Lab: Electric implant could allow people with crippling injuries to walk again – Metro Newspaper UK

By daniellenierenberg

PATIENTS with life-changing injuries could walk again thanks to a pioneering electrical spinal implant. The device has proven effective in trials on macaque monkeys and researchers in Canada are hopeful it will be available for use on human patients in as little as a decade.

Lead researcher Dr Vivian Mushahwar, of the University of Albertas Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, said: We think that intraspinal stimulation itself will get people to start walking longer and longer, and maybe even faster.

That in itself becomes their therapy. Theres been an explosion of knowledge in neuroscience over the last 20 years.

Were at the edge of merging the human and the machine.

The device features hair-like electrical wires that plunge deep into the spinal grey matter, sending electrical signals to trigger the networks that already know how to do the hard graft.

To work alongside the implant, the team created a map to identify which parts of the spinal cord trigger the hip, knees, ankles and toes, and the areas that put movements together.

People tend to think the brain does all the thinking, but the spinal cord has built-in intelligence, said Dr Mushahwar.

A complex chain of motor and sensory networks regulate everything from breathing to bowels, while the brain stems contribution is basically go! and faster!

Your spinal cord isnt just moving muscles, its giving you your natural gait. Being able to control standing and walking would improve bone health, improve bowel and bladder function, and reduce pressure ulcers, the researchers say.

For those with less severe spinal injuries, an implant could be therapeutic, removing the need for months of gruelling physical therapy regimes that have limited success, they add. The team are now focused on refining the hardware further by miniaturising an implantable stimulator and getting approval for human trials.

The first generation of the implants will require a patient to control walking and movement through physical means, but longer term, the implants could potentially include a direct connection to the brain, they say.

Dr Mushahwar said it has the power to transform lives.

Imagine the future, a person just thinks and commands are transmitted to the spinal cord. People stand up and walk. This is the dream, she said.

23million The number of lives saved globally by vaccines between 2000 and 2018, as estimated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

WHILE they may not be as talkative as Jungle Books King Louie, it turns out wild orangutans have some serious communication skills.

Researchers at the University of Exeter in Devon have identified 11 vocal signals and 21 physical gesture types that the apes use to communicate with one another.

The findings reveal orangutans are highly responsive to communication, reacting either before gesturing ended or in less than a second in 90 per cent of communications.

The team studied video footage of 16 orangutans consisting of seven mother-child pairs and a pair of siblings, noting a total of 1,299 communicative signals 858 vocal signals and 441 gestures.

The sounds included the kiss squeak a sharp kiss noise created while inhaling the grumph (a low sound lasting one or two seconds made on the inhale), the gorkum (a kiss squeak followed by a series of multiple grumphs) and the self-explanatory raspberry.

Gestures included beckoning, stamping, pushing out a lower lip, shaking objects and presenting a body part.

The eight identified goals or requests of their communications are acquire object, climb on me, climb on you, climb over, move away, decrease intensity, resume play and stop that.

Orangutans are the most solitary of all the apes, which is why most studies have been done on African apes, and not much is known about wild orangutan gestures, said University of Exeter scientist Dr Helen Morrogh-Bernard. We spent two years filming more than 600 hours of footage of orangutans in the Sabangau peat swamp forest in Borneo, Indonesia.

While some of our findings support what has been discovered by zoo-based studies, other aspects are new and these highlight the importance of studying communication in its natural context.

More signals are likely to be identified in the future, the researchers say.

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WE MAY like to put our feet up at Christmas but for older people, even a short period of reduced physical activity could lead to significant loss of muscle mass and gains in body fat.

Just a fortnight of walking fewer than 1,500 steps a day could have a severe impact making daily tasks harder and kick-starting chronic health conditions a University of Liverpool study found.

The team measured the effect of two weeks inactivity on 47 participants, around half of whom were elderly. All lost muscle size, strength and bone mass. But the older volunteers also experienced a big drop in cardio fitness and mitochondrial function the way cells produce energy.

If the gym is hard to get to, people should be encouraged to just meet 10,000 steps, said researcher Juliette Norman. Even this can guard against reductions in muscle and bone health as well as maintaining healthy levels of body fat.

EXPERIENCING stress at a young age could help you live longer. Juvenile Caenorhabditis elegans worms that produce more oxidants and free radicals, which are associated with stress and ageing, last longer, US researchers at the University of Michigan found. Study leader Daphne Bazopoulou said early exposure may make you better able to fight stress later in life.

AGE can be predicted by protein levels in the blood. Using blood samples from more than 4,000 18- to 95-year-olds, scientists at Stanford University, California, found 373 proteins that peak and trough across a lifespan. The blood test can also show how physiological and real ages compare, which could flag those more at risk of ageing-related illnesses or reveal the ageing effect of drugs and treatments.

To brag flagrantly is, most of us realise, unbecoming, and so a favoured mitigation tactic has emerged: the humblebrag. This is a way of masking a boast, either in a feigned complaint or as fake modesty, such as its so exhausting staying in touch with all my friends or if someone told me Id pass with first-class honours, Id never have believed them. Unfortunately for humblebraggers, the tactic is too transparent to work. Last year, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Harvard Business School found humblebraggers are less liked, and perceived as less competent, because they appear insincere.

Astronomers have found magnetic field strengths near supermassive black holes can be as strong as their intense gravitational fields. These fields are able to expel material from the vicinity of the black hole to form highly energetic outflows called jets. However, this process is not acting on material that has already passed beyond the black holes event horizon, where not even light can escape. Such material would need to be accelerated to the speed of light to escape, which would require an infinite amount of energy. No magnet, however powerful, could provide this.

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