Posts Under Tech News Category

[TECH NEWS] The tantalizing prospect of treating a range of brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, all with the same drug, has been raised by UK researchers. In a study, published in Nature, they prevented brain cells dying in mice with prion disease. It is hoped the same method for preventing brain cell death could apply in other diseases. The… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Real-time, 3D microscopic tissue imaging could be a revolution for medical fields such as cancer diagnosis, minimally invasive surgery and ophthalmology. University of Illinois researchers have developed a technique to computationally correct for aberrations in optical tomography, bringing the future of medical imaging into focus. The computational technique could provide faster, less expensive and higher resolution tissue imaging to… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Daily physical exercise may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, even in people over the age of 80, according to a study published in the April 18, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “The study showed that not only exercise but also activities such as cooking, washing the dishes and cleaning… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] A blood test that can predict whether a person is at high risk of suffering from a heart attack has been developed by researchers at Scripps Translational Science Institute, and published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The test can provide the doctor and patient with this vital information up to two weeks before an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack)… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is now the sixth leading cause of death among Americans, affecting nearly 1 in 8 people over the age of 65. There is currently no treatment that alters the course of this disease. However, an increasing amount of evidence suggests that changes in the way the body handles iron and other metals like copper and… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Targeted therapeutic nanoparticles that accumulate in tumors while bypassing healthy cells have shown promising results in an ongoing clinical trial, according to a new paper. The nanoparticles feature a homing molecule that allows them to specifically attack cancer cells, and are the first such targeted particles to enter human clinical studies. Originally developed by researchers at MIT and… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Instead of nerve fibers travelling willy-nilly through the brain like spaghetti, as some imaging has suggested, stunning new visuals reveal two-dimensional sheets of parallel fibers crisscrossing other sheets at right angles in a gridlike structure that folds and contorts with the convolutions of the brain. This same pattern appeared in the brains of humans, rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] The Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) research team at Virginia Tech has discovered important new information on the efficacy of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in treating Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). CLA is a naturally occurring acid found in meat and dairy products known for its anti-cancer and immune modulatory properties. In… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Researchers at the UCLA stem cell center and the departments of chemistry and biochemistry and pathology and laboratory medicine have identified, for the first time, a generic way to correct mutations in human mitochondrial DNA by targeting corrective RNAs, a finding with implications for treating a host of mitochondrial diseases. Mutations in the human mitochondrial genome are implicated… Read more »

[TECH NEWS] Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale. In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis… Read more »