Dogs could soon be used to sniff out Parkinson’s disease years before symptoms start to show.
Continue reading… “Dogs can sniff out Parkinson’s disease years before symptoms appear”
Organoids proposed to screen patients for high priced drugs
Medical scientist Hans Clevers thinks tests in lab-grown mini-organs could help make expensive drugs more cost-effective by identifying patients who are and aren’t likely to benefit.
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Beyond the five senses
The world we experience is not the real world. It’s a mental construction, filtered through our physical senses. Which raises the question: How would our world change if we had new and different senses? Could they expand our universe?
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Self-driving doctor brings the doctor to you
Even those of us fortunate enough to have good health insurance will often put off seeing a doctor when we probably should. Often it’s simply a matter of logistics. We feel like we can’t take the time off work, or arrange transportation, or get childcare to make the trip.
But what if the doctor just comes you? In a self-driving car.
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Scientists built an external womb to help premature infants survive
For expecting parents, 24 weeks is an important milestone. It’s a little more than halfway through pregnancy, and it’s at this age that the fetus has at least a fighting chance of surviving outside its mother’s body. The odds of survival aren’t great—only about half of babies birthed at this age survive—but it’s possible.
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Toyota’s new robot leg brace can help those with partial paralysis walk again
Toyota is introducing a new robotic leg brace called the Welwalk WW-1000 that can help patients with partial paralysis affecting one side of their body walk again. The robotic exoframe is worn on the affected leg, with a large motor component at the knee joint that provides just enough assistance to the patient, letting them recover their own walking ability therapeutically over time.
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Regrowing our own body parts
The ability to regenerate body parts has always been a fascinating prospect, inspiring characters like Wolverine who can instantly heal themselves and regrow body parts they’ve lost — and now regeneration has inspired scientific research.
Many species in the animal kingdom can regenerate: arthropods (like scorpions) can regrow appendages, some annelids (like worms) can regenerate from only a few segments of their body, echinoderms (like starfish) can both self-amputate and re-grow limbs, amphibians (like salamanders and newts) can regenerate a limb in as little as a month, and some reptiles can regenerate their tails.
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Human head transplant less than a year away
By this time next year, if all goes according to plan, the world’s first human head transplant will have taken place, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero has revealed.
In early 2015, Canavero made headlines around the world when he announced that he would perform the ground-breaking surgery within two years. Now, he has revealed in an interview with German magazine OOOM that it’s going to take place within 10 months, in China.
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Researchers grow heart tissue on spinach leaves
Researchers face a fundamental challenge as they seek to scale up human tissue regeneration from small lab samples to full-size tissues, bones, even whole organs to implant in people to treat disease or traumatic injuries: how to establish a vascular system that delivers blood deep into the developing tissue.
Current bioengineering techniques, including 3-D printing, can’t fabricate the branching network of blood vessels down to the capillary scale that are required to deliver the oxygen, nutrients and essential molecules required for proper tissue growth. To solve this problem, a multidisciplinary research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro have successfully turned to plants. They report their initial findings in the paper “Crossing kingdoms: Using decelluralized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds” published online in advance of the May 2017 issue of the journal Biomaterials.
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Home Smart Home: The Shape Of Things To Come
A new report predicts intelligent ‘Cognitive Homes’ of the future will be able to assess and manage our needs and desires in later life.
Almost 32 million people will be aged 60 or over in the UK by 2039. But what sort of living environment do older people face when they leave the workplace and embark on the next chapter of their lives?
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Medical Student Creates Patient-Specific 3D Printed Liver Model for Less Than $150
While researchers continue working hard to make readily available 3D printed organs a reality, we know that it likely won’t happen, at least not on a massively available and low-cost scale, for quite some time. However, 3D printing technology is often used in surgery these days, from surgical guides to implants to patient-specific medical models. Recently, a team developed patient-specific, cost-effective 3D printed liver models, to help doctors with their preoperative plans before performing difficult laparoscopic resections.
The 12 most dangerous superbugs, ranked by the WHO
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The World Health Organization says we need to step up the fight against a dozen bacteria that are growing resistant to all the antibiotics we have to treat them.
One of the scariest features of the antibiotic resistance crisis — which has been accelerated by how we overuse these drugs — is that pharmaceutical companies aren’t developing new antibiotics quickly enough. They also often place profits ahead public health when choosing which drugs to develop.
Continue reading… “The 12 most dangerous superbugs, ranked by the WHO”
