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Category: biotech/medical

😳! Circa 2018

Some animals live fast and die young. That means they need to grow up fast, too. This week, researchers crowned a new record holder for quick growth: Susan Milius at Science News reports that the turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri, found in Mozambique, can reach maturity in just 14 days, the fastest of any known vertebrate animal.

That rapid maturation is an adaptation to the killifish’s habitat, according to the study published this week in the journal Current Biology. The fish spend most of their lives as tiny embryos that have been deposited in sediment in small depressions across the savannah. When rain fills the ephemeral pools, the embryos mature rapidly reaching sexual maturity and depositing their own embryos before the pool once again dries up. Not only do they make babies quickly, they bulk up fast, too—typically growing from about 5 millimeters to 54 millimeters in their lifespan.

Researchers have been aware of the turquoise killifish’s super-fast maturation for a while. In fact, the fish is used as a model animal in aging studies because of this trait. In the lab, where the fish live a relatively leisurely lifestyle, the average rate of maturation is 18 days.

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Two new methods make it possible to delete long sections of the genome, expanding the capabilities of the gene editor CRISPR. The techniques could lead to therapies that excise large insertions or duplications tied to autism, such as the DNA repeats that underlie fragile X syndrome.

To remove a segment of DNA, CRISPR systems typically use an enzyme called Cas9 to snip double-stranded DNA at two target sites. The cell’s own repair machinery can then join the cut ends, omitting the intervening sequence. But this process is error prone and can insert or delete unintended segments of DNA, called ‘indels,’ or rearrange large sections of the genome. Snipping double-stranded DNA can also cause cell death.

A different CRISPR-based system called ‘prime editing’ can make DNA repair more precise. In one version of the technique, a protein complex called a prime editor cuts only one strand of DNA at one of the two sites and the opposite strand at the other site. The prime editor adds a sequence to one of the cut strands to guide the repair.

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The most promising application in biomedicine is in computational chemistry, where researchers have long exploited a quantum approach. But the Fraunhofer Society hopes to spark interest among a wider community of life scientists, such as cancer researchers, whose research questions are not intrinsically quantum in nature.

“It’s uncharted territory,” says oncologist Niels Halama of the DKFZ, Germany’s national cancer center in Heidelberg. Working with a team of physicists and computer scientists, Halama is planning to develop and test algorithms that might help stratify cancer patients, and select small subgroups for specific therapies from heterogeneous data sets.

This is important for precision medicine, he says, but classic computing has insufficient power to find very small groups in the large and complex data sets that oncology, for example, generates. The time needed to complete such a task may stretch out over many weeks—too long to be of use in a clinical setting, and also too expensive. Moreover, the steady improvements in the performance of classic computers are slowing, thanks in large part to fundamental limits on chip miniaturization.

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Circa 2012 o.o

New DNA tests suggest the owner of a British fertility clinic may have fathered as many as 600 children, while keeping his donations a secret. And in an even stranger twist, one of his newly discovered offspring says the man’s belief in eugenics may have been behind the decision.

The Telegraph reports that Bertold Wiesner and his wife operated a fertility clinic in the 1940s and were responsible for helping more than 1,500 families conceive. Two of the children conceived through clinic donations, Barry Stevens and David Gollancz, took part in DNA testing that revealed both were conceived using Wiesner’s sperm.

“Using standard figures for the number of live births which result, including allowances for twins and miscarriages, I estimate that he is responsible for between 300 and 600 children,” Gollancz told the paper.

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For the last decade and more, Stem Cell research and regenerative medicine have been the rave of the healthcare industry, a delicate area that has seen steady advancements over the last few years.

The promise of regenerative medicine is simple but profound that one day medical experts will be able to diagnose a problem, remove some of our body cells called stem cells and use them to grow a cure for our ailment. Using our body cells will create a highly personalized therapy attuned to our genes and systems.

The terminologies often used in this field of medicine can get a bit fuzzy for the uninitiated, so in this article, I have relied heavily on the insights of Christian Drapeau, a neurophysiologist and stem cell expert.

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For people with depression, finding a suitable antidepressant medication can be difficult and involve a lot of trial and error before finding one that works for them. Now a new study led by scientists at UT Southwestern has come up with a new imaging technique which the researchers claim will allow them to predict a person’s response to different types of antidepressant medication without sometimes having to spend months trying to find one that works.

The research first looked at the common antidepressant drug sertraline, one of a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), comparing people taking the drug to those taking a placebo. Before they started the medication, participants had their brains scanned in an MRI machine, both while they were resting and performing a reward task. This was repeated again after they had been on the drug or placebo for 8 weeks as well as measuring how their depression had changed, if at all. People who had not responded to sertraline after this time were switched to another antidepressant called bupropion and underwent the MRI tests and evaluation of their depression symptoms again after 8 weeks.

With this data from over 300 people, the researchers used machine learning techniques to map which brain regions and circuits where associated with a response to each drug, allowing them to predict how other people might respond in the future.

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Eliminating old, dysfunctional cells in human fat also alleviates signs of diabetes, researchers from UConn Health report. The discovery could lead to new treatments for Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic diseases.

The cells in your body are constantly renewing themselves, with older cells aging and dying as new ones are being born. But sometimes that process goes awry. Occasionally damaged cells linger. Called senescent cells, they hang around, acting as a bad influence on other cells nearby. Their bad influence changes how the neighboring cells handle sugars or proteins and so causes metabolic problems.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common metabolic disease in the US. About 34 million people, or one out of every 10 inhabitants of the US, suffers from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most people with diabetes have insulin resistance, which is associated with obesity, lack of exercise and poor diet. But it also has a lot to do with senescent cells in people’s body fat, according to new findings by UConn Health School of Medicine’s Ming Xu and colleagues. And clearing away those senescent cells seems to stop diabetic behavior in obese mice, they report in the 22 November issue of Cell Metabolism. Ming Xu, assistant professor in the UConn Center on Aging and the department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at UConn Health, led the research, along with UConn Health researchers Lichao Wang and Binsheng Wang as major contributors. Alleviating the negative effects of fat on metabolism was a dramatic result, the researchers said.

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✅ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pro_robots.

You’re on the PRO Robots channel and in this episode we’re going to talk about a vacation in space. When will this cherished dream come true? How will such a trip take place, what will the preparation consist of, how much does a trip and service in space cost, what will be the food for the space tourists and what are the living conditions and dangers awaiting them — watch this video! Watch this episode to the end and write in the comments: would you dare to go on a space vacation?

0:00 In this video.
0:25 Our Everything.
1:19 Space Perspective.
1:52 SpaceX
3:17 Roscosmos and Space Adventures.
3:46 Orbital Assembly Corporation.
5:00 Astronaut Menu.
5:46 weightlessness and the human body.
6:37 Rest on the Moon.

#prorobots #robots #robot #future technologies #robotics.

More interesting and useful content:
✅ Elon Musk Innovation https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcyYMmVvkTuQ-8LO6CwGWbSCpWI2jJqCQ
✅Future Technologies Reviews https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcyYMmVvkTuTgL98RdT8-z-9a2CGeoBQF
✅ Technology news.

#prorobots #technology #roboticsnews.

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Can you imagine a brain and its workings being replicated on a computer? That is what the EBRAINS Cellular Level Simulation Platform aims to do. The Platform is available to researchers worldwide, so that they can compare their experimental results with model predictions and conduct investigations that are not possible experimentally.

Simulation also aims to replicate work on animal models, such as the mouse. In addition, the computing environment used for simulation offers the possibility of studying disease processes electronically.

However, the challenge is a complex one, as the human brain contains 86 billion brain cells (known as neurons) each with an average of 7,000 connections to other neurons (known as synapses). Current computer power is insufficient to model a entire human brain at this level of interconnectedness.

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