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A team of neurosurgeons from the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) recently stepped into CAVE2 — a next-generation, large-scale, 320-degree, immersive, 3-D virtual environment — to solve a vexing problem that presented itself in the arteries of the brain of a real patient.

The method they used could someday benefit hundreds of thousands of Americans who fall victim to brain aneurysms and strokes, the third leading cause of death in the United States.

“We were flabbergasted,” said Andreas Linninger, professor of bioengineering and lead researcher of a project that measures and models blood flow in the brains of patients with stroke.

For years, Linninger and neurosurgeons had painstakingly used laptop and desktop computers to evaluate patient-specific images, which had been interpreted by computer algorithms to represent the brain and its blood flow in 3-D. They pieced together arteries, veins and micro-vessels to create three-dimensional, full-brain models that physiologically mirrored the brains of individual patients, including a particular patient whose cerebrovascular system they were trying to accurately model.

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It looks like a smiley face tattoo, but a new easy-to-apply sensor can detect medical problems and help athletes fine-tune training routines. “We wanted a design that could conceal the electrodes,” says Vinci Hung, a PhD candidate in physical and environmental sciences at the University of Toronto, who helped create the new sensor. “We also wanted to showcase the variety of designs that can be accomplished with this fabrication technique.” The tattoo, which is an ion-selective electrode (ISE), is made using standard screen printing technique and commercially available transfer tattoo paper—the same kind of paper that usually carries tattoos of Spiderman or Disney princesses. n the case of the sensor, the “eyes” function as the working and reference electrodes, and the “ears” are contacts for a measurement device to connect to. Hung contributed to the work while in the lab of Joseph Wang, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The sensor she helped make can detect changes in the skin’s pH levels in response to metabolic stress from exertion.

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Humans have stripes and you just can’t see them

You’ve got a tiger inside! Or maybe a zebra. At the very least a well-behaved house cat. Apparently humans are hiding stripes in our skin, they are just invisible. 

They’re called Blaschko Lines:

Blaschko Lines follow the same pattern on all people. They run down the arms and legs. They curve around the sides, like tiger stripes. On the chest and upper back they rise in a swirl before dipping down to meet in a deep “v” along the spine and the middle of the chest. They also run along the face above and below the eyes and over the ears, looking a little like painted-on glasses. These lines don’t correspond with any other system in the body. They don’t follow the lines of nerves, arteries, veins, muscles, or correspond with the endocrine system.

They are probably a remnant of how our cell growth is organized back when we are an embryo, with different “stripes” of cells growing along carefully delineated patterns. The stripes can become visible in genetic “chimeras”, people who have mixes of two genetic backgrounds in their body. Here’s some Google image results if you’re so inclined.

That “chimera” mix may sound scary, but it is just a rare occurrence of fertilization. Ever know someone with different colored skin patches or different color eyes? They’re a chimera. 

Check out more at io9.

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly. Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors. This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders. Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities. But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people. (via Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders – NYTimes.com)

A new biological robot has been made from rat heart cells and synthetic materials, a new study says—and the machine could someday lead to others that will attack diseases inside the human body. (See “Animal-Robot Pictures: Marine Machines Made in Nature’s Image.”) The centimeter-long “biobot” was made by attaching heart muscle cells onto a flexible structure, or body, of hydrogel—the same material used to make contact lenses for human eyes. (via Crawling Bio-Robot Runs on Rat Heart Cells)

Robots Powered by Rat Heart Cells to Deliver Drugs, Environmental Decontaminants

txchnologist:

by Charles Q. Choi

A new biological robot or “bio-bot” made with cells from rat hearts can inch across surfaces like a caterpillar.

Future bio-bots could incorporate neurons to intelligently react to their surroundings.

“You can imagine a bio-bot that can look for toxins in water and then annihilate them,” says researcher Rashid Bashir, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign bioengineer. “They could sense where those toxins are, move toward them and release chemicals that neutralize them, helping in environmental cleanup.”

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“The ultimate ideal sought,” wrote Harvey Ernest Jordan in 1912, “is a perfect society constituted of perfect individuals.” Jordan, who would later be dean of medicine at the University of Virginia, was speaking to the importance of eugenics in medicine—­a subject that might seem tasteless and obsolete today. Yet nearly a century later, in 2008, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the biomedical research institute on Long Island’s north shore, published a book titled Davenport’s Dream, which shows that eugenic visions persist. Charles Davenport, ­a colleague and friend of Jordan’s, ­had directed Cold Spring Harbor for the first third of the 20th century, turning it from a sleepy, summertime marine-biology laboratory into a center for genetics research­—and the epicenter of American eugenics. (via The Eugenic Impulse – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education)

A treatment which corrects errors in a person’s genetic code has been approved for commercial use in Europe for the first time. The European Commission has given Glybera marketing authorisation, meaning it can be sold throughout the EU. It is a gene therapy for a rare disease which leaves people unable to properly digest fats. The manufacturers say it will be available next year. Gene therapy has a simple premise. If there is a problem with part of a patient’s genetic code then change the code. However, the field has been plagued with problems. Patients have developed leukaemia and in one trial in the US a teenager died. In Europe and the US, the therapies are used only in research labs. (via BBC News – Gene therapy: Glybera approved by European Commission)

A Viagra follow-up? Drug used to treat glaucoma actually grows human hair | Science Codex

If you’re balding and want your hair to grow back, then here is some good news. A new research report appearing online in The FASEB Journal (www.fasebj.org) shows how the FDA-approved glaucoma drug, bimatoprost, causes human hair to regrow. It’s been commercially available as a way to lengthen eyelashes, but these data are the first to show that it can actually grow human hair from the scalp. “We hope this study will lead to the development of a new therapy for balding which should improve the quality of life for many people with hair loss,” said Valerie Randall, a researcher involved in the work from the University of Bradford, Bradford, UK. “Further research should increase our understanding of how hair follicles work and thereby allow new therapeutic approaches for many hair growth disorders.” To make this discovery, Randall and colleagues conducted three sets of experiments. Two involved human cells and the other involved mice. The tests on human cells involved using hair follicles growing in organ culture as well as those take directly from the human scalp. In both of these experiments, the scientists found that bimatoprost led to hair growth. The third set of experiments involved applying bimatoprost to the skin of bald spots on mice. As was the case with human cells, the drug caused hair to regrow. “This discovery could be the long-awaited follow up to Viagra that middle-aged men have been waiting for,” said Gerald Weissmann, MD, editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal. “Given that the drug is already approved for human use and its safety profile is generally understood, this looks like a promising discovery that has been right in front of our eyes the whole time. On to the front of our scalp!” Source: Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

A Viagra follow-up? Drug used to treat glaucoma actually grows human hair | Science Codex

A new study led by MIT neuroscientists has found that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy. Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient. The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began. The findings, published this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, may help doctors choose more effective treatments for social anxiety disorder, which is estimated to affect around 15 million people in the United States. “Our vision is that some of these measures might direct individuals to treatments that are more likely to work for them,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and senior author of the paper. Lead authors of the paper are MIT postdoc Oliver Doehrmann and Satrajit Ghosh, a research scientist in the McGovern Institute. (via Brain scans could help doctors choose treatments for people with social anxiety disorder)

A laser device for less painful injections has been developed by South Korean scientists. The system could replace traditional needles, with a jab as painless as being hit with a puff of air. The laser is already used in aesthetic skin treatments. The aim now is to make low-cost injectors for clinical use. A team from Seoul National University in South Korea describe the process in the Optical Society’s journal Optics Letters. The researchers write that the laser, called erbium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet, or Er:YAG, propels a stream of medicine with the right force to almost painlessly enter the skin. The jet is slightly larger than the width of a human hair and can reach the speed of 30m (100ft) per second. (via BBC News – Laser injection less painful than needles)

Researchers pioneer world’s first HIV/AIDS nanomedicines | KurzweilAI

Scientists at the University of Liverpool are leading a £1.65 million project to produce and test the first nanomedicines for treating HIV/AIDS. The research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), aims to produce cheaper, more effective medicines that have fewer side effects and are easier to give to newborns and children. The new therapy options were generated by modifying existing HIV treatments, called antiretrovirals (ARVs). The University has recently produced ARV drug particles at the nanoscale which potentially reduce the toxicity and variability in the response that different patients have to therapies. Drug nanoparticles have been shown to allow smaller doses in other disease areas, meaning reduced drug side-effects and reduced risk of drug resistance. Nanoscale objects are less than one micron in size — a human hair is approximately 80 microns in diameter.

Researchers pioneer world’s first HIV/AIDS nanomedicines | KurzweilAI

A “polypill” combining a statin with blood pressure drugs could prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes every year, according to researchers. A UK study of 84 over-50s, published in the journal PLoS One, showed the pill could cut blood pressure and levels of “bad” cholesterol. They called for the pill to be made available “as a matter of urgency”. The British Heart Foundation called for more research and said pills were not a substitute for a living a healthy life. This study at Queen Mary, University of London investigated a polypill containing a statin and three blood pressure drugs, all of which are already widely used. Patients were given either a polypill or a dummy pill once a day for three months. Their treatments were then swapped so that over a six-month period they would have spent half the time taking the drug and half the time taking the sugar pill. (via BBC News – Polypill ‘could save thousands’ of lives)

A new method of generating terahertz signals on an inexpensive silicon chip could have applications in medical imaging and wireless data transfer.

Terahertz radiation, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light, penetrates cloth and leather and just a few millimeters into the skin, but without the potentially damaging effects of X-rays.

Scanning can identify skin cancers too small to see with the naked eye. Many of the complex organic chemicals used in explosives absorb terahertz radiation at particular frequencies, creating a “signature” that detectors can read. And because higher frequencies can carry more bandwidth, terahertz signals could make a sort of super-Bluetooth that could transfer an entire high-definition movie wirelessly in a few seconds.

Overweight? There’s a vaccine for that | Science Codex

New vaccines promote weight loss. A new study, published in BioMed Central’s open access journal, Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology, assesses the effectiveness of two somatostatin vaccinations, JH17 and JH18, in reducing weight gain and increasing weight loss in mice. Obesity and obesity-related disease is a growing health issue worldwide. Somatostatin, a peptide hormone, inhibits the action of growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), both of which increase metabolism and result in weight loss. Vaccination with modified somatostatin causes the body to generate antibodies to somatostatin, effectively removing this inhibition without directly interfering with the growth hormones and subsequently increasing energy expenditure and weight loss. Keith Haffer from Braasch Biotech LLC, tested the vaccinations in two groups of ten diet-induced obese male mice compared with a control group of ten mice which received saline injections. Mice in all groups had been fed a high fat diet for eight weeks prior to the study and continued to eat the same food for the duration of the six-week study. The vaccinations were administered twice – at the start of the study followed by a booster vaccination on day 22. Four days after the first injection of modified somatostatin, the vaccinated mice had a 10% drop in body weight (not seen in the control mice). At the end of the study, results showed that both vaccines induced antibodies to somatostatin and significantly reduced body weight, sustaining a 10% lower body weight, without affecting normal levels of the growth hormone IGF-1, or insulin levels. “This study demonstrates the possibility of treating obesity with vaccination”, Keith explained. He continued, “Although further studies are necessary to discover the long term implications of these vaccines, treatment of human obesity with vaccination would provide physicians with a drug- and surgical- free option against the weight epidemic.”

Overweight? There’s a vaccine for that | Science Codex