Medicine doesn't work properly in space. Building a better brain: Strengthening your mental muscle. According to the newest theory of aging and memory , you can build your brain power through a process called "scaffolding. " As we get older, some of our neural circuits don't work as well they used to. You probably know that painful little brain blip when you're trying to remember the name that goes with a person you haven't seen for a while or when you walk into a room and forgot why you went there.
It feels like something just isn't clicking the way it should. It turns out that successful brain agers do have these experiences but they find clever ways to overcome them by switching on new circuits when old ones fail. For many years, proponents of the "plasticity" model of brain aging have been at war with the "neural fallout" advocates. We also know that aging spares the vital function known as "procedural memory," which is your ability to remember how to perform many of the actions that make up your daily activities. But it's not only your mental muscle that you need to exercise. Going Direct: Researchers Change Skin Into Blood With No Stops in Between | 80beats. It may not be as miraculous as turning water into wine, or as wealth-generating as turning dirt into gold, but we still think this is a very cool trick: Researchers have transformed mature skin cells directly into mature blood cells.
Crucially, this was done without reverting the cells to a flexible, “pluripotent” stage in which the cells can grow into any form. The technique, described in Nature, could lead to lab-grown blood cells for transfusions and transplants for people with bone marrow diseases. Researchers think this new process may be safer than previous methods. By skipping the pluripotent step, the researchers believe they have skirted the risk that the replacement cells might form dangerous tumors.
[Los Angeles Times] The research team, lead by Mickie Bhatia, coaxed the skin cells into becoming blood cells via a harmless virus that carried a gene called OCT4 into the cells–this reprogrammed the cells, turning their developmental clock back part of the way. Image: iStockphoto. New Bandages Latest in Healthcare Technology - High Tech Bandages and Band-Aids. ChitoGauze (Photograph courtesy of HemCon Medical Technologies, Inc.)
HemCon Medical Technologies manufactures bandages and wound dressings that harness the power of the sea. The company's products use chitosan, a biopolymer made from a component in the exoskeletons of crab, shrimp and other crustacean exoskeletons. The positively charged chitosan attracts the negatively charged outer membranes of red blood cells; when the two come into contact, localized clotting occurs. HemCon's chitosan-coated bandages are already in use in Iraq; its latest product is ChitoGauze. Gecko Bandage (Photograph by Bob Langer and Jeff Karp, MIT) The ability of geckos to scale vertical surfaces comes from the special topography of their feet: nano-size hairs gives their feet an adhesive property.
QuikClot (Photograph courtesy of Z-Medica Corporation) The family of QuikClot products make use of kaolin clay, a natural blood-clotter. Ultrasound Device (Photograph courtesy of George K. Scaffold Bandage Electric Bandage. Serotonin-and-dopamine.gif (GIF Image, 620x368 pixels)