Lifeboat Foundation

“I can feel touching my daughter’s hand or touching my wife’s hand, or picking up a hollow eggshell without crushing it,” Anderson says of his work with Psyonic, a startup operating out of the University of Illinois’ Research Park, in Urbana-Champaign. Psyonic expects to provide commercial prostheses with pressure sensing next year, and ones with sensory feedback sometime after that.

Technology is on the threshold of turning the unthinkable into reality. Awkward, unfeeling prostheses are morphing into mind-controlled extensions of the human body that give their wearers a sense of touch and a greater range of motion.

Along with sensory feedback, Psyonic’s rubber and silicone prosthesis uses machine learning to give its wearers intuitive control. The Modular Prosthetic Limb from Johns Hopkins University promises to deliver “humanlike” strength, thought-controlled dexterity and sensation. It’s currently in the research phase. And Icelandic company Ossur is conducting preclinical trials on mind-controlled leg and foot prostheses. These and other advances could make it dramatically easier for amputees to perform the sorts of tasks most people take for granted.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine, individuals with brown fat had lower prevalences of cardiometabolic diseases, and the presence of brown fat was independently correlated with lower odds of type 2 diabetes, dyslipidemia, coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, congestive heart failure and hypertension.

By Victor Omondi

Trip Planning

With their AI approximation for psychedelic trips in place, the team says they can start to probe for similarities with how the human brain processes drugs, citing the structural similarity between neural nets and the human visual cortices.

“The process of generating natural images with deep neural networks can be perturbed in visually similar ways and may offer mechanistic insights into its biological counterpart — in addition to offering a tool to illustrate verbal reports of psychedelic experiences,” Schartner told PsyPost.

Lightweight VTOL Air Ambulances To Be Optimized For Emergency Response

Urban Aeronautics Ltd., a leading Israeli aerospace company, today announced it has reached an agreement to provide four CityHawk VTOL aircraft to Hatzolah Air for emergency medical service (EMS) applications.

In addition, Hatzolah Air will become Urban Aeronautics’ official sales representative and distribution channel to other EMS and rescue organizations worldwide. The companies previously signed an MOU to develop, produce, and market the CityHawk aircraft for EMS applications.

One mouse is hunched over, graying, and barely moves at 7 months old. Others, at 11 months, have sleek black coats and run around. The videos and other results from a new study have inspired hope for treating children born with progeria, a rare, fatal, genetic disease that causes symptoms much like early aging. In mice with a progeria-causing mutation, a cousin of the celebrated genome editor known as CRISPR corrected the DNA mistake, preventing the heart damage typical of the disease, a research team reports today in. Treated mice lived about 500 days, more than twice as long as untreated animals.

“The outcome is incredible,” says gene-therapy researcher Guangping Gao of the University of Massachusetts, who was not involved with the study.

Continue reading “‘Incredible’ gene-editing result in mice inspires plans to treat premature-aging syndrome in children” »

Summary: Heating up cancer cells as they are being targeted with chemotherapy appears to be a highly effective way of killing them off.

Source: UCL

The study, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B, found that “loading” a chemotherapy drug on to tiny magnetic particles that can heat up the cancer cells at the same time as delivering the drug to them was up to 34% more effective at destroying the cancer cells than the chemotherapy drug without added heat.

Has some interesting parts, might interest some.

(not sure how novel)

As human beings age, the functioning of organs gradually deteriorates. While countless past studies have investigated the effects of aging on the human body, brain and on cognition, the neural mechanisms and environmental factors that can accelerate or slow down these effects are not yet fully understood.

Continue reading “Study explores the effects of immune responses on the aging brain” »

Brown fat is that magical tissue that you would want more of. Unlike white fat, which stores calories, brown fat burns energy and scientists hope it may hold the key to new obesity treatments. But it has long been unclear whether people with ample brown fat truly enjoy better health. For one thing, it has been hard to even identify such individuals since brown fat is hidden deep inside the body.

Now, a new study in Nature Medicine offers strong evidence: among over 52000 participants, those who had detectable brown fat were less likely than their peers to suffer cardiac and metabolic conditions ranging from type 2 diabetes to coronary artery disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.

The study, by far the largest of its kind in humans, confirms and expands the health benefits of brown fat suggested by previous studies. “For the first time, it reveals a link to lower risk of certain conditions,” says Paul Cohen, the Albert Resnick, M.D., Assistant Professor and senior attending physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital. “These findings make us more confident about the potential of targeting brown fat for therapeutic benefit.”