Almost fifty percent of people over the age of 85 have Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that is not considered part of the normal aging process by the U.S. National Institute on Aging. Statistics on the NIA website also reveal that there is no cure for the degenerative disease. Recently, according to scientists at University of York and Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, tricking the brain into halting the degeneration of neurons could be a dramatic step in finding a remedy for neurodegenerative diseases—especially Alzheimer’s disease. Research in the latest issue of Nature Chemical Biology looks at Alzheimer’s disease in relation to neurodegeneration involving the death of neurons.

Starve a fever, feed a traumatic brain injury. Recent studies by clinician-scientists from New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical Center found that patients with traumatic brain injury, or TBI, have a higher survival rate when their caloric intake is increased. Patients of TBI are fed through a gastric feeding tube inserted through a hole in the stomach for long-term eternal nutrition. The sooner the supplemental nutrition plan is initiated the better chance a patient has for survival, up to four times, researchers say.

A portable chip that detects everything from food-borne diseases, pathogens and pollution in water, to AIDS, cancer, hepatitis, drug-abuse, and flu in humans in a little over an hour, is set to be commercially released in no more than three years, experts say.



The OptoLabCard European Union-based project, uses a device otherwise known as a “lab-on-a-chip,” making it possible to perform full size laboratory tests on site. The chip, lined with a negative thick photoresist, is more than just cost and time effective.



“The uses for these devices are almost endless…….and the market is huge” said Jesus M. Ruano-Lopez who is the coordinator of the OptoLabCard Project in Spain at Ikerlan-IK4.