Summary: A new study provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind OCD and suggests the disorder could be treated by a class of drugs that has been investigated in clinical trails.
Source: Duke.
Brain receptor acts as switch for OCD symptoms in mice.
Scientists invent particles that will provide oxygen to your body without breathing!!!
This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can’t breathe anymore. It’s one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.
The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children’s Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
Continue reading “Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing” »
2016 has been called the year that virtual reality becomes a reality, as some of the most anticipated devices will be made available on the consumer market. From Magic Leap (valued at over $1 billion) to Oculus (acquired by Facebook last year for $2 billion), there’s plenty of interest in the market, and ample room for it.
Though virtual reality is often depicted as an experience for the recliner or gaming chair, a number of VR enthusiasts want us to rethink how we engage with the technology. Instead of sitting around, they’d like to get us moving and looking beyond the go-to medium of gaming. Developers of these new devices consider fields like military training and healthcare as valuable places for mobile virtual reality to be applied.
Leading this approach is a Kickstarter VR company called Virtuix, whose treadmill-like device Omni encourages users to get upright and active. The reason to develop such a device felt like a natural evolution to Virtuix’s former Product Manager, Colton Jacobs.
“If I am walking in the virtual world my avatar is actually walking…”, he says, “…then the body’s natural reaction is, I want to stand up, I want to be walking with this avatar as if I’m actually there.”
Continue reading “Virtuix Omni Provides Virtual Worlds in Which to Walk, Run, and Jump” »
Researchers in the U.K. have made what is described as a “breakthrough reclassification” of pancreatic cancer, which offers new opportunities to treat the often-fatal disease.
A study co-led by professor Andrew Biankin and colleagues at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Cancer Sciences has found four “key subtypes” of the cancer, with each possessing “their own distinct clinical characteristics and differential survival outcomes,” according to a statement released on Thursday.
The researchers’ paper was published in the journal Nature, and named the subtypes as:
Continue reading “Pancreatic cancer ‘breakthrough’ hailed” »
A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have invented what is being considered one the greatest medical breakthroughs in recent years. They have designed a microparticle that can be injected into a person’s bloodstream that can quickly oxygenate their blood. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or even cut off entirely.
This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VlGADx1s1zQ
It’s not just religious terrorism that is killing people. A religious anti-science culture—which most of us live amongst—also cuts short everyone’s lives. People simply don’t care much about longevity if they believe in an afterlife.
All around the world, religious terror is striking and threatening us. Whether in France, Istanbul, London, or the USA, the threat is now constant. We can fight it all we want. We can send out our troops; we can chip refugees; we can try to monitor terrorist’s every move. We can even improve trauma medicine to deal with extreme violence they bring us. But none of this solves the underlying issue: Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam are fundamentally violent philosophies with violent Gods. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others have all reiterated essentially the same thing.
Continue reading “Atheist Presidential Candidate: Religion is Literally Killing Us” »
Transhumanists will know that the science fiction author Zoltan Istvan has unilaterally leveraged the movement into a political party contesting the 2016 US presidential election. To be sure, many transhumanists have contested Istvan’s own legitimacy, but there is no denying that he has generated enormous publicity for many key transhumanist ideas. Interestingly, his lead idea is that the state should do everything possible to uphold people’s right to live forever. Of course, he means to live forever in a healthy state, fit of mind and body. Istvan cleverly couches this policy as simply an extension of what voters already expect from medical research and welfare provision. And while he may be correct, the policy is fraught with hazards – especially if, as many transhumanists believe, we are on the verge of revealing the secrets to biological immortality.
In June, Istvan and I debated this matter at Brain Bar Budapest. Let me say, for the record, that I think that we are sufficiently close to this prospect that it is not too early to discuss its political and economic implications.
Two months before my encounter with Istvan, I was on a panel at the Edinburgh Science Festival with the great theorist of radical life extension Aubrey de Grey, where he declared that people who live indefinitely will seem like renovated vintage cars. Whatever else, he is suggesting that they would be frozen in time. He may actually be right about this. But is such a state desirable, given that throughout history radical change has been facilitated generational change? Specifically, two simple facts make the young open to doing things differently: The young have no memory of past practices working to anyone else’s benefit, and they have not had the time to invest in those practices to reap their benefits. Whatever good is to be found in the past is hearsay, as far as the young are concerned, which they are being asked to trust as they enter a world that they know is bound to change.
Questions have been already raised about whether tomorrow’s Methuselahs will wish to procreate at all, given the time available to them to realize dreams that in the past would have been transferred to their offspring. After all, as human life expectancy has increased 50% over the past century, the birth rate has correspondingly dropped. One can only imagine what will happen once ageing can be arrested, if not outright reversed!
California’s space technology company Made In Space, currently preparing their second zero gravity 3D printer called the Additive Manufacturing Facility for the International Space Station, will be playing a key role in a NASA project that could completely revolutionize manufacturing in space. They will be partnering with Northrop Grumman and Oceaneering Space Systems on Archinaut, a 3D printer capable of working in the vacuum of space that will be equipped with a robotic arm. Archinaut is scheduled to be installed on an external space station pod and will be capable of in-orbit additive manufacturing, the fabrication and assembly of communications satellite reflectors or the repair on in-orbit structures and machinery.
