Recent Comments

    Category Health/Medical

    Engineered Light to Improve Health, Food

    January 18, 2019, Categories  Environment/Geology, Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Taking the lid off led light: Sandia National Laboratories researcher Jeff Tsao and coauthors say that controlled lighting at LED wavelengths and intensities has nearly unlimited potential for social and scientific advances.
    Credit: Courtesy Sandia National Laboratories, photographer Randy Montoya

    Intentionally controlled light can help regulate human health and productivity by eliciting various hormonal responses. Tailored LED wavelengths and intensities also can efficiently stimulate plant growth, alter their shapes and increase their nutritional value, opening a new world of scientific and technological possibilities for indoor farming.

    “LED lighting is only in its infancy,” the authors write. “We now stand at the threshold of what might be called engineered light.”
    “That’s not to ig...

    Read More

    Novel Materials Convert Visible into Infrared Light

    January 18, 2019, Categories  Physics, Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Billions of molecular lightbulbs, powered by invisible infrared photons, generate visible light.
    Credit: Melissa Ann Ashley

    Discovery opens up new routes for photodynamic therapy and drug development. Columbia University scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard, have succeeded in developing a chemical process to convert visible light into infrared energy, allowing innocuous radiation to penetrate living tissue and other materials without the damage caused by high-intensity light exposure.

    “The findings are exciting because we were able to perform a series of complex chemical transformations that usually require high-energy, visible light using a noninvasive, infrared light source,” said Tomislav Rovis, professor of chemistry at Columbia and co-author of the study...

    Read More

    Researchers Rescue Photoreceptors, Prevent Blindness in animal models of Age-Related Macular Degeneration

    January 17, 2019, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    The researchers will take a patient’s own blood cells, and in a lab, convert them into iPS cells capable of becoming any type of cell in the body. The iPS cells are then programmed to become retinal pigment epithelial cells, the type of cell that dies early in the geographic atrophy form of AMD.
    Credit: National Eye Institute

    Findings set stage for first clinical trial of stem cell-based therapeutic approach for AMD. Using a novel patient-specific stem cell-based therapy, researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) prevented blindness in animal models of geographic atrophy, the advanced “dry” form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is a leading cause of vision loss among people age 65 and older. The protocols established by the animal study, published Jan...

    Read More

    How Fasting can Improve Overall Health

    January 16, 2019, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Figure thumbnail fx1

    Highlights
    •Transcriptional response to fasting is robustly rhythmic in liver and muscle
    •Lack of food fails to sustain “free-running” conditions of peripheral circadian clocks
    •Genes are temporally regulated by the clock and fasting-related transcription factors
    •Rhythmic response to fasting is reversible by refeeding

    Protects against aging-associated diseases. In a University of California, Irvine-led study, researchers found evidence that fasting affects circadian clocks in the liver and skeletal muscle, causing them to rewire their metabolism, which can ultimately lead to improved health and protection against aging-associated diseases. The study was published recently in Cell Reports.

    The circadian clock operates within the body and its organs as intrinsic time-keepin...

    Read More