according to new research co-authored by scientists at Washington University in St louis. For example, people with ositivebehavioral traits,
such as sharp memories, many years of education and robust physical endurance, have stronger neural connections between certain brain regions than people with egativetraits, such as smoking, aggressive behavior and a family
a $40 million brain imaging initiative funded by the National institutes of health (NIH. The project is led by scientists at Washington University,
University of Minnesota and Oxford university in the United kingdom. Describing the findings as mpressive, Washington University School of medicine in St louis neuroscientist Marcus E. Raichle,
MD, told Nature News that the research confirms it possible to istinguish people with successful traits
The new study, based on data from the first 500 volunteers scanned as part of the HCP,
Earlier research by Raichle, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Medicine, played a pivotal role in the discovery of brain regions now known as the efault mode network.
the researchers examined a HCP database that included resting-state connectomes from about 460 people ages 22 to 35 years,
and information about 280 different behavioral and demographic traits that were recorded for these same participants. he quality of the imaging data is unprecedented really,
a biomedical engineer at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study. ot only is the number of subjects we get to study large,
but the spatial and temporal resolution of the fmri data is way ahead of previous large datasets.
Smith and his colleagues ran a massive computer analysis to examine how brain connectivity patterns correlated with individual behavioral traits, such as age, socioeconomic status, history of drug abuse, personality traits and various
such as a large vocabulary, good memory, life satisfaction, income and years of education. Conversely, those with weaker network connections were found to exhibit high scores for traits typically considered negative,
said Van Essen, who is a principal investigator of the HCP. t is also a testament to the intense efforts by the HCP team to improve the methods of imaging data acquisition
and analysis. Some of these advances were contributed by Matthew Glasser, a graduate student in Van Essen lab and a co-author on the study.
In an interview with Nature News, Raichle cautioned that the findings of this study do not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between strong brain network connections and positive behavioral traits or between weak connections and negative traits.
there a lot of work that needs to be done before brain scans could be used to predict what sorts of skills
and traits seen across individuals reflects a complex dance between environment and biology. Understanding the precise nature of these causal influences will help lead to the design of better interventions to help move the brain and behavior toward the positive end of the spectrum i
#New Material Could Turn Water into Fuel Scientists have designed theoretically a new material that could help supply the world with clean energy by turning water into fuel,
using just the power of the sun. Chemists at the University of Reading say a new catalyst,
which mimics the way plants absorb energy from the sun, could make the energy-sapping job of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen relatively easy.
As well as potentially being able to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, the complex new material could also be used to turn carbon dioxide from the air into a carbon-based fuel,
such as methanol. Ricardo Grau-Crespo, from the Chemistry department of the University of Reading, led the team that made the discovery."
"Finding a material that can help create readily available fuels is one of the holy grails of science,
"Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is an energy-intensive process, which currently requires much more energy in from electricity than comes out in usable fuel.
To make the process more efficient, scientists use a photocatalyst-a material that absorbs light from the sun
as it can only absorb energy from ultraviolet light. The Reading-led team used supercomputer simulations to look at many different candidates as potential photocatalysts for fuel production reactions.
In new research, published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Materials Chemistry A, they found that some metal-organic frameworks,
which combine metal atoms and organic molecules, exhibit the ideal electronic structure required to catalyse these reactions."
as porphyrin is related to chlorophylls, the green pigments which allow plants to convert sunlight into chemical energy,
"said Grau-Crespo.""The challenge now is to incorporate these wonderful natural catalysts into materials capable of doing the specific chemical job we need.
If we can do this, it could lead to highly-efficient conversion of solar energy to chemical energy-providing a clean, storable and transferrable source of energy. y
#Scientists Produce Tomatoes with Industrial Quantities of Natural Compunds Scientists at the John Innes Centre have found a way to produce industrial quantities of useful natural compounds efficiently,
and Genistein, the compound found in soybean which has been suggested to play a role in prevention of steroid-hormone related cancers, particularly breast cancer.
and Eugenio Butelli working in Professor Cathie Martin's lab at the John Innes Centre, one tomato can produce the same quantity of Resveratrol as exists in 50 bottles of red wine.
a plant found in most UK gardens and used as a model plant in scientific investigation.
and to influence the amount of energy and carbon the plant dedicated to producing these natural compounds.
and flavanoids and to devote more of energy to doing this in fruit. Introducing both Atmyb12
Tomatoes are a high yielding crop--producing up to 500 tons per hectare in countries delivering the highest yields (FAOSTAT 2013)
, grapes, soybeans, etc..The tomatoes can be harvested and juiced and the valuable compounds can be extracted from the juice.
The tomatoes themselves could potentially become the source of increased nutritional or medicinal benefit.""Our study provides a general tool for producing valuable phenylpropanoid compounds on an industrial scale in plants,
"said Martin."Our work will be of interest to different research areas including fundamental research on plants, plant/microbe engineering, medicinal plant natural products,
""Medicinal plants with high value are often difficult to grow and manage, and need very long cultivation times to produce the desired compounds.
Our research provides a fantastic platform to quickly produce these valuable medicinal compounds in tomatoes,
which are the major groups of medicinal compounds from plants
#Scientists Produce Tomatoes with Industrial Quantities of Natural Compounds Given the opportunity to drink fifty bottles of wine or eat one tomato,
and Genistein, the compound found in soybean which has been suggested to play a role in prevention of steroid-hormone related cancers, particularly breast cancer.
and Eugenio Butelli working in Professor Cathie Martin's lab at the John Innes Centre, one tomato can produce the same quantity of Resveratrol as exists in 50 bottles of red wine.
a plant found in most UK gardens and used as a model plant in scientific investigation.
and to influence the amount of energy and carbon the plant dedicated to producing these natural compounds.
and flavanoids and to devote more of energy to doing this in fruit. Introducing both Atmyb12
Tomatoes are a high yielding crop--producing up to 500 tons per hectare in countries delivering the highest yields (FAOSTAT 2013)
, grapes, soybeans, etc..The tomatoes can be harvested and juiced and the valuable compounds can be extracted from the juice.
The tomatoes themselves could potentially become the source of increased nutritional or medicinal benefit.""Our study provides a general tool for producing valuable phenylpropanoid compounds on an industrial scale in plants,
"said Martin."Our work will be of interest to different research areas including fundamental research on plants, plant/microbe engineering, medicinal plant natural products,
""Medicinal plants with high value are often difficult to grow and manage, and need very long cultivation times to produce the desired compounds.
Our research provides a fantastic platform to quickly produce these valuable medicinal compounds in tomatoes,
which are the major groups of medicinal compounds from plants
#Snake Venom-infused Hydrogel Stops Bleeding A nanofiber hydrogel infused with snake venom may be the best material to stop bleeding quickly, according to Rice university scientists.
The hydrogel called SB50 incorporates batroxobin, a venom produced by two species of South american pit viper.
and quickly turns into a gel that conforms to the site of a wound, keeping it closed,
Rice chemist Jeffrey Hartgerink, lead author Vivek Kumar and their colleagues reported their discovery in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering.
The hydrogel may be most useful for surgeries particularly for patients who take anticoagulant drugs to thin their blood."
It has been used in various therapies as a way to remove excess fibrin proteins from the blood to treat thrombosis and as a topical hemostat.
"There's a lot of different things that can trigger blood coagulation, but when you're on heparin, most of them don't work,
or they work slowly or poorly. That obviously causes problems if you're bleeding.""""Heparin blocks the function of thrombin,
This is important because surgical bleeding in patients taking heparin can be a serious problem. The use of batroxobin allows us to get around this problem
The substance used for medicine is produced by genetically modified bacteria and then purified, avoiding the risk of other contaminant toxins.
The Rice researchers combined batroxobin with their synthetic, self-assembling nanofibers, which can be loaded into a syringe
and injected at the site of a wound, where they reassemble themselves into a gel.
Tests showed the new material stopped a wound from bleeding in as little as six seconds, and further prodding of the wound minutes later did not reopen it.
The researchers also tested several other options: the hydrogel without batroxobin, the batroxobin without the hydrogel, a current clinical hemostat known as Gelfoam and an alternative self-assembling hemostat known as Puramatrix and found that none were as effective, especially in the presence of anticoagulants.
The new work builds upon the Rice lab's extensive development of injectable hydrogel scaffolds that help wounds heal
and grow natural tissue. The synthetic scaffolds are built from the peptide sequences to mimic natural processes."
""We think SB50 has great potential to stop surgical bleeding, particularly in difficult cases in
and respond to toxic injury in ways that are similar to kidney tubules in people.
and Women Hospital in Boston and is now an assistant professor of medicine in the nephrology division at the University of Washington. nswering this question was important for understanding the potential of mini-kidneys for clinical kidney regeneration and drug discovery.
To re-create human disease, researchers used the gene-editing technique called CRISPR. They engineered mini-kidneys with genetic changes linked to two common kidney diseases:
polycystic kidney disease and glomerulonephritis. The organoids developed characteristics of these diseases. Those with mutations in polycystic kidney disease genes formed balloon-like, fluid-filled sacks, called cysts, from kidney tubules.
The organoids with mutations in podocalyxin, a gene linked to glomerulonephritis, lost connections between filtering cells. utation of a single gene results in changes kidney structures associated with human disease,
thereby allowing better understand of the disease and serving as models to develop therapeutic agents to treat these diseases,
says Joseph Bonventre, senior author and chief of the renal division at Brigham and Women Hospital. hese genetically engineered mini-kidneys,
Freedman says, ave taught us that human disease boils down to simple components that can be re-created in a petri dish.
This provides us with faster, better ways to perform linical trials in a dishto test drugs
and therapies that might work in humans. Genetically matched kidney organoids without disease-linked mutations showed no signs of either disease,
Freedman says. RISPR can be used to correct gene mutations, explained Freedman. ur findings suggest that gene correction using CRISPR may be a promising therapeutic strategy.
In the United states, costs for kidney disease are about 40 billion dollars per year. Kidney disease affects approximately 700 million people worldwide.
Twelve million patients have polycystic kidney disease and two million have complete kidney failure. Dialysis and kidney transplantation, the only options for patients in kidney failure, can cause harmful side effects and poor quality-of-life. s a result of this new technology,
we can now grow, on demand, new kidney tissue that is 100 percent immunocompatible with an individual own body,
"says Freedman. e have shown that these tissues can mimic both healthy and diseased kidneys, and that the organoids can survive in mice after being transplanted.
The next question is whether the organoids can perform the functions of kidneys after transplantation. o
#Researchers Use Potatoes to Make Eco-friendly Plastic films Using potato peels and culls considered waste by Alberta potato-processing industry,
University of Alberta researchers have created a starch-based bioactive film that is both eco-friendly and rich in antioxidants.
With applications for both the food packaging and cosmetic industries, the new bioactive film is a green alternative to traditional petroleum-based plastics
and possesses added advantages, said Marleny Aranda Saldaña, a process engineer and associate professor in the Department of Agricultural,
Food & Nutritional Science who led the research team. evelopment of antioxidant and antimicrobial bioactive films can improve product shelf life and safety,
she said. otato peels have high phenolic content, a natural compound for plant protection, which you also find in apple peels and grape peels, among others.
which includes microbiologist and Canada Research Chair Michael Gänzle and cereal scientist Thava Vasanthan, used subcritical fluid technology to extract phenolic compounds from the potato biomass.
Traditional methods use methanol, a toxic solvent. Subcritical fluid technology uses water above its boiling point and below its critical temperature, under pressure.
In subcritical water medium, starch can be modified to influence the film properties, such as its tensile strength
elongation, and antioxidant and antimicrobial activity. Saldaña team has obtained already an international Patent Cooperation Treaty application for the processing method
and TEC Edmonton is in the process of commercializing the process. Currently, the team is testing antimicrobial activity.
The next step is to test the films on packaging of ready-to-eat meat. With international interest on whether the subcritical method would also work on cassava (the starchy root of a tropical tree),
her team is also studying that possibility. Another researcher in Saldaña lab is looking at adding nanoparticles on the films.
Right now there a maximum amount of antioxidants/antimicrobials that the film can hold, but with nanoparticles, more could be added
and released strategically. Meanwhile, Saldaña says, the overall goal is to achieve complete use of the available biomass.
Her team, including visiting scientists from Brazil and China, also uses sub/supercritical water processing technology to obtain other value-added compounds
and to gasify what left of the biomass residue to obtain hydrogen. That research is ongoing a
#Researchers Control Boiling Water Process Boiling water, with its commotion of bubbles that rise from a surface as water comes to a boil,
is central to most electric power plants, heating and cooling systems, and desalination plants. Now, for the first time, researchers at MIT have found a way to control this process, literally with the flick of an electrical switch.
The system, which could improve the efficiency of electric power generation and other processes, is described in a paper by Evelyn Wang, Department of Mechanical engineering Professor, Jeremy Cho, graduate student and Jordan Mizerak, recent graduate,
published in the journal Nature Communications. This degree of control over the boiling process, independent of temperature, Wang says,
has not previously been demonstrated despite the ubiquity of boiling in industrial processes. Other systems have been developed to control boiling using electric fields,
but these have required special fluids rather than water, and a thousandfold higher voltages, making them economically impractical for most uses.
or repelled by, a metal surface by changing the polarity of the voltage applied to the metal.
which rely on the creation of precise kinds of nanoscale textures on the surface, this system makes use of the tiny irregularities that naturally exist on a metal surface
in turn, allows control over the rate of heat transfer between the metal and the liquid.
That could make it possible to make more efficient boilers for powerplants or other applications, since present designs require a substantial safety margin to avoid the possibility of hot spots that could seriously damage the equipment.
While most such power plants operate at a steady rate most of the time being able to control the heat transfer rates dynamically could improve their efficiency
liquid cooling for high-performance electronics also could be made more efficient by being able to control the rate of bubbling to prevent overheating in hotspots,
he says. aving a boiler that can respond to quick changescould provide extra flexibility to the electric grid,
Wang says this work has demonstrated hat you can actively modify the rate of nucleation. It has not been shown previously that this is possible. ower plant operators are rightly conservative about making changes,
a demonstration plant would be needed to prove the concept at operational scale. don think there are any huge barriersto building such a demonstration,
says Satish Kandlikar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of technology, who was involved not in this research. uch control strategies will dramatically alter the heat transfer paradigm in many applications,
especially in the electronics cooling industry to cool hot spots. Such strategies can be applied effectively through simple electric controls using the new technology. g
#Model Could Predict Drug's Side effects Researchers at the University of California, San diego have developed a model that could be used to predict a drug's side effects on different patients.
but its side effects as well,"said Bernhard Palsson, the Galetti Professor of Bioengineering at the Jacobs School of engineering at UC San diego."
"There needs to be a good way to obtain data about a drug's side effects before exposing a lot of people to the drug.
who did this research while a Ph d. student in Palsson's Systems Biology Research Group.
Researchers used data from different people's genotypes and metabolism to build personalized models that simulate how a drug will affect a particular set of cells in the body."
and metabolomics data obtained from blood samples of 24 individuals. Researchers used these data to build a personalized
predictive model for each individual. Researchers then used these predictive models to understand--at the metabolic level--why some individuals experienced side effects to ribavirin,
a drug used to treat hepatitis C, while other individuals did not. A side effect of ribavirin is that it causes anemia--a condition characterized by a decrease in red blood cell levels--in approximately 8 to 10 percent of patients."
"A goal of our predictive model is to pinpoint specific regions in the red blood cell that might increase susceptibility to this side effect
In both, researchers used machine-learning and parallel processing techniques to"teach"computers to characterize microbiotic colonies
In one new study, researchers borrowed from concepts in microbial ecology and computer science to demonstrate that people have a variety of"microbial fingerprints"that could be used to distinguish them from many others,
and to show that those fingerprints don't change significantly over time. For the study, published this week in the journal PNAS,
"wrote the authors--a collection of biostatisticians, microbiologists and infectious disease specialists led by Eric A. Franzosa of Harvard's School of Public health and the Massachusetts institute of technology's Broad Institute.
A second study found that humans and the surfaces of their cellphones share enough microbiotic commonality that samples from one could probably be used to match an owner with her mobile.
The same study which drew samples from attendees at conferences in Vancouver, Canada; Washington; and California also characterized the extent to
which the surface of a cellphone put down in a new environment will pick microbiotic stowaways.
and built environments may play a significant role in future forensic investigations, "wrote the authors of that study, published in the journal Microbiome.
For research that collects such biological samples, hiding the identities of donors may not be enough to keep investigators from inferring matches between"before"and"after,"
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#FDA proposes letting gay men donate blood, with some caveats The Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules Tuesday that would allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood in the U s. for the first time in decades.
The ban, instated in 1985 in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, has long been criticized by members of the medical community
an intravenous drug user or a sex worker are permitted to donate blood only after waiting one year
Last year, a panel of independent experts concluded that imposing a yearlong waiting period would not endanger the safety of the nation supply of donated blood.
According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men who have sex with men make up only 7%of the U s. male population,
the most recent year for which data were available. The FDA, which regulates how blood donations are collected
"the National Gay Blood Drive said on its website.""We will continue to encourage the FDA to move toward a deferral based upon individual risk assessment."
Advances in bioengineering had allowed scientists to understand the complex processes within the poppy plant that convert sugar to morphine,
Biochemical engineer Christina Smolke and colleagues had been working on the problem of synthesizing opioids and other plant-based medicines in the lab for about a decade.
They do incredible and beautiful biochemistry, "she said.""But they do it in a way that's inefficient.
like brewing them using yeast in batches. If successful, the thinking went, the lab-based manufacturing approach wouldn't be vulnerable to weather and disease,
the way poppy crops are--allowing millions of people around the world who do not have sufficient access to painkilling drugs to get the medications they need.
It could also open the door to development of better medications. But there were technical problems to overcome.
querying DNA databases, to also figure out how that process worked. Another technical challenge Smolke's group addressed was maintaining efficiency in the process as they stringed all of the steps together.
that it would require thousands of gallons of yeast to make a single dose of medicine."
As a separate experiment, Smolke and two colleagues tried brewing thebaine under normal home brew conditions.
in a paper posted on the biorxiv preprint server, suggesting that"additional technical challenges, some
of which are unknown and likely unrelated to optimized production in large-volume bioreactors, would need to be addressed for engineered yeast to ever realize home-brew biosynthesis of medicinal opiates at meaningful yields."
"Still, she said she agreed with scientists who've said they want to work together with regulators
While noting that the work will need still refinement before it becomes a public health threat, he marveled at how quickly developments had been unfolding in bioengineering--for morphine synthesis
and other applications that would require policymakers to sit down with scientists and start planning ahead to get out ahead of technologies that can be used for beneficial and detrimental ends."
"The pace of biological engineering is faster than what was expected,"he said.""Why are things moving so fast,
Pollock became the first subject in a UCLA experiment that set out to meld electrical stimulation therapy with a robotic exoskeleton that effectively walks for paralyzed patients.
to help those with spinal cord injuries learn to walk again. After a fall out of a second-story window caused Pollock's catastrophic spinal cord injury in 2010,
physicians told him any return of sensation or function below his waist was out of the question. Pollock, who has been blind for 16 years,
He would learn to make a meaningful life using a wheelchair Pollock said in an interview.
After nearly four years of aggressive rehabilitation efforts, Pollock arrived at UCLA having already mastered the use of a battery-powered wearable bionic suit,
The robotic exoskeleton's sensors and motors are programmed to detect how much"help"a patient is capable of giving,
Pollock's injury was broken so extensive bones had nicked and pierced his spinal cord in two places--that he was,
In the lab of V. Reggie Edgerton, professor of integrative biology and physiology, neurobiology and neurosurgery, Pollock had attached electrical patches to the skin over his spinal cord.
this week to the world largest international society of biomedical engineers, said the electrical stimulation to the spinal cord appears to reawaken neurons there.
"After the injury there a lot of functional capability that remains,"Edgerton said.""But it has to do some relearning"--a process that appears to be started jump by electrical stimulation,
the Ekso's sensors and motors adjust, and provide less stepping power. Challenged to do more,
Whether that process leads a paralyzed patient to walk again depends on the extent and location of his or her spinal cord injury
published this week by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, is UCLA research scientist Parag Gad.
Lead coauthors were Yury Gerasimenko, director of the laboratory of movement physiology at Russia Pavlov Institute and a researcher in UCLA's department of integrative biology and physiology;
and Dr. Daniel Lu, associate professor of neurosurgery at UCLA David Geffen School of medicine. In a study published by the same team this summer in the Journal of Neurotrauma,
five paralyzed men were given one 45-minute training session per week for 18 weeks, and regained voluntary control of their legs."
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