There are a variety of causes for the occurrence of blindness, such as the lack of enough blood supply for the retina. If it doesn’t get proper amounts of oxygen, the result will be permanent blindness. The chances of preventing it depend on when the doctors realize if a patient’s retina is not receiving sufficient oxygen; the sooner the better. Prof. Bradley Nelson and his team of researchers at ETH Zurich seem to have found out a solution.

Earlier the team created microrobots, measuring a millimeter in length and one third of a millimeter in width, which could be used to deliver medication or remove scar tissue in the eye. Magnetic fields can be used to guide these tiny robots through the vitreous fluid.

They coated these microrobots with nanospheres made of a dye, which fluoresces when exposed to a specific wavelength of light. This fluorescence fades faster if there is higher amount of oxygen surrounding the dye. Now the team can inject these oxygen sensing dye-coated robots into the vitreous fluid to move them to the surface of the retina. They would then apply light to observe the dye’s fluorescence, and thereby determine the amount of oxygen around the area. The robots can be removed from the eye later on by magnetically attaching them to an inserted needle.

According to ETH, other methods now available for determining the oxygen levels within the eye are not sensitive enough. The method using microrobots have already been tested in water samples with different O2 levels and were found to be a success.

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Scientists at Nottingham University are currently working on a new method of treating children suffering from lazy eye. The new treatment uses video games and special glasses, which is already proving to be very effective.

The problem with the current treatment is that children are required to wear an eye patch over their good eye for extended periods of time. The results are usually poor, as patients are reluctant to put the patch on. In comparison the new video game based treatment is not only fun but appears to work even after just a few short sessions.

Developers working on the project have created ‘shutter glasses’. The lens covering the good eye shows static content while the other eye sees the action in the foreground. When combined, users experience the game just as they would playing normally.

Nottingham University are now teaming up with Sony Europe to adapt some current Playstation 3 games for use in the ground breaking treatment.

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As we get older, our cognitive skills go down. There will be problems related to memory, attention, perception and problem solving will never be as easy as when we used to be younger. But scientists from the University of Iowa appear to have found a way to stop and even reverse these effects of aging. They are claiming that cognitive skills of test subjects aged 50 and over have been improved by playing a specific video game.

Prof. Fredric Wolinsky and his team assigned a group of volunteers to do 10 hours of computer-based crossword puzzles (as a control). While three other groups were told to play a video game known as Road Tour. One group played in a lab for 10 hours, another one for 14 hours, and the last group for 10 hours at home. The Road Tour game briefly shows a vehicle and then asks the player to find it from a rotating circle of vehicles. There will be distractions and higher levels of course will be more challenging.

After a year of tests, it has been found that an average of three years’ worth of cognitive improvement has been achieved by those who played the game for 10 hours, and that increases to four years for the 14 hour group. Meanwhile, the control group showed improvement in “concentration, nimbleness with shifting from one mental task to another, and the speed at which new information is processed”.

Of course, it is a known fact that the best way to keep the brain in good working condition is to give it work. And the more variety of work it gets the better. Experts have suggested many ways, such as reading, meditation, exercise, working with numbers and more, to keep the brain in good form. And now you can add one more to that list.

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Itching, how I hate you. Sometimes you itch for reasons like coming into contact with outside irritants, but other times you just think about itching or hear someone else talking about it and you start itching. So what exactly causes itching? According to Lian Hong and Xinzhong Dong, nueroscientists from John Hopkins, it is actually a specific neuron that causes the trouble.

A protein receptor called MrgprA3 on some neurons has nerve endings in the skin, when the signals are fired, you start to itch. To test their theory, scientists found a way to remove all MrgprA3 neurons from a group of lab mice and found that while the mice still responded to painful stimuli, they desire to itch was gone.

The testing with mice went a few steps further to prove that MrgprA3 only caused itching and wasn’t associated with other feelings, but botton-line, you can blame these neurons specifically for the desire to itch.

So what does that mean for us exactly? Nothing right now, but with the right amount of research, it isn’t impossible to think that they could engineer some kind of pill that could help with problematic itching by making it go away for a while.

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Optogenetics is the process which allows us to use light to activate neurons or other cells, a technology which is helping scientists to understand more about how the brain works. The procedure involves the delivery of light to the desired region in the brain and now that can be done more easily all thanks to the new LEDs you see above.

Currently, fiber optic cables wired to a test animal’s brain are used to deliver light. The new LEDs, measuring as small as single cells, can be injected into the brain using a micro-injection needle.

The lights are printed onto the end of an extremely thin flexible plastic ribbon which provides power to the LEDs via an energy-harvesting module mounted on top of the animal’s head. The module can be removed from the head when not being used, unlike using fiber optic cables which requires that the animal is tethered to a laser that supplies light.

The image below shows LEDs in the brain of a test animal.

The LEDs were developed by a team led by Prof. John A. Rogers from the University of Illinois and Prof. Michael R. Bruchas from Washington University. Check out the video below to know more about their study and do leave your thoughts below. Would you like to light up your brain?

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From the development of diagnostic devices to uses in physical therapy and drug delivery and more, Nanotechnology is finding numerous applications in the medical world. Now a group of scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed Nanosponges which are capable of soaking up lethal toxins from the bloodstream.

Each sponge features a biocompatible polymer core which is packed inside a natural red blood cell (RBC) membrane. This makes the Nanosponges similar in appearance to RBC and capable of evading the host’s immune system. Each sponge is about 3,000 times smaller than an RBC; therefore thousands of sponges can be coated with membrane taken from a single cell.

In the bloodstream these nanosponges will attract “pore-forming toxins” produced by snake and insect venom, and bacteria such as MRSA and E. coli. Since the number of nanosponges in the bloodstream will be much higher than that of real red blood cells, the toxins end up attaching themselves mostly to the sponges. Then the sponges with attached toxins reach the liver where they are metabolized ensuring no harmful effects.

When they tested on mice by inoculating them with the nanosponges, 89 percent of them survived lethal doses of alpha-haemolysin toxin from MRSA. And unlike other anti-toxins, nanosponges in their stock form can take care of a variety of toxins.

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Rehabilitation for recovering from strokes can be frustrating for the patients. Their hands might not move in a way they wish, but now a new system called Synergistic Physio-Neuro Platform (SynPhNe) being developed by Dr. John Heng and his PhD student Banerji Subhasis at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. The new method seems to be better than conventional therapy in helping stroke victims.

SynPhNe (“symphony”, in case you are wrestling with the word) works by guiding patients through exercise and it also monitors them via a headset and an arm band, which are connected to a computer. When a patient fails to mimic an on-screen arm action SynPhNe shows why he or she is unable to perform the task. This is done via the headset’s neural sensors which keep track of brain activity and the sensors in the arm band which monitor the arm’s muscular activity. With the knowledge about the problem, the patient can then try to self-correct the action.

Here’s a bit more about it in the words of Banerji Subhasis:

“For example, if a patient wants to move his wrist, but his wrist is not moving, SynPhNe will be able to show him that his mind had sent out a signal, his muscles have received it, but because supporting and opposing muscles are clenched, he will need to relax the opposing muscle in order to move his wrist. Another common problem is that the patient may feel stressed while undergoing therapy, which affects his muscle control. So by showing the stress level on the screen, SynPhNe will teach the patient how to control his breathing and posture to regain his balance and composure so that he can continue with the exercises”.

Improvements have been shown by ten patients who used the system, and its makers are planning to test it on 50 other people. Their plan is to form a start-up company and make the system available for in-home use.

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Treatment for addiction to illicit drugs such as cocaine includes several processes like detoxification, medication, behavioral therapy, relapse prevention and all these take time. But a new study is suggesting that cocaine addiction can be switched on and off by the application of laser light to the brain. The research was done at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco.

Via genetic engineering researchers inserted rhodopsins (light-sensitive proteins) into the neurons of the prefrontal cortex of rats. Then through implanted fiber optic cables they activated those neurons by using pulses of laser light. The result was that the drug-seeking behavior in cocaine-addicted rats was turned off. This happened because the prefrontal cortex deals with impulse control and it is less active in addicted rats (and addicted humans).

Meanwhile, when they switched off the light to deactivate the neurons addicted behavior was switched on in non-addicted rats.

According to the scientists, these same effects can be brought about using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The folks over at NIH will soon start treating the prefrontal cortex of cocaine-addicted humans with TMS. Check out the video to know more about their research.

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For decades, scientists have known about the potential of boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) as a treatment for cancer. The only problem was that there wasn’t a delivery agent that would target the tumor without causing damage to the surrounding tissue. Now the folks over at the University of Missouri (MU) appear to have solved that problem.

In BNCT, a tumor is injected with non-radioactive boron-10 isotope capture agent which can capture epithermal neutrons to result in fission of the boron-11 nuclei into alpha particles and lithium ions that kill the tumor. Tumor-selective boron delivery agents were not available, until now it seems. Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne from MU apparently has designed a boron chemical which captures neutron to release lithium and helium atoms that destroys cancer cells from the inside without causing any harm to healthy cells.

According to Hawthorne, “A wide variety of cancers can be attacked with our BNCT technique. The technique worked excellently in mice. We are ready to move on to trials in larger animals, then people. However, before we can start treating humans, we will need to build suitable equipment and facilities. When it is built, MU will have the first radiation therapy of this kind in the world”.

That’s certainly good news for people suffering from the deadly disease. You can check out more details about the study by Hawthorne and his team here.

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The iPhone (or any other smartphone) certainly makes people’s lives a whole lot easier with all sorts of apps, but this new app called the BioAid, from the folks over at the University of Essex, is going to be a blessing for people with a hearing impairment. It converts the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad into hearing aids.

The BioAid app makes use of the iPhone’s microphone, audio processing capability, and earphones. All that a user has to do is install the app and choose a setting that will allow them to hear properly. And since the app has six fixed settings, each one of which has four fine-tuning sub-settings, users will be able to target specific frequencies. And that’s not all. The app can bring up low sounds while simultaneously turning down loud noises in the earphones.

In theory, there’s no need for those hearing aids worth hundreds of dollars and no need to visit the hearing aid specialist. There is that need to own an iDevice, though. It will be a great help if there is also an Android app available. Hopefully in the future we might see BioAid available with tiny behind-the-ear gadgets or smartwatches, and its settings might even be adjusted remotely.

A beta version of the BioAid is available for free on iTunes. It is certainly an interesting idea, though it probably is no match for specialized hearing equipment at this stage. What do you think?

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