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Category: health – Page 117

Inhibiting a protein on the surface of immune cells could offer new strategies for treating severe asthma, Cleveland Clinic researchers found.

Researchers discovered a new way a protein called MCEMP1 contributes to severe inflammation in the airway and lungs. The discovery, published in Nature Communications, provides critical information for developing therapeutic interventions to treat long-term lung conditions, including asthma, on a biological level.

The study was conducted in a lab led by Jae Jung, PhD, chair of the Cancer Biology Department, director of the Infection Biology program, and director of the Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Global Center for Pathogen & Human Health Research.

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I’m excited to share my new opinion article for Newsweek. It advocates for transforming America from a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex! Give it a read!

America spends 45 percent of its discretionary federal spending on defense and wars, while around us, the world burns in ways that have nothing to do with fighting or the military. Global warming has escalated into an enormous crisis. A fifth of everyone we know will die from heart disease. And an opioid crisis is reducing the average lifespans of Americans for the first time in decades. There’s plenty of tragedy, fear, and hardship all around us, but it has nothing to do with the need to make more bombs. It does, however, have to do with science.

It seems obvious America should do something different than spend so much of its tax dollars on defense. We should consider halving that money, and directing it to science, transforming America from a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex. Despite science and technological progress being broadly responsible for raising the standard of living around the world over the last 50 years, America spends only 3 percent of its GDP ($205 billion) on science and medical research across the federal government. Notably, this is dramatically less than the $877 billion the U.S. will spend on defense this year.

The famous designation of the term military-industrial complex comes from former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address, where he warned America and its economy could descend into being a conflict-driven nation. Over 60 years after his speech, we have become just that. A Brown University study found that since 2001, the U.S. has spent $5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia. For contrast, the 2023 budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a paltry $49 billion.

America and its military-industrial complex—including the Pentagon, CIA, foreign military services, Homeland Security, nuclear program, and many other U.S. Defense tentacles—promises to spread democracy and keep the world safe. However, a far more common enemy than a national security incident is getting cancer from the sun, being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and dying in a car accident. Given enough money and time for research and experimentation, science stands a good chance at fixing nearly anything, including all of the issues above.

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A new study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has examined how T cells of the immune system are affected by weightlessness. The results, which are published in the journal Science Advances, could explain why astronauts’ T cells become less active and less effective at fighting infection.

The next steps in the exploration of space are human missions to the moon and to Mars. Space is an extremely hostile environment that poses threats to human health. One such threat is changes to the that occur in astronauts while in space and that persist after their return to Earth. This immune deficiency can leave them more vulnerable to infection and lead to the reactivation of latent viruses in the body.

“If astronauts are to be able to undergo safe space missions, we need to understand how their immune systems are affected and try to find ways to counter harmful changes to it,” says study leader Lisa Westerberg, principal researcher at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet. “We’ve now been able to investigate what happens to T cells, which are a key component of the immune system, when exposed to weightless conditions.”

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This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

Many users who want more from their smartphones are glad to use a plethora of advanced features, mainly for health and entertainment. Turns out that these features create a security risk when making or receiving calls.

Researchers from Texas A&M University and four other institutions created malware called EarSpy, which uses machine learning algorithms to filter caller information from ear speaker vibration data recorded by an Android smartphone’s own motion sensors, without overcoming any safeguards or needing user permissions.

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Waterborne illness is one of the leading causes of infectious disease outbreaks in refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) settlements, but a team led by York University has developed a new technique to keep drinking water safe using machine learning, and it could be a game changer. The research is published in the journal PLOS Water.

As drinking water is not piped into homes in most settlements, residents instead collect it from public tap stands using storage containers.

“When water is stored in a container in a dwelling it is at high risk of being exposed to contaminants, so it’s imperative there is enough free residual chlorine to kill any pathogens,” says Lassonde School of Engineering Ph.D. student Michael De Santi, who is part of York’s Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, and who led the research.

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For prospective parents who are carriers of many inherited diseases, using in vitro fertilization along with genetic testing would significantly lower health care expenditures, according to researchers at Stanford Medicine.

Preimplantation genetic diagnostic testing during IVF, or PGD-IVF, is being used to screen for single-gene defect conditions such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and Tay-Sachs disease, along with nearly 400 others.

The problem is that the high cost of IVF — and the lack of coverage by all but one state Medicaid program, that of New York — makes it unavailable to millions of people at risk. The majority of private employer health benefit plans also do not cover IVF.

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Research has brought clarity to the longstanding question of how starch granules form in the seeds of Triticeae crops—wheat, barley, and rye—unlocking diverse potential benefits for numerous industries and for human health.

Starch in wheat, maize, rice and potatoes is a vital energy-giving part of our diet and a key ingredient in many industrial applications from brewing and baking to the production of paper, glue, textiles, and construction materials.

Starch granules of different crops vary greatly in size and shape. Wheat starch (and those of other Triticeae) uniquely have two distinct types of granules: large A-type granules and smaller B-type granules.

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Human eyes are the only natural window we have into a person’s central nervous system.

By looking through them, scientists have found very early signs of Parkinson’s disease, up to seven years before symptoms emerge.

The findings are based on three-dimensional eye scans, which are commonly used by optometrists to examine the health of someone’s retina – the layer of nerve cells at the back of the eye.

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