Altruism or Selfishness: How Meditation Can Change our Brains

TED talk by French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard: why Empathy is not enough...
Ph.D. degree in molecular genetics at the Pasteur Institute under French Nobel Laureate François Jacob, Matthieu Ricard is the son of renowned French philosopher the late Jean-François Revel.

Quadriplegic Man Uses Thoughts To Move His Limb

Source HERE.

In a groundbreaking clinical trial, a quadriplegic man moved his fingers and hand with his thoughts thanks to a brain implant developed by researchers at Ohio State University and Battelle.

The paralyzed man, named Ian Burkhart, is the first of five potential participants to trial the new system which has been dubbed Neurobridge. The technology, which was designed for spinal cord injury patients, translates and transmits brain signals to muscles via a chip, effectively re-joining the brain with paralyzed limbs.

“It’s much like a heart bypass, but instead of bypassing blood, we’re actually bypassing electrical signals,” research leader Chad Bouton said in a news-release. “We’re taking those signals from the brain, going around the injury, and actually going directly to the muscles.”

The treatment involves the implant of a tiny chip into the motor cortex of the individual’s brain which records and decodes neural impulses that would usually result in the initiation of limb movement. This brain activity is then forwarded to a computer that uses algorithms to translate the signals which are ultimately directed to a high-definition stimulation sleeve fitted onto a particular limb of the individual. This non-invasive sleeve is then able to stimulate precise muscles in the paralyzed limb which results in the execution of movement.

With the addition of a sophisticated software system which acts as a “virtual spinal cord” the individual can execute movements of individual fingers as well as coordinated hand and wrist movements.

While this may sound like it could take some time from the initial thought to the execution of movement, incredibly it takes just seconds for intention to be translated into action.

“I’ve been doing rehabilitation for a lot of years, and this is a tremendous stride forward in what we can offer these people,” said Dr. Jerry Mysiw, chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Ohio State. “Now we’re examining human-machine interfaces and interactions, and how that type of technology can help.”

Timothy Ray Brown, Known As “The Berlin Patient”, Was Cured Of HIV In 2008!

A Man Was Cured Of HIV In 2008, And Hardly Anyone Knows About It
May 27, 2014 | by Justine Alford
Source: HERE.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), has plagued the world for decades. Since the dawn of the epidemic, it is estimated that around 36 million people have died of HIV. Currently, over 35 million people are infected with the virus. With the majority of infections in the developing world where access to medical care is often limited, and treatments that control rather than cure, HIV represents a global, ongoing problem. However, back in 2008, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known more famously as “The Berlin Patient”, received a functional cure for HIV. What sets this man apart from others? Why did this treatment work, and could it be used to cure others? This article is going to briefly summarize this case study to give those who may not be aware of The Berlin Patient an insight into this intriguing situation.

Brown was diagnosed with HIV back in 1995 and he soon began taking anti-HIV drugs, or antiretroviral therapy. HIV treatments typically involve a cocktail of three drugs that target different stages of the HIV life cycle. This is because HIV can rapidly mutate and become resistant to a drug, but this becomes more difficult if several drugs are given at the same time. Brown seemed to be controlling infection with these drugs and did not present any illnesses associated with AIDS. In 2006 he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Since HIV RNA was not detectable in the patient it was likely that the two conditions were unrelated.

Brown was given chemotherapy to treat the cancer, but the drugs induced severe toxic effects and he had to stop taking his antiviral medication. This resulted in a rebound of viral replication. He was put back on the antiviral drugs, but a few months later the cancer came back. His doctors then carried out an experimental procedure to see if they could tackle both the cancer and the HIV at the same time. To do this, Brown was given two stem cell transplants from an unrelated donor. This donor happened to possess a very specific mutation.




HIV predominantly infects a type of white blood cell called a CD4+ T cell. These cells express a receptor called CD4 which is what HIV primarily uses for cell entry; HIV, and viruses in general, cannot replicate outside of a host cell. However, HIV also needs to use a co-receptor to get into cells, one of which is called CCR5. Around 1% of the Caucasian population has a mutation in the gene producing this receptor, called CCR5delta32 (referring to a deletion of 32 base pairs within the gene). This mutation results in a smaller than normal receptor which does not localize to the outside of cells. Individuals that are homozygous (carry two copies) for this mutation are typically immune to HIV infection since HIV can’t get inside target cells. The doctors therefore wondered whether replacing the patient’s cells with cells carrying this mutation would hamper HIV replication.

Remarkably, future tests demonstrated that Brown was cleared of HIV. He therefore stopped taking antiretroviral medication and has not needed to take it since. Many are reluctant to use the word “cure” when it comes to HIV, but this was considered to be a “functional cure”. One of the (many) difficulties in tackling HIV is that it hides away in cells, replicating at very low levels that aren’t picked up by the immune system. These “viral reservoirs” can become activated and kick start viral replication when treatment stops, representing a major hurdle in treatment. Many were worried this may be the case for Brown, and indeed tests carried out years later did find traces of HIV genetic material in some tissues. However, the tests were so sensitive that it is likely these were false positives.

Although this was a very exciting case for medicine, this cure is not applicable to the vast majority of people. Stem cell transplantation is not a simple, risk-free procedure. It’s invasive, dangerous and extremely expensive. The process involves destroying the immune system of the patient, and regularly results in death. It's only used when no other treatment is available. HIV infection on the other hand, is no longer the death sentence that it was decades ago. Current antiretroviral therapies are extremely effective at suppressing viral replication and prevent the onset of AIDS. If a person infected with HIV today receives proper treatment, they have a normal life expectancy. So as fascinating as this case is medically, don’t expect it to become common practice.

Proposed Device Could Capture Unlimited Renewable Energy From Earth's Infared Emissions

Two devices have been proposed to turn the Earth's night-time infrared emissions into a source of power. At the moment the idea is a series of calculations rather than one prototype, let alone two, but the thought experiments alone were enough to win publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A crucial component of one idea is work forgotten since the late 1960s.

A team at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences set out to take on the challenge of how to produce clean, renewable energy at night for regions dependent on solar power. Theoretically speaking it is possible to generate energy wherever there is a difference in temperature. This includes the heat radiated back to space at night in the infrared part of the spectrum.

"Sunlight has energy, so photovoltaics make sense; you're just collecting the energy. But it's not really that simple, and capturing energy from emitting infrared light is even less intuitive," says lead author Dr Steven J. Byrnes.

Source: HERE

Women Scientists You Need To Know

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

More HERE

Forget the Placebo Effect: It’s the ‘Care Effect’ That Matters

Source: HERE

.Americans spend $34 billion a year on so-called alternative medicine — botanical pills, acupuncture, energy healing, and the like — despite the fact that few of these techniques are backed by any science. Study after study has rejected the ability of such treatments to cure. But the same studies routinely find that treated patients do wind up feeling better. For example, a randomized, controlled trial of Chinese herbs on women with ovarian cancer found no effective difference between the herbs and a dummy pill — because there was some improvement with both. A double-blind trial of saw-palmetto pills for men with enlarged prostates produced similar results. What gives?

The obvious answer is the placebo effect. We’ve known for decades that when sick people are given a treatment, even if it’s just a sugar pill, their condition often improves. But that can’t be the whole story, if only because the size of the effect varies wildly from one study to the next. One clue to a better answer is found in research led by Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School: Patients with irritable bowel syndrome were told they’d be participating in a study of the benefits of acupuncture — and one group, which received the treatment from a warm, friendly researcher who asked detailed questions about their lives, did report a marked reduction in symptoms, equivalent to what might result from any drug on the market. Unbeknownst to them, the researchers used trick needles that didn’t pierce the skin.

Now here’s the interesting part: The same sham treatment was given to another group of subjects — but performed brusquely, without conversation. The benefits largely disappeared. It was the empathetic exchange between practitioner and patient, Kaptchuk concluded, that made the difference.

IT WAS THE EMPATHETIC EXCHANGE BETWEEN PRACTITIONER AND PATIENT THAT MADE THE DIFFERENCE.


What Kaptchuk demonstrated is what some medical thinkers have begun to call the “care effect” — the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health. Scientific or no, alternative practitioners tend to express empathy, to allow for unhurried silences, and to ask what meaning patients make of their pain. Kaptchuk’s study was a breakthrough: It showed that randomized, controlled trials could measure the effect of caring. But there was already abundant evidence from nursing science to suggest a healing power in the interaction between practitioner and patient. A study in Turkey found that empathetic nurses improved the symptoms of patients with hypertension. Midwestern cancer patients who received massages slept better and had less pain.

Of course, nurturing is no replacement for science — care won’t shrink a tumor or set a broken bone. But mainstream medicine could stand to learn something important about caring from the alternative forms. Suffering people reflexively seek care, but in mainstream medicine, “care” tends to mean treatment and nothing more. Many patients who really need empathy and advice are instead given drugs and surgery.

OF COURSE, NURTURING IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR SCIENCE.

Back in 2002, The New England Journal of Medicine published a paper showing that arthroscopic knee surgery for arthritis worked no better than a placebo, though 650,000 such operations were being performed a year. Knee doctors protested: They knew from personal experience that their patients felt much better after this procedure. These patients had come to them with their pain; the surgeons provided care in the form they knew best — surgery — and the patients’ pain decreased. But as with the saw palmetto and Chinese herbs, the surgery itself wasn’t the thing that helped. In the years since, other trials have confirmed the study’s findings and silenced the protests. It’s reasonable to think that the act of caring may be what led to the improvements.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all yearn for care when we suffer. When we can’t get genuine caring, we seek out the medical version: spendy and sometimes even counterproductive treatments. Some $210 billion is wasted annually on overtreatment, according to the Institute of Medicine, while a Medicare study found that overly aggressive treatment kills some 30,000 people a year. As a result, the number of U.S. adults who die from too much medicine is now higher than the number who die for lack of it.

If we’re going to fix our broken health system, we’ll have to solve the problem of overtreatment. To do that, we need to stop thinking of care as just another word for treatment and instead accept it as a separate, legitimate part of medicine to be studied and delivered. People who need care (in the nonmedical sense of the word) shouldn’t have to search outside of science-based medicine to get it.

Nathanael Johnson (nathanaeljohnson.org) is the author of the new book All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier.

Actress Scientists

Source: HERE.

An Inspiring 7-Year-Old Girl Gives Lego the Takedown It Deserves

Lego might seem like a simple children's toy company, but a letter from a 7-year-old girl named Charlotte will open your eyes to a glaring problem within the company.

Charlotte's father posted his daughter's letter to Lego on the internet this week, and it's gone totally viral:

Image Credit: TheSocietyPages.org

The full text of the letter:

"Dear Lego company:
My name is Charlotte. I am 7 years old and I love legos but I don’t like that there are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls.
Today I went to a store and saw legos in two sections the girls pink and the boys blue. All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks.
I want you to make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!
Thank you.
From Charlotte."

Even though Charlotte loves legos, she knows there's something wrong with the boy/girl ratio of available sets. And she's totally right.

For a company who's message is rooted in the power of a child's imagination, you'd think Lego would be working to allow every single one of their customers to expand their imagination without limits. This 7-year-old has done an amazing job at accurately pointing out a problem within the Lego company. Now let's see how Lego responds.

Source: HERE.

Inspirational figure: Evariste Gallois

Evariste Gallois was a 19thC French mathematician who had made major contributions to the theory of equations before he died at the age of 20, shot in a duel. Whatever the reasons behind the duel (the story says it was over a woman's honor), Galois was so convinced of his impending death that he stayed up all night writing letters to his Republican friends and composing what would become his mathematical testament, the famous letter to Auguste Chevalier outlining his ideas, and three attached manuscripts. That night he invented group theory--one of the most basic and important concepts of modem mathematics. Galois used his new concept to prove that equations of the fifth degree--quintics--and higher could never be solved. Because his ideas were so radical it took 150 years for mathematicians to work out their implications.
Hermann Weyl, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, said of this testament, "This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind."
Early in the morning of May 30, 1832, he was shot in the abdomen and died the following day in the Cochin hospital, Paris after refusing the offices of a priest.
His last words to his brother Alfred were: "Don't cry, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty."

A cheap and easy-to-use pill could help combat malaria - which kills nearly 2m people a year in poor countries.

Source HERE

Combined pill to combat malaria

Malaria is spread by mosquitoes A cheap and easy-to-use pill could help combat malaria - which kills nearly 2m people a year in poor countries.The pill combines a classic malaria drug amodiaquine with a newer medicine containing artemisinin, which comes from a Chinese plant. Developed by pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, patients need only take it twice a day - other regimes require as many as eight pills a day. The malaria parasite has developed growing resistance to current drugs. Malaria Malaria kills between up to 2m people a year, and affects 500m A child dies of malaria every 30 seconds in Africa An estimated 40% of the world population, mostly living in the world poorest countries, is at risk Malaria is the leading cause of death among the under-five children in sub-Saharan Africa It is thought that part of the reason for this is that current treatments require patients to take a large number of pills, so many often do not complete the course properly. This leaves them vulnerable to recurrences of the disease, but also allows the parasite, which often it not totally killed off, to modify, and develop resistance. Dr Allan Schapira, of the World Health Organization, said: "It seems to be a simple thing just to put two drugs together in one pill, but it really is an important step forward because it makes it much easier for people to take. "It's very good news. It could have a major impact on the effectiveness of treatment." Africa to benefit Four main malaria drugs are used around the world, and often one drug will work in one country, but not in another. The WHO recommends using those classic medications together with an artemisinin-based newer drug. The new drug, developed in collaboration with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), is likely to be most effective in parts of Africa - where a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds - and Indonesia. It is hoped the drug will cost less than $1 per three-day treatment for an adult, and 50 cents for a child. There is already a combination tablet for malaria, using another of the four classic malaria drugs - lumefantrine. However, that therapy still involves taking eight pills a day and is more than twice as expensive as the new combination pill. Dr Bernard Pecoul, DNDi Foundation Executive Director, said: "One of the key goals of the DNDi's development strategy was to create a drug that is simple to use, at a cost below a dollar."The World Health Organization estimates malaria affects up to 500m people world-wide each year.

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This scientist has saved one BILLION lives!

This scientist Richard Lewisohn (July 12, 1875 - August 11, 1961)'s work led to the storage of blood in blood banks, a discovery that is credited with saving over 1 billion lives!

Richard Lewisohn
(July 12, 1875 - August 11, 1961)

Before him, physicians in the United States, during the 1880s, transfused the milk of cows and goats into humans - a treatment that would also be banned due to the negative outcomes. Real breakthroughs came in the early 1900s as physicians began to match blood by types, based on Karl Landsteiner's work, and to experiment with storing it. The discovery of a means to store blood outside the body without it clotting (coagulating), was the key. Prior to this discovery, blood transfusions used the "direct" method, requiring the donor and the recipient to be side by side for the transfusion. The ability to store blood for later use was revolutionary, and led to the establishment of a worldwide system of blood banks. 

Source: HERE 

This scientist has saved over one MILLION lives

Jonas Salk's vaccine has saved over one million lives (1,010,000).

"During the first half of the 20th century, no illness inspired more dread and panic than did polio. It came in epidemics and mainly infected children in the summer, creating great scares for parents. Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. The virus enters the body through the mouth and multiplies in the intestine. Initial symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs. Most infected patients recover, but in a minority of patients, the virus attacks the nervous system. One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis (usually in the legs). [...] For parents, the Salk vaccine was a godsend, with active polio cases plummeting by almost 90 percent in the first two years following its introduction. Polio has now been virtually eradicated in countries using Salk's vaccine. "

 Source: HERE

This scientist has saved one BILLION lives!

This scientist Karl Landsteiner discovered that different people's blood had different characteristics that made it "incompatible" with other people's blood that didn't carry those same traits. He discovered the A, B, and O blood types. His discovery of the differences and identification of the groups that were alike made it possible for blood transfusions to become a routine procedure. This paved the way for many other medical procedures that we don't even think twice about today, such as surgery, blood banks, and transplants.
Over 1 Billion Lives Saved So Far!
Source:  HERE

Karl Landsteiner
 (June 14, 1868 - June 26, 1943)

These scientists have saved three BILLION lives!

These scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the Synthetic Fertilizer, have saved over 2,720,000,000 lives! (yes that is over two billion lives!).
Source:  HERE

Carl Bosch (August 27, 1874 - April 26, 1940)

Fritz Haber (December 9, 1868 - January 30, 1935)

Sugar-Powered Biobattery Has 10 Times the Energy Storage of Lithium

Researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully created a sugar-powered fuel cell that has an energy storage density of 596 amp-hours per kilo — or “one order of magnitude” higher than lithium-ion batteries. This fuel cell is refillable with a solution of maltodextrin, and its only by products are electricity and water. Read more: http://ow.ly/sTGxJ