Table of Contents
Stem cell transplants could reverse diabetes
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Five hundred million people around the world live with diabetes. There are different types with different causes, but they all lead to people having too much sugar in their blood. If not well controlled, this excess glucose can cause damage throughout the body, putting people at risk for gum disease, nerve damage, kidney disease, blindness, amputations, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. .
For now, patients manage the condition with medications, insulin and lifestyle changes, but a new generation of treatments could reverse the disease. Details of the first woman treated for type 1 diabetes with Stem cells taken from your own body. They were announced last month. Previously, the 25-year-old needed significant amounts of insulin. Now she produces her own.
In April, a similar cell transplant allowed a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes to stop using insulin. It’s still early and challenges remain, including scaling up treatment, but the results so far are exciting.
Cancer vaccines
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Vaccines were one of the notable successes of the pandemic. Now scientists hope that the same mRNA technology that underpins the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 shots can be used to train the immune system to recognize and attack cancer.
These injections work by providing instructions to the patient’s cells to produce a particular protein that acts as a signal for the immune system to target. In this case, scientists are tailoring the vaccine design to proteins on the surface of a patient’s cancer cells.
In August, hundreds of patients participated in the world’s first personalized trial of an mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma and Trials are being carried out with pancreatics.intestine and other cancers. And since the protection offered by vaccines can be long-lasting, it may be possible to use the approach as a preventive measure, for those at high genetic risk for breast or ovarian cancer, and to prevent the cancer from coming back.
AI will help detect cancer faster
Robert Booth
The next four years are expected to see rapid advances in the use of artificial intelligence to better diagnose serious diseases such as lung cancer and brain tumors, which should mean longer lives.
The technology is being rolled out in hospitals, including several in the north of England, to detect cancers faster and prolong lives. The system, which scans x-rays and prioritizes cases where it detects something suspicious that the human doctor may have missed, has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy by 45% and diagnostic efficiency by 12%. according the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust.
Hannah Devlin
In the two years since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the night sky in a series of images that are Technicolor masterpieces. It is also enabling unprecedented discoveries about the origins of stars, black holes, the evolution of the universe, and the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos.
The telescope is so powerful that it has observed galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 300 million years old, whose light has traveled for 14 billion years (almost the age of the universe itself) to reach us. Capturing the light of the first stars to illuminate the sky (long considered the holy grail in astronomy) now appears to be within our reach. Some of these discoveries are upending conventional theories: The first galaxies appear much brighter or larger than expected, and the first black holes appear to have snowballed together more quickly than current models can explain.
In science, strange and unexpected findings are not viewed with disappointment: they are the fuel that drives the next revolution. This telescope promises to do just that for our understanding of the history of the universe and whether humans are alone in it.
Renewable energy is gaining pace
Jillian Ambrosio
The world’s transition to green energy is gaining pace. A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global energy watchdog, found that over the next six years renewable energy projects are on track to be implemented at three times the rate in the six years previous. This would put the world on track to exceed 2030 targets set by governments to create total global renewable energy capacity roughly equal to the existing energy systems in China, the EU, India and the United States combined.
In Europe, the solar energy boom caused market prices to turn negative for a record number of hours this summer. Wind energy developers are preparing to launch a new generation of floating offshore wind turbines to better capture more powerful wind speeds further offshore.
The rise of green electricity will be led by clean energy programs from China and India, which would help displace fossil fuel consumption from two of the world’s most polluting countries.
China will have more than half of the world’s renewable energy by the end of the decade, according to the IEA, which is already believed to have slowed China’s pipeline of future coal power plants. The number of new permits for coal plants in China has fallen from 100 GW in 2022 and 2023 to just 12 new projects for a total of 9.1 GW in the first half of 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor.