A health librarian at church: Doubting Thomas
Thomas, one of Jesus ' 12 disciples, did not believe the other disciples when they told him Jesus had risen from the dead, and would not believe until he had seen Jesus for himself.Jesus appeared to him (and to the group he was with) and invited Thomas to put his hands into his wounds, something portrayed in several works of art. And then he did believe.So, he gained the name " Doubting Thomas " , a name in English that is, or was, anyway, applied to people who were sceptical or would not believe without seeing for themselves.I am not sure how fair the name is applied just to him, as in the Gospel accounts, the ...
Source: Browsing - May 3, 2021 Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: science and religion Source Type: blogs
Let ’s welcome Mental Health Month (May) by appreciating our beautiful brains
Self Reflected was created over two years by a team that included neuroscientists, engineers, physicists, and students, and is a hyperdetailed representation of 500,000 neurons in a sagittal slice. Credit: Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards.
Between Thought and Expression (Cerebrum):
Greg Dunn was on his way to a Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania when he realized that bringing the brain’s beauty to life was a more suitable role for him than lab work. He started in ink, inspired by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean paintings and the similarities he found in the microscopic world of neurons and the macroscopic w...
Source: SharpBrains - April 28, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: SharpBrains Tags: Education & Lifelong Learning beauty Mental Health Month Microetchings neuro art neuroimaging Neurons neuroscience Neurotechnology Source Type: blogs
Wanted: Biophysics, Biomedical Technology, and Computational Biosciences Program Directors
We’re recruiting two accomplished scientists for program officer positions in the Division of Biophysics, Biomedical Technology, and Computational Biosciences. The successful applicants will be responsible for scientific and administrative management of a portfolio of research grants, and will stimulate, plan, advise, direct, and evaluate program activities related to their field of expertise.
The positions are in our Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Branch and Biophysics Branch.
The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Branch supports bioinformatics and computational approaches that ...
Source: NIGMS Feedback Loop Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - April 20, 2021 Category: Biomedical Science Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Job Announcements Source Type: blogs
Can AI Reinvent Radiation Therapy for Cancer Patients?
John Halamka, M.D., president, Mayo Clinic Platform, and Paul Cerrato, senior research analyst and communications specialist, Mayo Clinic Platform, wrote this article.Of all the advances in health care artificial intelligence (AI), medical imaging is probably the most remarkable success story. Two prominent examples come to mind: Machine learning has helped improve the screening and diagnosis of retinal disease and is making inroads in skin cancer detection. Given these developments, it ’s not surprising to find researchers and clinicians developing the digital tools to improve radiotherapy, which combines imaging techno...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - April 19, 2021 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
edX course: learn the physics of COVID transmission
As a lifelong learner, I enjoy taking courses on edX and coursera. To learn more about the science of COVID transmission, take a look at the MITx course titled, "Physics of COVID-19 Transmission." Learn about the scientific principles behind the airborne transmission of COVID-19, and how quantitative safety guideline may be derived to assess the risk of transmission. You will explore factors such as the occupancy, the time spent in the space, the dimensions of the room, the use of face masks, ventilation, air filtration, humidity, the respiratory activities involved, etc. (Source: Medicine and Technology by Dr. Joseph Kim)
Source: Medicine and Technology by Dr. Joseph Kim - April 19, 2021 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 19th 2021
In conclusion, airway pressure treatment and adherence are independently associated with lower odds of incident AD diagnoses in older adults. Results suggest that treatment of OSA may reduce risk of subsequent dementia. (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - April 18, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
The Future of Cryopreservation
The ability to cryopreserve and thaw organs via vitrification, without ice formation and significant tissue damage, allowing for indefinite storage time, would go a long way towards simplifying the logistics and reducing the costs of present organ donation and future tissue engineering of organs for transplantation. Cryopreservation via vitrification also offers the possibility of indefinitely storing the terminally ill and recently deceased until such time as medical science advances to the point of restoration. This has been practiced for several decades by the small cryonics industry.
Cryonics is a long shot, but...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 12, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
3D Printed Microfluidic Bioreactor for Brain Organoid Culture
Researchers at MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras have developed a 3D-printed microfluidic bioreactor that can be used to culture and study brain organoids. The tiny self-organizing nodules of brain tissue are very useful in studying neurological disease and the effects of drugs. However, the bioreactors used to grow brain organoids can be bulky and costly, and do not always allow for easy viewing of the organoids as they grow. This latest technology aims to provide a low-cost organoid bioreactor using the benefits of 3D printing and microfluidics.
Organoids offer a chance to create ‘mini organs,’ and...
Source: Medgadget - April 8, 2021 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Materials Medicine Neurology Neurosurgery Oncology Source Type: blogs
The Days of Miracles and Wonder
Here ' s a good overview by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic ofthe history of mRNA technology. This heretofore obscure field of biomedical research burst into view with the Covid-19 vaccines, but the apparent suddenness of vaccine development was misleading. As I have noted here before, the technology was decades in development. As the technology became more mature, Pfizer partnered with one of the speculative ventures, BionTech, originally to develop flu vaccines, and then of course pivoted to Covid-19. Unlike Moderna, Pfizer actually didn ' t take federal funding for that final stage of development. But for most of the dec...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 6, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Ethics class
I delivered a lecture about ethical considerations related to the neuroscience of brain plasticity to a class at Stanford last night, and thought it might be fun to reiterate some of the issues raised for those bright young men and women struggling to understand how to behave in their professional lives. The class is organized by Bill Hurlbut, a Stanford neurologist and bioethicist who serves on the President’s Council for Bioethics, and Bill Newsome, a distinguished neurobiologist (member of the National Academy of Sciences) on the Stanford faculty who has had a long interest in neuroscience-related issues of philos...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - April 1, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Source Type: blogs
Micro-Aneurysm-On-A-Chip to Model Vascular Disease
An international research collaboration, including teams from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Brown University, and MIT, has developed an AI platform that can assess blood flow characteristics through microvasculature. The system relies on a microfluidic chip that mimics vascular disease, in this case a micro-aneurysm in the eye.
The AI platform uses 2D images of fluid flow through the chip to calculate how blood would flow in three dimensions. The resulting data could help clinicians to learn more about vascular diseases, improve their diagnosis, and track their progression.
“Curre...
Source: Medgadget - March 25, 2021 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Cardiology Ophthalmology Vascular Surgery Source Type: blogs
Nanoparticles On My Mind
By KIM BELLARD
Nanoparticles are everywhere! By that I mean, of course, that there seems to be a lot of news about them lately, particularly in regard to health and healthcare. But, of course, literally they could be anywhere and everywhere, which helps account for their potential, and their potential danger.
Let’s start with one of the more startling developments: a team at the University of Miami’s College of Engineering, led by Professor Sakhrat Khizroev, believes it has figured out a way to use nanoparticles to “talk” to the brain without wires or implants. They use “a novel clas...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 23, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Tech Kim Bellard nanoparticles Source Type: blogs
The Universe
I ' d like to digress for a few minutes to consider the mind boggling revolution in physics and cosmology of the 20th Century. Copernicus and Galileo established that the earth and planets revolve around the sun in the 17th Century. This overturned established doctrine, but did not in itself pose a major challenge to the human centered philosophy of the Abrahamic religions, in which we are the principal preoccupation of the all powerful creator God. However, as astronomers continued to look through telescopes and discovered the vast number and great distance of the stars of our galaxy, that belief became less tenable....
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 5, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
How Pixar ’s “Soul” met the Science of Awe
Five years ago, I (Dacher) received a call from Pixar writer and director Pete Docter to talk about his new film. The last time I said yes to such a request, I served as a scientific consultant for his film Inside Out. So, I was intrigued.
Before my visit, Pete offered a brief sketch of the film. The main character, Joe, is a middle-aged jazz pianist in a rut as a middle school band teacher in Queens. Just before his breakthrough show with a famous quartet, he falls into a manhole and dies, entering into another realm of consciousness. There he encounters “The Great Beyond”—but escapes to a pre-life realm, the “Gre...
Source: SharpBrains - March 2, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Greater Good Science Center Tags: Education & Lifelong Learning art awe connection creativity mental states Pixar purpose science soul Source Type: blogs
