Category Health/Medical

This is a white button mushroom equipped with 3D- printed graphene nanoribbons (black), which collect electricity generated by densely packed 3D-printed cyanobacteria (green).
Credit: Sudeep Joshi, Stevens Institute of Technology

In their latest feat of engineering, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have taken an ordinary white button mushroom from a grocery store and made it bionic, supercharging it with 3D-printed clusters of cyanobacteria that generate electricity and swirls of graphene nanoribbons that can collect the current.

The work, reported in the Nov...

The left side of the figure illustrates the retina transplantation procedure. The right side of the figure represents examples of orientation tuning curves recorded from three rats: a normal rat, a rat with a transplant and a rat with a degenerated retina (blind). Displayed below the tuning curves are the responses to sinusoidal grating stimuli. The response patterns indicate that neurons in the brains of transplant recipients are very similar to those of the rats with normal vision.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, have discovered that neurons located in the vision centers of the brains of blind rats functioned normally following fetal retina cell transplants, indicating the successful restoration of vision...

Estimates of the Heritability of Human Longevity Are Substantially Inflated due to Assortative Mating. Genetics, 2018; 210 (3): 1109 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.118.301613

Study of huge Ancestry.com pedigree set suggests similar life spans between spouses may have inflated previous estimates of life span heritability. Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own...

Nightwatch bracelet on the arm of a young epilepsy patient.
Credit: LivAssured

A new high-tech bracelet, developed by scientists from the Netherlands detects 85% of all severe night-time epilepsy seizures. That is a much better score than any other technology currently available. The researchers involved think that this bracelet, called Nightwatch, can reduce the worldwide number of unexpected night-time fatalities in epilepsy patients. They published the results of a prospective trial in the scientific journal Neurology.

SUDEP, sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, is a major cause of mortality in epilepsy patients. People with an intellectual disability and severe therapy resistant epilepsy, may even have a 20% lifetime risk of dying from epilepsy...