Category Archives: Uncategorized
Afternoon Napping Linked To Better Mental Agility
Taking a regular afternoon nap may be linked to better mental agility, suggests research published in the online journal General Psychiatry. It seems to be associated with better locational awareness, verbal fluency, and working memory, the findings indicate. Longer life expectancy and the associated neurodegenerative changes that accompany it, raise the prospect of dementia, with around 1 in 10 people over the age of 65 affected in the developed world.
As people age, their sleep patterns change, with afternoon naps becoming more frequent. But research published to date hasn’t reached any consensus on whether afternoon naps might help to stave off cognitive decline and dementia in older people or whether they might be a symptom of dementia.
The researchers explored this further in 2214 ostensibly healthy people aged at least 60 and resident in several large cities around China, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Xian. In all, 1534 took a regular afternoon nap, while 680 didn’t. All participants underwent a series of health checks and cognitive assessments, including the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE) to check for dementia. The average length of night time sleep was around 6.5 hours in both groups. Afternoon naps were defined as periods of at least five consecutive minutes of sleep, but no more than 2 hours, and taken after lunch. Participants were asked how often they napped during the week; this ranged from once a week to every day.
The dementia screening tests included 30 items that measured several aspects of cognitive ability, and higher function, including visuo-spatial skills, working memory, attention span, problem solving, locational awareness and verbal fluency. The MMSE cognitive performance scores were significantly higher among the nappers than they were among those who didn’t nap. And there were significant differences in locational awareness, verbal fluency, and memory.
This is an observational study, and so can’t establish cause. And there was no information on the duration or timing of the naps taken, which may be important.
Source: https://www.eurasiareview.com/
Highly Efficient Grid-scale Electricity Storage at Fifth of Cost
Rows of huge tanks full of chemical solutions storing energy generated from massive solar and wind farms and powering whole cities: It’s a landscape that millennials might very well equate with the new normal. Batteries will power this new paradigm, and they won’t necessarily all be lithium-ion batteries. The flow battery is staking a claim in the renewable energy world of the future. Flow batteries are definiively the future of energy storage, or at least an important part of it.
What are flow batteries? They are systems of two connected tanks, both containing electrolyte liquids: one with a positively charged cathode and the other with the negatively charged anode, just like a lithium-ion battery. Electricity passes from one electrolyte liquid to the other via a membrane between the tanks.
Rechargeable like lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries have longer lives because the electric current flowing from tank to tank does not degrade the membrane. True flow batteries are also called redox flow batteries, after the two reactions they utilize: reduction, or a gain of electrons, and oxidation, or loss of electrons from electrolyte liquid to electrolyte liquid.
Now researchers in WMG at the University of Warwick, in collaboration with Imperial College London, have found a way to enhance hybrid flow batteries and their commercial use. The new approach can store electricity in these batteries for very long durations for about a fifth the price of current technologies, with minimal location restraints and zero emissions.
The scientists enhanced three hybrid flow cells using nitrogen doped graphene (exposed to nitrogen plasma) in a binder-free electrophoresis technique (EPD). Wind and solar power are increasingly popular sources for renewable energy. Unfortunately, intermittency issues keep them from connecting widely to the National grid. One potential solution to this problem involves in the deployment of long-duration battery technology, such as the redox flow battery. Despite its great promise the current costs of this system are a key determining factor to real-world adoption. An affordable grid battery should cost £75/kWh, according to the US Department of Energy. Lithium-ion batteries, which lead the charge for grid storage, cost about £130/kWh. The hybrid flow battery’s total chemical cost is about 1/30th the cost of competing batteries, such as lithium-ion systems. Scaled-up technologies may be used to store electricity from wind or solar power, for multiple days to entire seasons, for about £15 to £20 per kilowatt hour.
Colchicin-based Anti COVID treatment Reduces Deaths by 44%
A team of researchers from the Montreal Heart Institute believe they have found an effective weapon against COVID-19: colchicine, an oral tablet already known and used for other diseases. For Dr. Jean-Claude Tardif, who led the study, this is a “major scientific discovery,” he said. Colchicine is the first “effective oral drug to treat out-of-hospital patients.” As colchicine is a well-understood drug, it could be used very quickly to treat people with COVID-19, the researcher says.
“Colchicine is old as it is — we’ve been treating gout with it for hundreds of years — so it’s available in pharmacies,” Tardif said, speaking in French. “So any doctor, tomorrow, who reads this can definitely decide to prescribe if he wants.”
Analysis of the study found that colchicine resulted in reductions in hospitalizations by 25 per cent, the need for mechanical ventilation by 50 per cent, and deaths by 44 per cent.
COVID: the Risk of Death is 70% Higher for Male than for Female Patients
Evidence increasingly indicates that male sex is a risk factor for more severe disease and death from COVID-19. Male bias in COVID-19 mortality is observed in nearly all countries with available sex-disaggregated data, and the risk of death in males is ∼1.7 times higher than in females. Aging is strongly associated with higher risk of death in both sexes, but at all ages above 30 years, males have a significantly higher mortality risk, rendering older males the most vulnerable group. Sex differences are intertwined with differences in gender roles socially and with behavioral factors, which also influence COVID-19 incidence and outcomes. However, there are also possible biological mechanisms of male sex bias that affect the severity of COVID-19, particularly with respect to immune responses.
Sex differences beyond sex organs are present across species and extend to physiological systems, including the immune system. Infection by different pathogens results in differential immune responses and disease outcomes by sex, and although the pattern depends on age and other host factors, male sex is more often associated with lower immune responses and higher susceptibility and/or vulnerability to infections in animals. This is generally also the case in humans: Male patients have higher viral loads for hepatitis B virus (HBV) and HIV. Conversely, females generally mount a more robust immune response to vaccines, such as influenza vaccines. However, the heightened immune responses in females can also lead to detrimental immunopathology in infections.
The physiological response to virus infection is initiated when virus replication is detected by pattern recognition receptors. This leads to two antiviral programs by the infected cells.
Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/
Half of Israel’s Population Will Be Vaccinated by the End of the Month
Israel‘s Health Minister Edelstein provided ministry data showing that 2,272,000 people have so far had the first of the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, including 550,000 who have also had their second dose. The number represents close to a quarter of Israel’s 9.3 million citizens and maintains its position as the country with the highest per capita vaccination rate in the world, according to monitoring groups.
Edelstein on Wednesday presented figures showing that over 210,000 vaccination shots were administered the day before, a new record for the country’s mass inoculation program.
Israelis recieve a Covid-19 vaccine, at a vaccination center operated by the Tel Aviv Municipality
Urging continued adherence to Health Ministry lockdown guidelines, which on Tuesday were extended until January 31, Edelstein wrote “a little more and this will be behind us.”
His figures were more optimistic than numbers released by the ministry during the morning, which showed that 56,008 people had their first dose on Tuesday and another 114,769 had the second shot for a total of 170,777. It was not clear why there was a discrepancy in the numbers.
The ministry said 8,511 new cases were confirmed Tuesday, a drop of some 1,500 from the record-shattering 10,058 cases detected on Monday. The figure for Tuesday was the lowest weekday daily caseload in over a week. The positive test rate also dropped to 9.2%, having reached 10.2% on Monday.
Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/
How Does an mRNA Vaccine Work?
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unusual attention to everything from handwashing to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. As we move into the later stages of this pandemic, though, a different scientific concept has dominated the national conversation: vaccines. The study of the human immune system and how vaccines influence it is complex and sometimes counterintuitive, and the deployment of a new method for immunization based on mRNA has made it all the more confusing.
The two vaccines that have received Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) from the Food and Drug Administration are both mRNA vaccines. And since they’re our only hope for ending this pandemic, it’s crucial to understand how they work—and why you should get one.
Vaccines come in a few main forms, but they share the same central goal: equip our immune systems with the tools to handily defeat a pathogen we might encounter in the future. Think of it like a practice round before your body sees the real thing.
The exact way our bodies develop this preemptive immunity depends on the kind of vaccine we’re given. Live-attenuated vaccines provide our cells with a weakened version of a pathogen; protein subunit vaccines give just one part of a bad guy, so immune cells know how to recognize that part of a virus or bacterium. But mRNA (short for messenger RNA) vaccines actually provide our cells with the instructions for making a protein from the pathogen, in essence creating their own practice dummy. Our own cells produce the viral protein specific to, say, SARS-CoV-2, and then our immune system learns to recognize the proteins.
Source: https://www.popsci.com/
Base Editing Could Cure a Host of Genetic Diseases
Picture the familiar double helix of human DNA — a long, twisted ladder with 3 billion rungs on it, each made of a pair of genetic bases (A, T, C, and G). A mistake in just one base along that ladder — an A where there should be a G — can be enough to cause a disease. In fact, researchers have linked over 31,000 different mistakes, known as “point mutations,” to human diseases. Now, an advanced form of gene therapy — called base editing — could make it possible to safely correct them.
Base editing is a type of gene editing technology, just like CRISPR. However, while CRISPR cuts through both strands of the DNA ladder to swap in different genes, a base editor makes precise changes to individual letters along the genome — a much less invasive kind of DNA surgery.
“It’s like your spell-checker,” neuroscientist Jeffrey Holt said. “If you type the wrong letter, spell checker fixes it for you.” Base editing was first developed by Broad Institute researcher David Liu in 2016, and it’s not perfect — the best base editors still make off-target edits and aren’t 100% efficient. However, the technique is more efficient than CRISPR and causes fewer errors, which has made it the focus of considerable research into correcting disease-causing point mutations.
“Base editing is like your spell-checker. If you type the wrong letter, it fixes it for you,” explained Jeffrey Holt. Holt was part of a team that used base editing to partially restore the hearing of mice with a point mutation that causes deafness in people. Earlier in 2020, University of Illinois researchers used base editing to slow the progression of ALS in mice. More recently, Liu was part of a group that used base editing to correct the point mutation that causes progeria, a premature-aging syndrome, in mice. By changing a T to a C in a single gene, they were able to more than double the lifespan of mice with the disease.
There’s no guarantee that a therapy that works in mice will translate to humans (although gene editing is conceptually much simpler than drugs that rely on complex chemistry). To find out whether base editing can live up to its promise as a disease-curing technology, we need human studies — and now, one is just on the horizon.
On January 12, Massachusetts-based biotech company Verve Therapeutics announced the promising results of a study testing a base editing treatment for heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), a genetic heart disease. HeFH is fairly common, affecting about one in 500 people, and it causes consistently high levels of “bad” cholesterol (LDL-C) — that makes people with the disease susceptible to heart attacks or strokes at a relatively young age. In primates with HeFH, Verve used base editing to change an A to a G in a single gene. Within two weeks, the animals’ blood LDL-C levels had dropped by 59%. Six months later, they were still just as low.The treatment, dubbed “VERVE-101,” was well-tolerated, with no adverse effects reported.
“When we started, we had no idea this would work,” Verve CEO Sekar Kathiresan said in a press release, adding, “It works, and we expect this to be durable for the lifetime of the animals.” Now, Verve wants to find out if VERVE-101 works in humans.
Source: https://www.freethink.com/
Norway Raises Concern Over Vaccine Jabs for the Elderly
Norway expressed increasing concern about the safety of the Pfizer Inc. vaccine on elderly people with serious underlying health conditions after raising an estimate of the number who died after receiving inoculations to 29. The latest figure adds six to the number of known fatalities in Norway, and lowers the age group thought to be affected to 75 from 80. While it’s unclear exactly when the deaths occurred, Norway has given at least one dose to about 42,000 people and focused on those considered most at risk if they contract the virus, including the elderly.
“There are 13 deaths that have been assessed, and we are aware of another 16 deaths that are currently being assessed,” the agency said. All the reported deaths related to “elderly people with serious basic disorders,” it said. “Most people have experienced the expected side effects of the vaccine, such as nausea and vomiting, fever, local reactions at the injection site, and worsening of their underlying condition.”
Official reports of allergic reactions have been rare as governments rush to roll out vaccines to try to contain the global pandemic. U.S. authorities reported 21 cases of severe allergic reactions from Dec. 14-23 after administration of about 1.9 million initial doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The first Europe-wide safety report on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is due to be published at the end of January. Until Friday, the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech SE was the only one available in Norway, and “all deaths are thus linked to this vaccine,” the Norwegian Medicines Agency said in a written response to Bloomberg on Saturday.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/
Nanomicelles Are Perfect Carrier To Destroy Cancerous Cells
With the advance in nanotechnology, researchers across the globe have been exploring how to use nanoparticles for efficient drug delivery. Similar to nanoshells and nanovesicles, nanomicelles are extremely small structures and have been noted as an emerging platform in targeted therapy. Nanomicelles are globe-like structures with a hydrophilic outer shell and a hydrophobic interior. This dual property makes them a perfect carrier for delivering drug molecules.
Now a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team has created a nanomicelle that can be used to deliver a drug named docetaxel, which is commonly used to treat various cancers including breast, colon and lung cancer.
Modus operandi: Once injected intravenously, these nanomicelles can easily escape the circulation and enter the solid tumours.
“The ideal goal for cancer therapy is destroying the cancer cells without harming healthy cells of the body, and chemotherapeutics approved for treatment of cancer are highly toxic. The currently used docetaxel is a highly hydrophobic drug, and is dissolved in a chemical mixture (polysorbate-80 and alcohol). This aggravates its toxic effects on liver, blood cells, and lungs. So, there was an urgent and unmet need to develop effective drug delivery vehicles for docetaxel without these side effects,” explains Avinash Bajaj, from the Laboratory of Nanotechnology and Chemical Biology at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad. He is one of the corresponding authors of the paper recently published in Angewandte Chemie.
The nanomicelles are less than 100nm in size and are stable at room temperature. Once injected intravenously these nanomicelles can easily escape the circulation and enter the solid tumours where the blood vessels are found to be leaky. These leaky blood vessels are absent in the healthy organs. “Chemical conjugation would render the phospholipid-docetaxel prodrug to be silent in the circulation and healthy organs. But once it enters the cancer cells, the enzymes will cleave the bond to activate the drug, and kill the cancer cells,” adds Dr. Bajaj.
The team tested the effectiveness of the nanomicelles in a mice breast tumour model and was found to help in tumour regression. Its toxicity was compared with the currently used FDA approved formulation and found to be less toxic. Similar promising results were seen when tested in higher model organisms including rats, rabbits and rhesus monkeys.
Immune System Killer Cells Controlled By Circadian Rhythms
An analysis of an exhaustive dataset on cells essential to the mammalian immune system shows that our ability to fight disease may rely more heavily on daily circadian cycles than previously assumed.
Malfunctions in circadian rhythms, the process that keeps our bodies in tune with the day/night cycles, are increasingly associated with diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many other diseases. An investigation published today in Genome Research shows that the activity of macrophages—cells within us that seek and destroy intruders like bacteria—may time daily changes in their responses to pathogens and stress through the circadian control of metabolism. In this study, Jennifer Hurley, the Richard Baruch M.D. Career Development Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and senior author on this study, and her team investigated how the levels of RNA and proteins in macrophages change over two days.
“We have shown there is an incredible amount of circadian timing of macrophage behavior, but the clock is timing macrophages in unexpected ways” said Hurley.
The circadian system is comprised of a set of core clock proteins that anticipate the day/night cycle by causing daily oscillations in levels of enzymes and hormones, and ultimately affecting physiological parameters such as body temperature and the immune response. This molecular clock marks time through a self-regulating cycle of protein production and decay. The “positive” element proteins of the clock trigger production of the “negative” element proteins, which in turn block production of positive element proteins until the negative element proteins decay, thus creating a negative feedback cycle that occurs once every 24 hours.
Positive element proteins also regulate fluctuations in a substantial number of gene products, known as messenger RNA or mRNA. Genetic instructions are transcribed from DNA to mRNA, which are then used as a recipe for assembling proteins, the functional building blocks of the cell. It has long been assumed that the levels of each subsequent step could be predicted from the previous. If that were the case, oscillating mRNA would correspond with oscillating levels of cellular proteins, and therefore, if one could track mRNA, they would know what proteins the circadian clock controlled in the cell.
However, this investigation showed that this paradigm may not always be true. The analysis of the macrophage dataset revealed that there was a substantial mismatch between the proteins and mRNAs that are controlled by the circadian clock. This data paralleled research published in Cell Systems in 2018 by the Hurley lab, showing that about 40% of oscillating proteins in the fungus and circadian model system, Neurospora crassa, had no corresponding oscillating mRNA.
“But the scale of the difference in macrophages really surprised us,” Hurley said. “Eighty percent of the proteins that oscillate don’t have associated oscillating mRNA in macrophages. That means we were really missing how the clock was timing immunity.”
Source: https://medicalxpress.com/
