Many people with rheumatoid arthritis, or RA, report having trouble thinking clearly, problems with memory, and difficulty concentrating.
These symptoms, known as brain fog, are widespread in people with chronic inflammatory conditions, including RA, Sjogren’s syndrome, and multiple sclerosis.
If you want to learn, then you have to break some things.
Summary: Brain cells snap DNA in more places and in more cell types than previously realized in order to express genes for learning and memory.
Source: Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
Continue reading “Memory Making Involves Extensive DNA Breaking” »
To date, there have been no metrics for accurately assessing individuals’ inflammatory status in a way that could predict these clinical problems and point to ways of addressing them or staving them off, Furman said. But now, he said, the study has produced a single-number quantitative measure that appears to do just that.
You’re as old as your immune system.
Investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have built an inflammatory-aging clock that’s more accurate than the number of candles on your birthday cake in predicting how strong your immune system is, how soon you’ll become frail or whether you have unseen cardiovascular problems that could become clinical headaches a few years down the road.
Continue reading “Immune System ‘Clock’ Developed That Accurately Predicts Illness and Mortality” »
The compounds can form PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancer and birth defects. The E.P.A. approvals came despite the agency’s own concerns about toxicity.
Two reports call for the development of global standards for gene editing, covering unfair and potentially dangerous applications of experimental techniques, including altering DNA to enhance athletic ability.
The formula for launching a machine learning company in health care looks something like this: Build a model, test it on historical patient data in a computer lab, and then start selling it to hospitals nationwide.
Suchi Saria, director of the machine learning and health care lab at Johns Hopkins University, is taking a different approach. Her company, Bayesian Health, is coming out of stealth mode on Monday by publishing a prospective study on how one of its lead products — an early warning system for sepsis — impacted the care of current patients in real hospitals.
Olympic stadiums can be costly and wasteful. Some have argued for a single, more sustainable, location that can be used year after year.
The summer Olympics have been a quadrennial tradition ever since the late 1800s—when modern sports and rivalries freshened up the ancient tradition. Since COVID-19 crashed the schedule for last years’ events, now the world is gearing up again for another round of competition in Tokyo.
Transporting athletes and fans from all over the world and to cities hosting the Olympic games comes with a gigantic carbon footprint, for example, the 2021 London Olympics had an estimated footprint of over 400 thousand tons of CO2 emissions. Constantly building brand-new stadiums every few years that often go unused after the games, with very few exceptions, is also extremely wasteful. The 2016 Rio Olympics whipped up a whopping 3.6 million tonnes of carbon when including all that went into infrastructure. Eerie listicles of decaying stadiums, including Rio’s, litter the internet with costly examples of the wasted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of labor and materials that go into just one site.
Continue reading “The argument for a permanent Olympic City” »
In 1971, scientists were building a case for viruses as a cause of cancer. Fifty years later, cancer-preventing vaccines are now a reality.
The innovative material that creates green energy through mechanical force.
A new nanotechnology development by an international research team led by Tel Aviv University researchers will make it possible to generate electric currents and voltage within the human body through the activation of various organs (mechanical force). The researchers explain that the development involves a new and very strong biological material, similar to collagen, which is non-toxic and causes no harm to the body’s tissues. The researchers believe that this new nanotechnology has many potential applications in medicine, including harvesting clean energy to operate devices implanted in the body (such as pacemakers) through the body’s natural movements, eliminating the need for batteries.
The study was led by Prof. Ehud Gazit of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, along with his lab team, Dr. Santu Bera and Dr. Wei Ji.
University of Maryland scientists discover that match matters: The right combination of parents in nematode worms can turn a gene off indefinitely.
Evidence suggests that what happens in one generation — diet, toxin exposure, trauma, fear — can have lasting effects on future generations. Scientists believe these effects result from epigenetic changes that occur in response to the environment and turn genes on or off without altering the genome or DNA sequence.
But how these changes are passed down through generations has not been understood, in part, because scientists have not had a simple way to study the phenomenon. A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland provides a potential tool for unraveling the mystery of how experiences can cause inheritable changes to an animal’s biology. By mating nematode worms, they produced permanent epigenetic changes that lasted for more than 300 generations. The research was published on July 9, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications.
