Elated as they stood in the cold on a November evening in 2008, packs of millennials celebrated the election of their new president. Barack Obama was the great hope of a great new generation, the largest in the world at 78 million strong. The millennials held their “HOPE” signs high. Fifty-one percent of them voted in the 2008 election, and...
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Over the last 50 years, we’ve seen a steady decline in trust in politics and institutions, especially in the western world. The millennial generation is, as of today, the most untrustworthy cohort since such things have been tracked. Early Millennials, born from 1982-89, have shown to be disinterested in political action and social advocacy. They only vote when pushed by...
Science breaks the blood-brain barrier
Drugs that could fight cancer and other conditions in the brain have long been prevented from entering that tightly guarded place by the blood-brain barrier, a densely interlocked network of cells lining the brain’s blood vessels to screen out harmful substances. Recently, scientists at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto broke through that cordon for the first time without using...
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Breaching the blood-brain barrier safely opens the possibility of new protocols for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, various kinds of tumors and even some psychiatric conditions, using drugs, payload-carrying viruses or nanoparticles loaded with DNA to carry out genetic therapy.
Save the mind by saving the body
Most researchers seeking to cure or prevent Alzheimer ’s disease target ways to prevent or remove plaque that builds up in the brain’s blood vessels. But researchers at the Salk Institute took a different approach: Instead of taking on the disease directly, they decided to cure its chief cause — old age. Treated with an experimental drug called J147 (left),...
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The drug, modeled after cellular compounds that retard aging, could be effective in up to 99 percent of Alzheimer’s cases.
Tuning up the Internet
As much as people love watching pet videos or sending wedding photos over the Internet, they’re frustrated by slow transmission speeds. Now, Canadian researchers have invented a way to transmit optical information as much as six times faster while using less energy. At Université Laval in Québec, engineers have created an electronic component called a “tunable filter” that responds up...
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The device, which could be improved to surpass current filters’ speeds by 10 times, brings us closer to three-dimensional Internet video and vastly greater cloud-storage capacity.
Where pain comes from
A decade ago, science isolated the rare genetic mutation that renders a person able to feel touch but unable to feel pain. But using drugs to replicate the condition as a way to manage chronic pain has proven ineffective. So, scientists at University College London engineered mice that carried the human version of the genetic defect and searched for ways...
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The pharmaceutical industry has new competition. Cataloging the human genome opens research to bypass synthetic drugs and find ways to manipulate the body’s own mechanisms to heal and manage chronic conditions.