Many describe this as the experience of seeing their life ‘flash before their eyes.’
The recording was made when an 87-year-old patient underwent cardiac arrest while being treated for epilepsy.
Doctors had strapped a device on his head to monitor brain activity, but the man died during the process.
A complex molecular machine, the spliceosome, ensures that the genetic information from the genome, after being transcribed into mRNA precursors, is correctly assembled into mature mRNA. Splicing is a basic requirement for producing proteins that fulfill an organism’s vital functions. Faulty functioning of a spliceosome can lead to a variety of serious diseases.
Researchers at the Heidelberg University Biochemistry Center (BZH) have succeeded for the first time in depicting a faulty “blocked” spliceosome at high resolution and reconstructing how it is recognized and eliminated in the cell. The research was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
The genetic information of all living organisms is contained in DNA, with the majority of genes in higher organisms being structured in a mosaic-like manner. So the cells are able to “read” the instructions for building proteins stored in these genetic mosaic particles, they are first copied into precursors of mRNA, or messenger RNA. The spliceosome then converts them into mature, functional mRNA.
Xenon gas inhalation reduced neurodegeneration and boosted protection in preclinical models of Alzheimer’s disease. Most treatments being pursued today to protect against Alzheimer’s disease focus on amyloid plaques and tau tangles that accumulate in the brain, but new research from Mass General Brigham and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis points to a novel — and noble — approach: using Xenon gas. The study found that Xenon gas inhalation suppressed neuroinflammation, reduced brain atrophy, and increased protective neuronal states in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Results are published in Science Translational Medicine, and a phase 1 clinical trial of the treatment in healthy volunteers will begin in early 2025.
“It is a very novel discovery showing that simply inhaling an inert gas can have such a profound neuroprotective effect,” said senior and co-corresponding author Oleg Butovsky, PhD, of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. “One of the main limitations in the field of Alzheimer’s disease research and treatment is that it is extremely difficult to design medications that can pass the blood-brain barrier — but Xenon gas does. We look forward to seeing this novel approach tested in humans.”
“It is exciting that in both animal models that model different aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, amyloid pathology in one model and tau pathology in another model, that Xenon had protective effects in both situations,” said senior and co-corresponding author David M. Holtzman, MD, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Dense crowds form some of the most dangerous environments in modern society. Dangers arise from uncontrolled collective motions, leading to compression against walls, suffocation and fatalities. Our current understanding of crowd dynamics primarily relies on heuristic collision models, which effectively capture the behaviour observed in small groups of people. However, the emergent dynamics of dense crowds, composed of thousands of individuals, remains a formidable many-body problem lacking quantitative experimental characterization and explanations rooted in first principles. Here we analyse the dynamics of thousands of densely packed individuals at the San Fermín festival (Spain) and infer a physical theory of dense crowds in confinement. Our measurements reveal that dense crowds can self-organize into macroscopic chiral oscillators, coordinating the orbital motion of hundreds of individuals without external guidance. Guided by these measurements and symmetry principles, we construct a mechanical model of dense-crowd motion. Our model demonstrates that emergent odd frictional forces drive a non-reciprocal phase transition7 towards collective chiral oscillations, capturing all our experimental observations. To test the robustness of our findings, we show that similar chiral dynamics emerged at the onset of the 2010 Love Parade disaster and propose a protocol that could help anticipate these previously unpredictable dynamics.
UMD researchers have discovered key mechanisms in gene regulation that could improve the design of RNA-based medicines.
RNA-based medicines are among the most promising approaches to combating human disease, as evidenced by the recent successes of RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule similar to DNA that is essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. Both are nucleic acids, but unlike DNA, RNA is single-stranded. An RNA strand has a backbone made of alternating sugar (ribose) and phosphate groups. Attached to each sugar is one of four bases—adenine (A), uracil (U), cytosine ©, or guanine (G). Different types of RNA exist in the cell: messenger RNA (mRNA), ribosomal RNA (rRNA), and transfer RNA (tRNA).
Crowdsourcing treatments that work — yael elish — CEO & founder, stuffthatworks.
Yael Elish is CEO and Founder of StuffThatWorks (https://www.stuffthatworks.health/), a company that offers an online platform where people suffering from chronic diseases can share information to learn which treatments work best for their specific condition, based on the experience of their peers combined with a smart, AI-based crowdsourcing system.
A passionate entrepreneur with expertise in crowdsourcing and consumer-facing products, Yael was on the Waze founding team, where she drove the overall product strategy that led the company from User One to one of the world’s most notable crowdsourcing endeavours. She also co-founded eSnips and NetSnippet, and was part of the senior management team that took Commtouch to its successful NASDAQ IPO in 2000.
Prior to Commtouch, Yael led the sales and marketing efforts for various start-ups in Israel.
Yael holds a first degree in Foreign Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have identified in a preclinical model a specific brain circuit whose inhibition appears to reduce anxiety without side effects. Their work suggests a new target for treating anxiety disorders and related conditions and demonstrates a general strategy, based on a method called photopharmacology, for mapping drug effects on the brain.
In their study, published Jan. 28 in Neuron, the researchers examined the effects of experimental drug compounds that activate a type of brain-cell receptor called the metabotropic glutamate receptor 2 (mGluR2). While these receptors are found on neurons within many brain circuits, the team showed that activating them in a specific circuit terminating in an emotion-related brain region called the amygdala reduces signs of anxiety without apparent adverse side effects. Current treatments for anxiety disorders, panic disorder and associated conditions can have unwanted side effects including cognitive impairments.
“Our findings indicate a new and important target for the treatment of anxiety-related disorders and show that our photopharmacology-based approach holds promise more broadly as a way to precisely reverse-engineer how therapeutics work in the brain,” said study senior author Dr. Joshua Levitz, an associate professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The aim of the following paper was to overview the body-composition-related changes and molecular effects of different chemotherapy agents used in cancer treatment on skeletal-muscle remodeling.
— Pedrosa, et al.
Full text is available
Paraneoplastic conditions such as cancer cachexia are often exacerbated by chemotherapy, which affects the patient’s quality of life as well as the response to therapy. The aim of this narrative review was to overview the body-composition-related changes and molecular effects of different chemotherapy agents used in cancer treatment on skeletal-muscle remodeling. A literature search was performed using the Web of Science, Scopus, and Science Direct databases and a total of 77 papers was retrieved. In general, the literature survey showed that the molecular changes induced by chemotherapy in skeletal muscle have been studied mainly in animal models and mostly in non-tumor-bearing rodents, whereas clinical studies have essentially assessed changes in body composition by computerized tomography.
Electric sparks are used for welding, powering electronics, killing germs or for igniting the fuel in some car engines. Despite their usefulness, they are hard to control in open space—they split into chaotic branches that tend to go toward the closest metallic objects.
A recent study published in Science Advances uncovers a way of transporting electricity through air by ultrasonic waves. The level of control of the electric sparks allows guidance of the spark around obstacles, or guiding it to hit specific spots, even in non-conductive materials.
“We observed this phenomenon more than one year ago, then it took us months to control it, and even longer to find an explanation,” says Dr. Asier Marzo from the Public University of Navarre, lead researcher of the work.
The largest solar storm in two decades hit Earth in May 2024. For several days, wave after wave of high-energy charged particles from the sun rocked the planet. Brilliant auroras engulfed the skies, and some GPS communications were temporarily disrupted.
With the help of a serendipitously resurrected small NASA satellite, scientists have discovered that this storm also created two new temporary belts of energetic particles encircling Earth. The findings are important to understanding how future solar storms could impact our technology.
The new belts formed between two others that permanently surround Earth called the Van Allen Belts. Shaped like concentric rings high above Earth’s equator, these permanent belts are composed of a mix of high-energy electrons and protons that are trapped in place by Earth’s magnetic field. The energetic particles in these belts can damage spacecraft and imperil astronauts who pass through them, so understanding their dynamics is key to safe spaceflight.
