Published in Scientific Reports, this study is the first to provide evidence of new neuron formation—and the presence of stem cells—in the leopard gecko brain.
University of Guelph researchers have discovered the type of stem cell allowing geckos to create new brain cells, providing evidence that the lizards may also be able to regenerate parts of the brain after injury.
This finding could help in replacing human brain cells lost or damaged due to injury, aging or disease.
“The brain is a complex organ and there are so few good treatments for brain injury, so this is a very exciting area of research,” said Prof. Matthew Vickaryous in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC).
Billed as the Chinese answer to Dallas Buyers Club, the tear-jerking film Dying to Survive last week became Premier Li Keqiang’s new rallying cry for speeding up price cuts for cancer medications. It is an issue of such complexity that he has held two cabinet meetings about it in the past three months.
Li Keqiang has been trying to speed up price cuts for life-saving medication for months, and it’s a boon that the box-office hit has generated widespread awareness.
Watch on Rappler the longest total lunar eclipse of the century, and Mars will be right next to the eclipsing moon http://www.rappler.com/science-nature/earth-space/208321-how-to-watch-july-28-2018-blood-moon?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Inhouse_video&utm_campaign=science-nature
http://xt-pl.com received an honorable mention from I-Zone judges for its innovative product that prints extremely fine film structures using nanomaterials. XTPL’s interdisciplinary team is developing and commercializing an innovative technology that enables ultra-precise printing of electrodes up to several hundred times thinner than a human hair – conducive lines as thin as 100 nm. XTPL is facilitating the production of a new generation of transparent conductive films (TCFs) that are widely used in manufacturing. XTPL’s solution has a potentially disruptive technology in the production of displays, monitors, touchscreens, printed electronics, wearable electronics, smart packaging, automotive, medical devices, photovoltaic cells, biosensors, and anti-counterfeiting. The technology is also applicable to the open-defect repair industry (the repair of broken metallic connections in thin film electronic circuits) and offers cost-effective, non-toxic, flexible industry-adapted solutions.
XTPL’s technology might be the only one in the world offering cost-effective, non-toxic, flexible, industry adapted solution for the market of displays TFT/LCD/OLED, integrated circuits (IC), printed circuit boards (PCB), multichip modules (MCM); photolithographic masks & solar cells market.
XTPL delivers also solutions for research & prototyping including printing head, electronics, software algorithms which are the core of the system driving the electric field and the assembly process of nanoparticles implemented in XTPL’s Nanometric Lab Printer. It is a device that offers necessary functionalities to test, evaluate and use XTPL line-forming technology with nanometric precision and enables positioning of the printing head with micrometric resolution precisely.
Official video explaining XTPL’s technology: https://youtu.be/WMerzxzCXuw
Filmed at the I-Zone demo and prototype area at SID Display Week, the world’s largest and best exhibition for electronic information display technology.
Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe announced on Wednesday that GlaxoSmithKline purchased a $300 million stake in the company, allowing the pharmaceutical giant to use 23andMe’s trove of genetic data to develop new drugs — and raising new privacy concerns for consumers.
23andMe is partnering with big pharma company GlaxoSmithKline. Here’s what that means for consumer rights and genetic privacy.
While the rest of the world debates the ethics of designer babies, a team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMass) have shown that we might not need CRISPR to change the genes of future generations. Their paper, released this week in the journal Developmental Cell, shows that things like diet and stress might affect some crucial genetic components of sperm, and that these tiny changes have real effects on how babies develop.
The same way rockets bound for outer space contain “payloads” like satellites, or astronauts who battle giant balls of urine, sperm are also like little rockets containing their own cargo: “small RNAs.” This study found that not only do RNA sequences play a crucial role in how genes get expressed early on in human development, but they can also be radically changed by the lifestyles of fathers. Things like diet, and in particular, stress can change the makeup of this crucial RNA cargo and lead to observable changes in offspring, says researcher Colin Conine, Ph.D., at UMass Medical School’s Rando Lab.
“Labs all over the world have been able to link changes in dad’s lifestyle to changes in RNA in the sperm, and then that leads to phenotypes in the offspring,” Conine tells Inverse. “Our study was one of the first to really look at how changes small RNAs affect early development. We wanted to ask, what are the first steps that lead to these phenotypes down the road?”
Healthcare can be transformed with the innovation and insights of AI and machine learning. From robot-assisted surgery to virtual nursing assistants, diagnosing conditions facilitating workflow and analyzing images, AI and machines can help improve outcomes for patients and lower costs for providers.
But the great potential of artificial intelligence shall become fully clear when considering its possible applications to drug discovery. It seems an era ago since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003; since then, sequencing capabilities and softwares for data analysis rapidly established themselves as the new paradigm for drug discovery thanks to the increasing availability of IT technologies and the institutional and governmental support to big data analytics’ policies.
The exponential growth of the market
The annual growth rate of the market of artificial intelligence for healthcare applications has been recently estimated by Global Market Insights to be 40% CAGR (Compounded Average Growth Rate) per year up to 2024, starting from a value on $ 750 million in 2016.
A new way of administering drugs for wet age-related macular degeneration might be close.
Two studies by researchers at the University of Birmingham have shown that delivering drugs against the wet form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in the form of eyedrops might soon be possible in humans [1, 2].
What is age-related macular degeneration?
AMD is a pathology of the retina, which is a light-sensitive tissue located in the back of the eye and is similar to the film in a non-digital camera. Two-dimensional images are created on the retina and are subsequently transferred to the brain in the form of electrical neural impulses. Near the center of the retina is the macula, an oval-shaped region responsible for central, high-resolution, color vision. In AMD, the macula is damaged, impairing or preventing this kind of vision. AMD is progressive, but it cannot lead to total blindness, as it doesn’t affect peripheral vision. It comes in two forms, wet and dry, with the latter being overwhelmingly more common and, unfortunately, presently incurable. As the name suggests, the highest risk factor for AMD is age; the disease is usually observed only in patients over 50.
