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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,330

Supplemental Vitamin D and Incident Fractures in Midlife and Older Adults

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 City declares monkeypox a public health emergency

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.”

How a Neurotransmitter May Be the Key in Controlling Alzheimer’s Toxicity

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.

The importance of finding a cure is widely understood with increasingly aging population and the life expectancy being ever-extended. However, even the cause of the grim disease is yet to be given a clear definition.

Researchers find a better way to measure consciousness

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 activity that represents 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 or other clinical situations—there can be high-frequency activity as well.”

Rising star: Ann Kennedy bridges gap between biology, computational theory

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.”

Engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body

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, 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.

In a paper appearing today in Science, the engineers present the design for a new ultrasound —a stamp-sized device that sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of for 48 hours.

How to help assembly-line robots shift gears and pick up almost anything

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.

Theoretically, a robot could pick up almost anything if its grippers could be swapped out for each task. To keep costs down, these grippers could be passive, meaning grippers pick up objects without changing shape, similar to how the tongs on a forklift work.

Just add water to activate a disposable paper battery

A water-activated disposable paper battery is presented in a proof-of-principle study in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that it could be used to power a wide range of low-power, single-use disposable electronics—such as smart labels for tracking objects, environmental sensors and medical diagnostic devices—and minimize their environmental impact.

The , devised by Gustav Nyström and colleagues, is made of at least one cell measuring one centimeter squared and consisting of three inks printed onto a rectangular strip of paper. Sodium chloride salt is dispersed throughout the strip of paper and one of its shorter ends has been dipped in wax. An ink containing graphite flakes, which acts as the positive end of the battery (cathode), is printed onto one of the flat sides of the paper while an ink containing zinc powder, which acts as the negative end of the battery (anode), is printed onto the reverse side of the paper. Additionally, an ink containing graphite flakes and carbon black is printed on both sides of the paper, on top of the other two inks. This ink connects the positive and negative ends of the battery to two wires, which are located at the wax-dipped end of the paper.

When a small amount of water is added, the salts within the paper dissolve and charged ions are released. These ions activate the battery by dispersing through the paper, resulting in zinc in the ink at the negative end of the battery releasing electrons. Attaching the wires to an electrical device closes the circuit so that electrons can be transferred from the negative end—via the graphite and carbon black-containing ink, wires and device—to the positive end (the graphite-containing ink) where they are transferred to oxygen in the surrounding air. These reactions generate an that can be used to power the device.

New bioremediation material can clean ‘forever chemicals’

A novel bioremediation technology for cleaning up per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, chemical pollutants that threaten human health and ecosystem sustainability, has been developed by Texas A&M AgriLife researchers. The material has potential for commercial application for disposing of PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.”

Published July 28 in Nature Communications, the was a collaboration of Susie Dai, Ph.D., associate professor in the Texas A&M Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, and Joshua Yuan, Ph.D., chair and professor in Washington University in St. Louis Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, formerly with the Texas A&M Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology.

Removing PFAS contamination is a challenge

PFAS are used in many applications such as food wrappers and packaging, dental floss, fire-fighting foam, nonstick cookware, textiles and electronics. These days, PFAS are widely distributed in the environment from manufacturing or from products containing the chemicals, said Dai.

Dr. Arye Elfenbein, MD, PhD — Co-Founder, Wildtype — Building A Better Food System

Dr. Arye Elfenbein, MD, PhD, is the Co-Founder of Wildtype (https://www.wildtypefoods.com/), a biotechnology company which produces cultured seafood (with a focus on cultivated Pacific salmon) from fish cells, sustainably and cost effectively, with the nutritional benefits, but without common contaminants such as mercury, microplastics, antibiotics, or pesticides, and without relying on commercial fishing or fish farming.

Born in Israel and raised in Australia, Dr. Elfenbein combines his deep passion for medicine and unique childhood connection to the ocean to fuel Wildtype’s health and environmental mission.

After studying at Dartmouth and Kyoto University, attaining a PhD and MD, Dr. Elfenbein began his residency at Yale where he first trained in Internal Medicine before completing training in Cardiology. After residency, he moved to San Francisco to work with Professor Dr. Deepak Srivastava at the revered Gladstone Institutes / UCSF, also known for being the scientific homes of Nobel laureates Dr. Shinya Yamanaka (iPs cells) and Dr. Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR).

During his time at the Gladstone Institutes, Dr. Elfenbein’s research focused on cardiac regeneration following heart attacks. This research inspired him to apply the principles of stem cell biology beyond medicine, and to address the growing problems in our food system.

When away from Wildtype, Dr. Elfenbein continues to work as a cardiologist with a focus on critical care, lending his expertise and passion for patient care to the ICU.