Summary: A new study provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind OCD and suggests the disorder could be treated by a class of drugs that has been investigated in clinical trails.
Source: Duke.
Brain receptor acts as switch for OCD symptoms in mice.
Scientists invent particles that will provide oxygen to your body without breathing!!!
This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can’t breathe anymore. It’s one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.
The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children’s Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
Continue reading “Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing” »
Researchers in the U.K. have made what is described as a “breakthrough reclassification” of pancreatic cancer, which offers new opportunities to treat the often-fatal disease.
A study co-led by professor Andrew Biankin and colleagues at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Cancer Sciences has found four “key subtypes” of the cancer, with each possessing “their own distinct clinical characteristics and differential survival outcomes,” according to a statement released on Thursday.
The researchers’ paper was published in the journal Nature, and named the subtypes as:
Continue reading “Pancreatic cancer ‘breakthrough’ hailed” »
A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have invented what is being considered one the greatest medical breakthroughs in recent years. They have designed a microparticle that can be injected into a person’s bloodstream that can quickly oxygenate their blood. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or even cut off entirely.
This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VlGADx1s1zQ
It’s not just religious terrorism that is killing people. A religious anti-science culture—which most of us live amongst—also cuts short everyone’s lives. People simply don’t care much about longevity if they believe in an afterlife.
All around the world, religious terror is striking and threatening us. Whether in France, Istanbul, London, or the USA, the threat is now constant. We can fight it all we want. We can send out our troops; we can chip refugees; we can try to monitor terrorist’s every move. We can even improve trauma medicine to deal with extreme violence they bring us. But none of this solves the underlying issue: Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam are fundamentally violent philosophies with violent Gods. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others have all reiterated essentially the same thing.
Continue reading “Atheist Presidential Candidate: Religion is Literally Killing Us” »
Scientists have captured new images of a calcium-shuttling molecule that has been linked to aggressive cancers. The three-dimensional structure could help researchers develop novel therapies and diagnostic tools for diseases that are caused by a malfunction in calcium adsorption.
Alexander Sobolevsky’s lab at Columbia University Medical Center is studying a family of proteins called “Transient receptor potential (TRP)” channels. These proteins line surfaces inside the body, such as the intestine, and form pores that help calcium cross a dense barrier of lipid and protein called the membrane to reach the interior of the cell.
Matthew Davis’ Arcus is officially the most impressive thing we’ve ever seen come out of a 3D printer. Sure, cheap prosthetics and replacement body parts are important uses of the technology, but this spinning rubber band blaster is what finally makes us want to put a 3D printer on our desks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8PtwqRvVDU
Unlike most rubber band blasters that only fire a single shot every time you squeeze the trigger or require a drive mechanism to make them fully automatic, Davis’ Arcus uses the energy from the loaded elastics to spin the barrel and automatically fire shot after shot until it’s empty. Brilliant.
Continue reading “3D-Printed Gatling Gun Fires 48 Rubber Bands in Mere Seconds” »
There is a well-documented organ shortage throughout the world. For example, 3,000 kidney transplants were made last year in the United Kingdom, but that still left 5,000 people on the waiting list at the end of the period. A lucrative trade in organs has grown up, and transplant tourism has become relatively common. While politicians wring their hands about sensible solutions to the shortage, including the nudge of opt-out donation, scientists using genetic manipulations have been making significant progress in growing transplantable organs inside pigs.
Scientists in the United States are creating so-called ‘human-pig chimeras’ which will be capable of growing the much-needed organs. These chimeras are animals that combine human and pig characteristics. They are like mules that will provide organs that can be transplanted into humans. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare). Horses and donkeys are different species with different numbers of chromosomes, but they can breed together.
In this case, the scientists take a skin cell from a human and from this make stem cells capable of producing any cell or tissue in the body, known as ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’. They then inject these into a pig embryo to make a human-pig chimera. In order to create the desired organ, they use gene editing, or CRISPR, to knock out the embryo’s pig’s genes that produce, for example, the pancreas. The human stem cells for the pancreas then make an almost entirely human pancreas in the resulting human-pig chimera, with just the blood vessels remaining porcine. Using this controversial technology, a human skin cell, pre-treated and injected into a genetically edited pig embryo, could grow a new liver, heart, pancreas or lung as required.
Continue reading “Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a person?” »
A POSSIBLE cure for inherited eye diseases which cause blindness is within sight thanks to a breakthrough recorded by a Tasmanian-led research team.
Associate Professor Alex Hewitt, an ophthalmologist and a researcher with the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research and the School of Medicine, said his team had successfully edited adult eye tissue genes in the laboratory to replace unwanted genes that caused blindness.
Dr Hewitt said he was optimistic Tasmanian doctors could soon start wielding molecular gene shears inside the eyes of humans.
