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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,249

Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases

Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Yamanaka Factors and Partial Cellular Reprogramming

Prior to this, it was assumed that egg cells (oocytes) would contain a complex array of factors needed to reprogram a somatic cell into becoming an embryonic cell. After all, the feat of transforming an aged egg cell and reprogramming it to make a new animal must be controlled by many factors present in the egg cell, or so they thought. Takahashi and Yamanaka turned this idea upside down when they showed that just four of the Yamanaka factors were needed to achieve this transformation.

They used the Yamanaka factors to reprogram adult mouse fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) back to an embryonic state called pluripotency, a state where the cell behaves like an embryonic stem cell and can become any other cell type in the body.

This discovery paved the way for research into how these Yamanaka factors might be used for cellular rejuvenation and a potential way to combat age-related diseases.

The ‘dense’ potential of nanostructured superconductors

From superfast magnetic levitation trains and computer chips to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and particle accelerators, superconductors are electrifying various aspects of our life. Superconductivity is an interesting property that allows materials to transfer moving charges without any resistance, below a certain critical point. This implies that superconducting materials can transfer electrical energy in a highly efficient manner without loss in the form of heat, unlike many conventional conductors.

Almost two decades ago scientists discovered superconductivity in a —magnesium diboride, or MgB2. There has been a resurgence in the of popularity MgB2 due to its low cost, superior superconducting abilities, high critical current density (which means that compared to other materials, MgB2 remains a semiconductor even when larger amounts of electric current is passed through it), and trapped magnetic fields arising from strong pinning of the vortices—which are cylindrical current loops or tubes of magnetic flux that penetrate a superconductor.

The intermetallic MgB2 also allows adjustability of its properties. For instance, the critical current density values (Jc) of MgB2 can be improved by decreasing the grain size and increasing the number of grain boundaries. Such adjustability is not observed in conventional layered superconductors.

Watch Live Human Brain Cells in a Dish Learn To Play Pong

Live biological neurons show more about how a brain works than AI ever will.

Scientists have shown for the first time that 800,000 brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks. In this case, they played the simple tennis-like computer game, Pong. The results of the Melbourne-led study are published today (October 12) in the journal Neuron.

Now the researchers are going to investigate what happens when their DishBrain is affected by medicines and alcohol.

China’s advances with RNA gene editing

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pr5aRhEIE9A&feature=share

‎Researchers from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claimed in a recently published study to have developed a gene editing method that is supposed to be “more efficient and safer” than the technique used so far.

But there is a lot behind gene editing, so let’s look at what it is all about and its risks and applications.
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#ChinaRevealed #ChinaNews

AI equal to humans in text-message mental health trial

UW Medicine researchers have found that algorithms are as good as trained human evaluators at identifying red-flag language in text messages from people with serious mental illness. This opens a promising area of study that could help with psychiatry training and scarcity of care.

The findings were published in late September in the journal Psychiatric Services.

Text messages are increasingly part of mental health care and evaluation, but these remote psychiatric interventions can lack the emotional reference points that therapists use to navigate in-person conversations with patients.

Team uses digital cameras, machine learning to predict neurological disease

In an effort to streamline the process of diagnosing patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, researchers used digital cameras to capture changes in gait—a symptom of these diseases—and developed a machine-learning algorithm that can differentiate those with MS and PD from people without those neurological conditions.

Their findings are reported in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

The goal of the research was to make the process of diagnosing these diseases more accessible, said Manuel Hernandez, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of kinesiology and who led the work with graduate student Rachneet Kaur and industrial and enterprise systems engineering and mathematics professor Richard Sowers.