Many believe the future of humanity is to go Digital, uploading our minds to computers, living in virtual worlds that are vastly more efficient and compact. If we might do this, might distant alien empires too? And if so, might this be the reason we don’t see them?
Disrupted connections between memory and appetite regulating brain circuits are directly proportional to body mass index (BMI), notably in patients who suffer from disordered or overeating that can lead to obesity, such as binge eating disorder (BED), according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Published today in Nature, the research notes that individuals who are obese have impaired connections between the dorsolateral hippocampus (dlHPC) and the lateral hypothalamus (LH), which may impact their ability to control or regulate emotional responses when anticipating rewarding meals or treats.
“These findings underscore that some individual’s brains can be fundamentally different in regions that increase the risk for obesity,” senior author, Casey Halpern, MD, an associate professor of Neurosurgery and Chief of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at Penn Medicine and the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “Conditions like disordered eating and obesity are a lot more complicated than simply managing self-control and eating healthier. What these individuals need is not more willpower, but the therapeutic equivalent of an electrician that can make right these connections inside their brain.”
The dlHPC is located in the region of the brain that processes memory, and the LH is in the region of the brain that is responsible for keeping the body in a stable state, called homeostasis. Previous research has found an association with loss of function in the human hippocampus in individuals with obesity and related disordered eating, like BED. However, outside of imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the role of the hippocampus has been difficult to study in humans with obesity and related eating disorders.
A study has linked the development in kids of any of food allergy, asthma, eczema and rhinitis to a common factor – an unbalanced gut microbiome.
Researchers have long been intrigued by the gut microbiome in the development of allergic diseases. But this Canadian study is unique in identifying a common origin in infancy across the four separate allergic diseases. As well, it explored the composition of gut bacteria in children before and following allergic sensitization.
As each allergic disease has a separate list of symptoms, they are usually studied on their own. “But when you look at what is going wrong at a cellular level, they actually have a lot in common,” notes Dr. Charisse Petersen, co-senior author and a researcher at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and BC Children’s Hospital.
Inside our bodies at every moment, our cells are orchestrating a complex dance of atoms and molecules that uses energy to create, distribute and deploy the substances on which our lives depend.
And it’s not just in our bodies: all animals carry out this dance of metabolism, and it turns out none of them do it quite the same way.
In new research published in Science Advances, we analysed specific carbon atoms in amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – to discover distinctive fingerprints of the metabolism of different species.
The hyperactivity disorder, usually referred to as ADHD, is an independent risk factor for several common and serious mental health issues, finds research published in the open access journal BMJ Mental Health.
It is associated with major depression, post traumatic stress disorder, the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, and suicide attempts, the findings show, prompting the researchers to recommend vigilance by health professionals in a bid to ward off these disorders later on.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition in children and teens that extends into adulthood in up to around two thirds of cases. Worldwide, its prevalence is estimated to be around 5% in children/teens and 2.5% in adults.
Previous research has shown that consumption of plant-based foods is associated with healthy aging [2,3]. It can also help to decrease the risk of mortality [4], prevent the development of chronic diseases [5,6], and improve neurological health, such as by lowering the risk of dementia [7] and cognitive impairment [8].
This new study aimed to determine the influence of a plant-based diet on the aging trajectory of the middle-aged Asian population. Researchers recruited over 10,000 people 50 years and older in Taiwan. Participants provided health data four times during the eight years after enrollment, underwent physical examinations, and filled out relevant questionnaires.
Other questions to the experts in this canvassing invited their views on the hopeful things that will occur in the next decade and for examples of specific applications that might emerge. What will human-technology co-evolution look like by 2030? Participants in this canvassing expect the rate of change to fall in a range anywhere from incremental to extremely impactful. Generally, they expect AI to continue to be targeted toward efficiencies in workplaces and other activities, and they say it is likely to be embedded in most human endeavors.
The greatest share of participants in this canvassing said automated systems driven by artificial intelligence are already improving many dimensions of their work, play and home lives and they expect this to continue over the next decade. While they worry over the accompanying negatives of human-AI advances, they hope for broad changes for the better as networked, intelligent systems are revolutionizing everything, from the most pressing professional work to hundreds of the little “everyday” aspects of existence.
One respondent’s answer covered many of the improvements experts expect as machines sit alongside humans as their assistants and enhancers. An associate professor at a major university in Israel wrote, “In the coming 12 years AI will enable all sorts of professions to do their work more efficiently, especially those involving ‘saving life’: individualized medicine, policing, even warfare (where attacks will focus on disabling infrastructure and less in killing enemy combatants and civilians). In other professions, AI will enable greater individualization, e.g., education based on the needs and intellectual abilities of each pupil/student. Of course, there will be some downsides: greater unemployment in certain ‘rote’ jobs (e.g., transportation drivers, food service, robots and automation, etc.).”
A molecular assembler, as defined by K. Eric Drexler, is a “proposed device able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision”. A molecular assembler is a kind of molecular machine. Some biological molecules such as ribosomes fit this definition. This is because they receive instructions from messenger RNA and then assemble specific sequences of amino acids to construct protein molecules. However, the term “molecular assembler” usually refers to theoretical human-made devices.
Beginning in 2007, the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has funded development of ribosome-like molecular assemblers. Clearly, molecular assemblers are possible in this limited sense. A technology roadmap project, led by the Battelle Memorial Institute and hosted by several U.S. National Laboratories has explored a range of atomically precise fabrication technologies, including both early-generation and longer-term prospects for programmable molecular assembly; the report was released in December, 2007. In 2008 the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council provided funding of 1.5 million pounds over six years for research working towards mechanized mechanosynthesis, in partnership with the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, amongst others. Likewise, the term “molecular assembler” has been used in science fiction and popular culture to refer to a wide range of fantastic atom-manipulating nanomachines, many of which may be physically impossible in reality. Much of the controversy regarding “molecular assemblers” results from the confusion in the use of the name for both technical concepts and popular fantasies. In 1992, Drexler introduced the related but better-understood term “molecular manufacturing”, which he defined as the programmed “chemical synthesis of complex structures by mechanically positioning reactive molecules, not by manipulating individual atoms”.This article mostly discusses “molecular assemblers” in the popular sense. These include hypothetical machines that manipulate individual atoms and machines with organism-like self-replicating abilities, mobility, ability to consume food, and so forth. These are quite different from devices that merely (as defined above) “guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision”. Because synthetic molecular assemblers have never been constructed and because of the confusion regarding the meaning of the term, there has been much controversy as to whether “molecular assemblers” are possible or simply science fiction. Confusion and controversy also stem from their classification as nanotechnology, which is an active area of laboratory research which has already been applied to the production of real products; however, there had been, until recently, no research efforts into the actual construction of “molecular assemblers”. Nonetheless, a 2013 paper by David Leigh’s group, published in the journal Science, details a new method of synthesizing a peptide in a sequence-specific manner by using an artificial molecular machine that is guided by a molecular strand. This functions in the same way as a ribosome building proteins by assembling amino acids according to a messenger RNA blueprint. The structure of the machine is based on a rotaxane, which is a molecular ring sliding along a molecular axle. The ring carries a thiolate group which removes amino acids in sequence from the axle, transferring them to a peptide assembly site. In 2018, the same group published a more advanced version of this concept in which the molecular ring shuttles along a polymeric track to assemble an oligopeptide that can fold into a α-helix that can perform the enantioselective epoxidation of a chalcone derivative (in a way reminiscent to the ribosome assembling an enzyme). In another paper published in Science in March 2015, chemists at the University of Illinois report a platform that automates the synthesis of 14 classes of small molecules, with thousands of compatible building blocks. In 2017 David Leigh’s group reported a molecular robot that could be programmed to construct any one of four different stereoisomers of a molecular product by using a nanomechanical robotic arm to move a molecular substrate between different reactive sites of an artificial molecular machine. An accompanying News and Views article, titled ‘A molecular assembler’, outlined the operation of the molecular robot as effectively a prototypical molecular assembler.
Scientists from the Babraham Institute suggest an alternative connection between diet and aging, based on studies in yeast. Dr. Jon Houseley and his team have published their experiments, demonstrating that healthy aging is achievable through dietary change without restriction by potentially optimizing diet and that ill health is not an inevitable part of the aging process.
Scientists have long known that caloric restriction – intentionally consuming far fewer calories than normal without becoming malnourished – improves health in later life and may even extend life. However, studies in mice show that caloric restriction really needs to be maintained throughout life to achieve this impact, and the health benefits disappear when a normal diet is resumed. Dr. Houseley’s new research conducted in yeast suggests an alternative to calorie restriction can lead to improved health throughout the lifecycle.
Dr. Kimathi is a medical oncologist in a community setting where she sees patients with a variety of cancer diagnoses. Recently, she had several patients with toxicities to different treatments, including tamoxifen, cisplatin, and methotrexate. Concerned, she wondered if there was a common factor these patients shared to have experienced these toxicities. On review, she found that these patients had different cancer diagnoses and did not share any known comorbidities or risk factors.
Why do some cancer patients experience toxicities from certain treatments and others don’t? Drug metabolism is highly variable among patients, and even within the same patient, depending on age and disease state. Both the toxicity and efficacy of cancer chemotherapy can be affected by many different factors, including other medications, foods, dietary supplements, environmental conditions, and genetic variants in drug-metabolizing genes and drug transporters.
