Dry Powder.

Hydrogen therapy.

As you know, nothing says ‘Santa Claus’ quite like a subscription to News Items. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, 6 days a week, almost every week. Act now and you’ll get the ‘Santa Claus Gift Discount’ (20% off). Satisfaction, loosely defined, is guaranteed. And it couldn’t be easier. Simply click on the button below.

---

1. A team of Chinese researchers has developed an anti-aging hydrogen therapy that could effectively rewind age-related changes in the body and potentially prevent geriatric diseases. Scientists have known for some time that hydrogen – the lightest and simplest of the elements – can slow or even turn back the clock on the aging of cells. But turning this knowledge into a viable therapy has been a tough nut to crack. In a paper published by the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, the Chinese researchers said they have overcome the problem of how to safely deliver a high concentration of hydrogen molecules for long enough to have a therapeutic effect. (Source: scmp.com)

---

2. Neuroscience is going high-def. Researchers have developed a series of technological improvements that dramatically increase the spatial resolution of an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The improvements allow an fMRI to image voxels—the 3D equivalent of pixels—that are less than half a millimeter on each side. In doing so, they have passed an important threshold relative to the structure of the human brain, to roughly match the scale of functional clusters of neurons. The NexGen 7T scanner is a ten-fold improvement in resolution over 7T MRI machines that are currently available to researchers. The finer scale could be useful for many research questions. For example, higher resolution images could provide answers about the broad functional organization of some brain areas and the activity of neurons in different layers of other areas. (Source: spectrum.ieee.org)