Went on my midnight run. Very relaxing.

LOL poor Ken? Or poor Barbie? :P

Going for a run again. This is the start of my summer body

expose-the-light:

Top 10 Biggest Brain Damaging Habits

1. No Breakfast

People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level.This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.

2. Overreacting

It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.

3. Smoking

It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.

4. High Sugar consumption

Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.       

5. Air Pollution

The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.

6. Sleep Deprivation

Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain

7. Head covered while sleeping

Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.

8. Working your brain during illness

Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.            

9. Talking Rarely

Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.

10. Lacking in stimulating thoughts

Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.

(Source: beauty-beauty)

Those eyes…

(Source: asianhoneys)

genannetics:

New in Nature: Remote-controlled genes

Radio control, to be more precise.  Researchers bound specially engineered nanoparticles to cellular ion channels (in mice), that, when heated (using radio waves), opened said channels, triggering a signal cascade switching on an insulin production gene.  The result was a significant increase in insulin production in the mice with the nano-particle system.

Jeffrey Friedman, a molecular geneticist at the Rockefeller University in New York and lead author of the study, says that in the short term, the results will lead to better tools to allow scientists to manipulate cells non-invasively. But with refinement, he thinks, clinical applications could also be possible.

While the research published this week was done on bio-engineered tumor cells (which, of course, cannot be done in humans), the radio waves used penetrated deep into tissue, causing no harm to the modified cells or surrounding cells.  These results make this technique very promising for the future of nanotechnology in human medicine.

genannetics:

In the fight against HIV, gene therapy looks promising

Pictured: “HIV particles assemble at the surface of a white blood cell called a macrophage.”  (via A Step Forward For Gene Therapy To Treat HIV : Shots - Health Blog : NPR)

We’ve known for decades that as good as HIV anti-viral drug therapies are, HIV is clever, hiding away only to reactivate when therapy is stopped. HIV: treatable, not curable.  However, this mantra may change with gene therapy.

Gene therapy is the use of DNA as a treatment for disease.  There is a variety of different strategies, but in the case of HIV they use genetically engineered T-cells, programmed to seek out and kill HIV infected cells.  It’s working.  And there are two promising aspects to this research:

1.  They’ve been observing patients on this therapy for as many as 16 years now, with no signs of side-effects (the main worry would be cancer; in the early days of gene therapy, cancer was a common side-effect).

2.  They still find these modified T-cell fighters circulating in the patients after all this time, meaning they “perpetuate” in the patients and keep fighting the infection.

Based on these promising long term findings, the team of researchers working this project recently launched a new patient trial:

This time, Tebas says, they hope to see evidence that the engineered T cells are actually reducing patients’ hidden reservoirs of HIV infection. Or — dare they hope? — eliminating them altogether.

Really amazing research.  Gene therapy has come a long way.