Category: Medicine
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Re-mapping the brain… Moving mountains…
Targeted motor and sensory reinnervation (TMSR) is a surgical procedure on patients with amputations that reroutes residual limb nerves towards intact muscles and skin in order to fit them with a limb prosthesis allowing unprecedented control. By its nature, TMSR changes the way the brain processes motor control and somatosensory input; however, the detailed brain…
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Phantom reality… Affecting reality…
In breakthrough research led by neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his team at EPFL, Switzerland, the scientists show that phantom body pain can be reduced in paraplegics by creating a bodily illusion with the help of virtual reality. The results are published in Neurology. "We managed to provoke an illusion: the illusion that the subject's legs…
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Calligraphy. Cancer. Life. Death.
For hundreds of years, Chinese calligraphers have used a plant-based ink to create beautiful messages and art. Now, one group reports in ACS Omega that this ink could noninvasively and effectively treat cancer cells that spread, or metastasize, to lymph nodes. (1) Life is Silence. Death is Writing. The death of the body can be…
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Replication and cell identity. The birth of death.
The set of genes a cell expresses determines if it's a skin cell, nerve cell or a heart muscle cell, among the 200 or so different cell types found in the human body". Prior to cell division, chromosomes are seemingly a jumbled mess. During cell division, parent cell chromosomes and their duplicates sort themselves out…
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Autoimmune diseases. The usefulness of forgetting. The paths…
Sciences analyze how autoimmune diseases work. The problem comes when the body incorrectly identifies a normal protein as a threat. When that happens, the B cell selection process produces what are known as autoantibodies that prove very effective at harming our own bodies. "Over time, the B cells that initially produce the 'winning' autoantibodies begin…
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