10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid, a fatty acid found in the soil based bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae, interacts with immune cells to inhibit pathways that drive inflammation and increases resilience to stress. Researchers say the findings could bring us one step closer to developing a microbe-based “stress vaccine”.
As promising as some treatments are in lab tests, unfortunately they don’t always meet hopes when translated to the real world. Now, scientists at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have investigated a class of cancer drugs that failed in human trials, and found out why. Better yet, they went on to identify another drug that could finally make the treatment work.
O.o!
In what the German automaker is calling a “world premiere,” Volkswagen’s futuristic Golf GTI Aurora concept has a high-end sound system in its trunk that can be operated with a hologram.
You can leave your 3D glasses and augmented reality gloves at home: the hologram floats freely in the air and can be operated without any external aids. Though to be fair, VW is being very vague about the details of the technology behind the interface.
Floating Images
Scientists are only scratching the surface of creating 3D holograms that can be viewed from any angle. Current state holographic displays also tend to be extremely expensive and unwieldy.
Tiny selenium particles could have a therapeutic effect on ischemic brain strokes by promoting the recovery of brain damage. Pharmacologists, including Alireza Mashaghi from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research discovered that selenium nanoparticles inhibit molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the loss of brain cells after a stroke. The results were published in Nature Scientific Reports in April.
Nanoparticles against strokes
An ischemic stroke happens when a supplying blood vessel to the brain is narrowed or obstructed. As a result, the brain gets too little blood. “This lack of blood can lead to brain tissue damage due to cellular toxicity, inflammation and cell death,” Mashaghi explains. “This will, in turn, lead to brain dysfunction and neurological complaints such as numbness, vision problems, dizziness and severed headache.” Ischemic stroke accounts for 87% of all strokes and is a significant cause of death. “So far, no neuroprotective agents have been shown to produce any measurable improvement in health in cerebral stroke cases. Our results now demonstrated that selenium nanoparticles inhibit molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the loss of brain cells after a stroke.”
It’s entirely possible that micro-machines could one day be delivering drugs inside the body, with many designs proposed in recent years. The latest comes from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), which gets around under its own power using a system similar to how submarines rise and sink.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Pécs, Hungary used cell secretions known as exosomes to regenerate the thymus, one of the most important organs in the body.
The thymus shrinks as we age
The thymus is arguably one of the most critical organs in the body, and it is where new T cells develop before being trained in the lymph nodes in order to become the soldiers of the adaptive immune system. However, as we get older, the thymus starts to shrink, its ability to create new T cells declines, and the immune cell-producing tissue increasingly turns into fat and wastes away; this process is known as thymic involution.
Everything is backwards now, like out there is the real world and this is the dream. (James Cameron’s Avatar, 2009)
Over recent years, considerable scholarly attention and mass media speculation has been paid to the emergence of the figure of the posthuman – a vision of augmented human that has undergone radical transformation as a result of new biotechnological and informatic technologies. This posthumanity lives simultaneously in the world of the virtual and the biological, cast concurrently as the future of a biomedically enhanced humanity and a figuration for overcoming the identity politics of the past. Some are arguing that we will eventually leave the human ‘as we know it’ behind, in a techno-modified, cognitively enhanced evolution, while in critical theory, the posthuman is being lauded as an ontology through which the boundary structures of the EuroWestern legacy of humanism can be dismantled.
Practice results in better learning. Consider learning a musical instrument, for example: the more one practices, the better one will be able to learn to play. The same holds true for cognition and visual perception: with practice, a person can learn to see better—and this is the case for both healthy adults and patients who experience vision loss because of a traumatic brain injury or stroke.
The problem with learning, however, is that it often takes a lot of training. Finding the time can be especially difficult for patients with brain injuries who may, for instance, need to re-train their brains to learn to process visual cues.