More than one-third of UK health experts are not aware of Charles Bonnet syndrome — CBS — a condition which can cause vivid, and sometimes frightening, hallucinations.
A poll of 1,100 health experts — including GPs, doctors and optometrists — found 37 per cent were not aware of CBS.
The condition is not caused by mental health problems or dementia. It is purely due to a loss of sight — 60 per cent or more — which reduces or stops the regular messages from the eye to the brain.
In this video, Dr. Lee Hood traces the beginnings of systems biology and the founding of the Institute for Systems Biology to its role in the creation of systems (P4) medicine and ISB’s recent affiliation with Providence.
Dr. Nadine Lamberski, D.V.M., Dipl. ACZM, Dipl. ECZM (ZHM), is Chief Conservation and Wildlife Health Officer, at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/about-us/key-leaders/nadine-lamberski).
Dr. Lamberski leads a unified team of conservation scientists, researchers, wildlife nutritionists, and wildlife veterinarians, cultivating a strategic approach to conservation efforts. She is aligning San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance with other global conservation organizations and developing strategies that safeguard biodiversity so all life can thrive.
Dr. Lamberski joined the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in 2001 as senior veterinarian, following seven years as the senior veterinarian at Riverbanks Zoological Park and Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina. She completed an internship at the University of Tennessee and Zoo Knoxville, followed by a zoological medicine residency at the University of California, Davis.
Dr. Lamberski has focused her career on the health and welfare of zoological species, as well as on the conservation impacts of disease on small or fragmented wildlife populations. She has participated in several field projects, most notably studying black-footed cats in southern.
Africa, thick-billed parrots in northern Mexico, desert tortoises in the Southwestern United States, and working with partners at the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya. She is inspired by the next generation of wildlife veterinarians and conservationists and has a special.
interest in organizational leadership.
Dr. Lamberski is a Diplomate of the American College of Zoological Medicine (ACZM) and European College of Zoological Medicine (ECZM) in zoo health management (ZHM). She received her undergraduate degree in zoology and DVM from the University of Georgia.
Dr. Lamberski is a member and past president of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians and a member of the American Veterinary Medical Association, American College of Zoological.
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 17, 2021— To observe how a tiny ball of identical cells on its way to becoming a mammalian embryo first attaches to an awaiting uterine wall and then develops into the nervous system, heart, stomach, and limbs: This has been a highly sought-after grail in the field of embryonic development for nearly 100 years. Now, Prof. Jacob Hanna of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his group have accomplished this feat. The method they created for growing mouse embryos outside the womb during the initial stages after embryo implantation will give researchers an unprecedented tool for understanding the development program encoded in the genes, and may provide detailed insights into birth and developmental defects as well as those involved in embryo implantation. The results were published in Nature.
Prof. Hanna, who is in the Institute’s Department of Molecular Genetics, explains that much of what is currently known about mammalian embryonic development comes through either observing the process in non-mammals, like frogs or fish that lay transparent eggs, or obtaining static images from dissected mouse embryos and adding them together. The idea of growing early-stage embryos outside the uterus has been around since before the 1930s, Prof. Hanna says, but those experiments had limited success and the embryos tended to be abnormal.
Prof. Hanna’s team decided to renew that effort in order to advance the research in his lab, which focuses on the way the development program is enacted in embryonic stem cells. Over seven years, through trial and error, fine-tuning and double-checking, his team came up with a two-step process in which they were able to grow normally developing mouse embryos outside the uterus for six days – around a third of their 20-day gestation period – by which time the embryos have a well-defined body plan and visible organs. “To us, that is the most mysterious and the most interesting part of embryonic development, and we can now observe it and experiment with it in amazing detail,” say Prof. Hanna.
A robot that can shift between solid and liquid states has been filmed escaping from a miniature jail cell with bars too close together to allow it to leave in solid form. The creators claim they were inspired by sea cucumbers’ capacity to alter their tissue stiffness – but the scene is just a little too similar to Robert Patrick liquifying his way through the mental hospital bars for us to believe them. We even see the famous reabsorption of the little bit left behind.
Hard-bodied robots are common, even if they have yet to reach the capacities of science fiction films. Their soft-bodied counterparts can get into tight spaces, but what they can do there is limited, and they are also difficult to control.
A team led by Dr Chengfeng Pan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has made a robot that can swap states to whichever is most needed, with a video that sums it up. The prison escape may trigger our fears, but robots like these could also provide lifesaving services others cannot.
Novak Djokovic, age 35, sometimes hangs out in a pressurized egg to enrich his blood with oxygen and gives pep talks to glasses of water, hoping to purify them with positive thinking before he drinks them. Tom Brady, 45, evangelizes supposedly age-defying supplements, hydration powders and pliability spheres. LeBron James, 38, is said to spend $1.5 million a year on his body to keep Father Time at bay. While most of their contemporaries have retired, all three of these elite athletes remain marvels of fitness. But in the field of modern health science, they’re amateurs compared to Bryan Johnson.
Middle-aged tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson and his team of 30 doctors say they have a plan to reboot his body.
We spoke with Dr Morgan Levine 2 years ago concerning the remarkable results that she and a team that included Dr David Sinclair had in restoring vision in mice. In that experiment, published in the journal Nature, older mice had tighter optic nerves crushed causing blindness. Then, using a combination of 3 of the 4 Yamanaka cellular programing factors, they were able to restore the mice’s vision by signally the underlying DNA, rebuilding what had been thought to be permanently damaged cells. This was a remarkable result, as it was restoring a damaged organ, essentially a part of the brain, to its original healthy state. When I spoke to Dr Levine about the next step in her research, she mentioned it may be a more complex organ, such as a mouse liver.
But they went further. In the January issue of Cell, Sinclair published results of their ability to age an entire mouse. That is, to signal the epigenome to cause the underlying mouse DNA to behave as if it were much older. They were also able to do the reverse: to take an older mouse and, by signaling the epigenome, bring its cells and organs to the state of a younger mouse. This is a truly remarkable achievement, and it seems to prove Sinclair’s theory that all of our cells have within them a pristine copy of their DNA, and that aging and the disease associated with aging are the result of miscues from the epigenome. If these miscues can be corrected then the cell can be restored, not to a blank stem cell but to its original condition.
You’ve seen the headlines. The FDA approved its use in tackling the underlying genetic mutation for sickle cell disease. Some researchers edited immune cells to fight untreatable blood cancers in children. Others took pig-to-human organ transplants from dream to reality in an attempt to alleviate the shortage of donor organs. Recent work aims to help millions of people with high cholesterol—and potentially bring CRISPR-based gene therapy to the masses—by lowering their chances of heart disease with a single injection.
But to Dr. Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her role in developing CRISPR, we’re just scratching the surface of its potential. Together with graduate student Joy Wang, Doudna laid out a roadmap for the technology’s next decade in an article in Science.
If the 2010s were focused on establishing the CRISPR toolbox and proving its effectiveness, this decade is when the technology reaches its full potential. From CRISPR-based therapies and large-scale screens for disease diagnostics to engineering high-yield crops and nutritious foods, the technology “and its potential impact are still in their early stages,” the authors wrote.
Researchers have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, a mechanically flexible silver mesh that is visibly transparent, allows high-quality infrared wireless optical communication and efficiently shields electromagnetic interference in the X band portion of the microwave radio region. Optical communication channels are important to the operation of many devices and are often used for remote sensing and detection.
Electronic devices are now found throughout our homes, on factory floors and in medical facilities. Electromagnetic interference shielding is often used to prevent electromagnetic radiation from these devices from interfering with each other and affecting device performance.
Electromagnetic shielding, which is also used in the military to keep equipment and vehicles hidden from the enemy, can also block the optical communication channels needed for remote sensing, detection or operation of the devices. A shield that can block interference but allow for optical communication channels could help to optimize device performance in a variety of civilian and military settings.
