Posts Under Tech News Category
[TECH NEWS] The use of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging may help identify findings in brain tissue associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to two articles published Online First July 11 by Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. As scientists seek to understand more about AD and other forms of dementia, they are exploring the use of PET,… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Peter Carr, a bioengineer at MIT Media Lab who is part of the group developing the technology, describes it as “highly directed evolution”. It is a strange combination of clumsiness and beauty. Sitting on a cheap-looking worktop is a motley ensemble of flasks, trays and tubes squeezed onto a home-made frame. Arrays of empty pipette tips wait expectantly…. Read more »
[TECH NEWS] New neurons take more than six months to mature in adult monkeys and that time is likely even longer in humans, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the University of Illinois, and Pennsylvania State University. Their findings, reported this week in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] A paper in Science reports a design method that substantially advances the macromolecular technology base for building atomically precise nanosystems. As many readers know, biology shows an effective way to build large, intricate, atomically precise systems: Use covalent chemistry to build chains of small building blocks, and design these chains to fold into nanoscale building blocks that undergo… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Human skin cells can be converted directly into functional neurons in a period of four to five weeks with the addition of just four proteins, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding is significant because it bypasses the need to first create induced pluripotent stem cells, and may make it… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Pity the lowly astrocyte, the most common cell in the human nervous system. Long considered to be little more than putty in the brain and spinal cord, the star-shaped astrocyte has found new respect among neuroscientists who have begun to recognize its many functions in the brain, not to mention its role in a range of disorders of… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] An Australian woman’s life has been saved using a radical synthetic blood substitute made from cow plasma. In a world first, doctors at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne brought 33-year-old Tamara Coakley back from the brink of death after a car crash left her with severe blood loss and close to heart failure. Her spinal cord was almost… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Brain scans of healthy people showed signs that the brain was shrinking in Alzheimer’s-affected areas nearly a decade before the disease was diagnosed, U.S. researchers said April 13. The finding, published in the journal Neurology, may offer a new way to detect the disease early, an advance that could help in the development of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s,… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Mapping the fat distribution of the healthy human brain is a key step in understanding neurological diseases, in general, and the neurodegeneration that accompanies Alzheimer’s disease in particular. Antonio Veloso and colleagues, from the University of the Basque Country in Leioa, Spain, find a new technique to reveal the fat distribution of three different areas of the healthy… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] By knocking down the expression of a protein in rat brains known to stimulate eating, Johns Hopkins researchers say they not only reduced the animals’ calorie intake and weight, but also transformed their fat into a type that burns off more energy. The finding could lead to better obesity treatments for humans, the scientists report. “If we could… Read more »
