—there can be high-frequency activity as well.”
For now, the acrylic table is under construction and open only to the stuffed mouse, originally a cat toy, used to help set up the cameras. The toy squeaks when Kennedy presses it. “Usually, you do a surgery to remove the squeaker” before using them to set up experiments, says Kennedy, assistant professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.
The playful squeak is a startling sound in a lab that is otherwise defined by the quiet of computational modeling. Among her projects, Kennedy is expanding her work with an artificial-intelligence-driven tool called the Mouse Action Recognition System (MARS) that can automatically classify mouse social behaviors. She also uses her modeling work to study how different brain areas and cell types interact with one another, and to connect neural activity with behaviors to learn how the brain integrates sensory information. In her office on the fifth floor of Northwestern’s Ward Building in downtown Chicago, most of this work happens on computers with data, code and graphs. Quiet also prevails in a room down the hall, where Kennedy’s small group of postdoctoral researchers and technicians sit at workstations in a lab that she launched less than a year and a half ago.
Kennedy’s ability to talk about abstract concepts, with a little stuffed animal as a prop, sets her apart, her colleagues say. She is a rare theoretical neuroscientist who can translate her mathematical work into real-world experiments. “That is her gift,” says Larry Abbott, a theoretical neuroscientist at Columbia University who was Kennedy’s graduate school advisor. “She’s good at the technical stuff, but if you can’t make that reach across to the data and the experiments, a person is not going to be that effective. She’s really just great at that — finding the right mathematics to apply to the particular problem that she’s looking at.”
Ultrasound imaging is a safe and noninvasive window into the body’s workings, providing clinicians with live images of a patient’s internal organs. To capture these images, trained technicians manipulate ultrasound wands and probes to direct sound waves into the body. These waves reflect back out to produce high-resolution images of a patient’s heart, lungs, and other deep organs.
Currently, ultrasound imaging requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor’s offices. But a new design by MIT engineers might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-AIDS at the pharmacy.
Continue reading “Engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body” »
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, car manufacturing companies such as Ford quickly shifted their production focus from automobiles to masks and ventilators.
To make this switch possible, these companies relied on people working on an assembly line. It would have been too challenging for a robot to make this transition because robots are tied to their usual tasks.
Continue reading “How to help assembly-line robots shift gears and pick up almost anything” »
