Science! (2 Viewers)

Up to one in five cases of dementia in older people might be avoided if problems with eyesight are prevented or treated, research has suggested.

According to the World Health Organization, there are about 55 million people living with dementiaglobally.

However, experts have long stressed such conditions are not an inevitable part of ageing, with recent research flagging 14 risk factors that, if addressed, could together prevent or delay 45% of dementia cases.


But while that work suggested about 2% of dementia cases were attributable to untreated vision loss in later life, a new study – considering a wider range of vision impairments – suggests up to 19% of dementia cases in older people could be attributed to vision impairments.……

 
Researchers have peered into the brains and bodies of living animals after discovering that a common food dye can make skin, muscle and connective tissues temporarily transparent.

Applying the dye to the belly of a mouse made its liver, intestines and bladder clearly visible through the abdominal skin, while smearing it on the rodent’s scalp allowed scientists to see blood vessels in the animal’s brain.

Treated skin regained its normal colour when the dye was washed off, according to researchers at Stanford University, who believe the procedure opens up a host of applications in humans, from locating injuries and finding veins for drawing blood to monitoring digestive disorders and spotting tumours.

“Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, doctors might be able to diagnose deep-seated tumours by simply examining a person’s tissue without the need for invasive surgical removal,” said Dr Guosong Hong, a senior researcher on the project. “This technique could potentially make blood draws less painful by helping phlebotomists easily locate veins under the skin.”

The trick has echoes of the approach taken by Griffin in HG Wells’s 1897 novel, The Invisible Man, in which the brilliant but doomed scientist discovers that the secret to invisibility lies in matching an object’s refractive index, or ability to bend light, to that of the surrounding air.…..

 
Engineers have created a new type of robot that places living fungi behind the controls.

The biohybrid robot uses electrical signals from an edible type of mushroom called a king trumpet in order to move around and sense its environment.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team from Cornell University in the US and Florence University in Italy, the machine could herald a new era of living robotics.

“Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” said Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell.

“That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”…….

 
Doctors have welcomed a breakthrough in medicine that will see tiny robots injected into the human body to perform complex tasks.

A team of scientists engineered magnetic nanobots made up of blood-clotting drugs encased in a coating designed to melt at precise temperatures.

The technology could “open new frontiers in medicine”, scientists announced.

In a study co-led by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, researchers showed the technology could be used to treat bleeds in the brain caused by aneurysms, which cause about 500,000 deaths globally each year.

They injected several hundred billion of the bots, each about a twentieth of the size of a red blood cell, into an artery, and then remotely guided them to the site of the aneurysm using magnets and medical imaging.…….

 
Scientists have found the best measurement yet of how much the universe glows.

The universe has what researchers liken to a cosmic night light: a very dim, faint glow that spreads right through the cosmos.

And researchers have now found how bright that is, more precisely than ever before. The light – known as the cosmic optical background – is 100 billion times fainter than the sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface.

That makes it impossible to see with the naked eye, and very difficult to see even with advanced telescopes. As such, they had to use Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015 and is now billions of miles from Earth.

That allowed researchers to get away from the light that surrounds Earth, and which reflects off the dust and debris that is near to our planet. With that, they could get a view deep into the universe.……

 
Doctors have welcomed a breakthrough in medicine that will see tiny robots injected into the human body to perform complex tasks.

A team of scientists engineered magnetic nanobots made up of blood-clotting drugs encased in a coating designed to melt at precise temperatures.

The technology could “open new frontiers in medicine”, scientists announced.

In a study co-led by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, researchers showed the technology could be used to treat bleeds in the brain caused by aneurysms, which cause about 500,000 deaths globally each year.

They injected several hundred billion of the bots, each about a twentieth of the size of a red blood cell, into an artery, and then remotely guided them to the site of the aneurysm using magnets and medical imaging.…….

That’s great, but FWIW, I think this is how the Borg got their start.
 
New research claims that exposure to outdoor light at night may increase the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, especially in people under the age of 65.

The researchers who conducted the study, funded by a National Institutes of Health grant and published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscienceon Friday, said they have found correlations between areas of the US with excessive exposure to artificial light at night and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease.

In the US, at least 19 states have legislation in place aimed at reducing light pollution, but the authors of the study say that despite this, the “levels of light at night remain high in many parts of the country”.


While “streetlights, roadway lighting, and illuminated signs can deter crime, make roads safer, and enhance landscaping”, undisrupted light, however, “comes with ecological, behavioral, and health consequences”, the authors said.

For this study, the researchers evaluated Alzheimer’s disease prevalence by looking at the average nighttime light intensity by state and county in the US from 2012 to 2018, using satellite-acquired light pollution data and Medicare data reports of Alzheimer’s prevalence. They also incorporated medical data about variables known or believed to be risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease into their analysis, they said.

While conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and others were associated more strongly with Alzheimer’s disease prevalence than nighttime light intensity, the authors said that nighttime light was more strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease prevalence than “alcohol abuse, chronic kidney disease, depression, heart failure, and obesity”.

For people under 65, nighttime light exposure was more strongly associated with Alzheimer’s prevalence than any other disease factor examined in the study.

“This could suggest that younger people may be particularly sensitive to the effects of light exposure at night,” the researchers said.…..

 
Microbes that cause disease in humans can travel thousands of miles on high-level winds, scientists have revealed for the first time.

The winds studied carried a surprising diversity of bacteria and fungi, including known pathogens and, some with genes for resistance to multiple antibiotics. Some of the microbes were shown to be alive – in other words, they had survived the long journey and were able to replicate.

The researchers said this intercontinental transport route was unlikely to cause disease in people directly, because the concentration of microbes was low. However, they said it was a cause of concern that microbes could be seeded into new environments and that antibiotic-resistance genes could travel in this way.


The study showed the microbes hitched a 1,200-mile (2,000km) ride on dust particles blown from farm fields in north-eastern China to Japan. Similar patterns of winds exist around the world. More than 300 types of bacteria and about 260 types of fungi were found in the samples collected over Tokyo. Other microbes not yet known to science are thought to be present.……

 
"You may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store," wrote Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "but that's just peanuts to space."

Space is big. We live on one tiny planet orbiting a star that's tucked away in the far reaches of a galaxy — just one galaxy of around 2 trillion in the known universe. Space is really really big.

Planet Earth is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way (called the Orion Arm) which lies about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the galaxy.

We know how big the Earth is — 12,756 kilometers (7,926 miles) across. And we know how big our sun is too — about 1,391,000 kilometers (864,400 miles) across.

But how big is the Milky Way? Until now, the true size of galaxies has remained a mystery.

A new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, has found that galaxies are far bigger than originally thought, perhaps several times bigger.

The spiraled structure of the galaxy we know is only the smaller core of the galaxy. For the Milky Way, this is about 100,000 light-years across.

The starlight from stars nestled in the spiral arms extend to around 7,800 light-years into deep space, which was thought to be where a galaxy ended and deep space began.

The study has revealed that large "halos" of gas extend from the visible spirals of star light far out into deep space.

These gas halos only became visible to astronomers with new imaging techniques. The methods enabled astronomers to detect galaxy gas halos over 100,000 light years into deep space, vastly increasing our estimations of how big galaxies are.

In fact, the halos of gas from galaxies extend so far into deep space that galaxies actually interact with each other.

The findings suggest that our Milky Way is likely interacting with our closest neighbor, Andromeda — around 2.5 million light years away, according to Nikole Nielsen, lead author of the paper, and a researcher with Swinburne University, Australia............


 

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