Scientists have momentarily restored a faint twinkle of life to dying cells in the human eye.
In order to better understand the way nerve cells succumb to a lack of oxygen, a team of US researchers measured activity in mouse and human retinal cells soon after their death.
Amazingly, with a few tweaks to the tissue's environment, they were able to revive the cells' ability to communicate hours later.
When stimulated by light, the postmortem retinas were shown to emit specific electrical signals, known as b-waves.
These waves are also seen in living retinas, and they indicate communication between all the layers of macular cells that allow us to see.
It's the first time deceased human donor eyes have ever responded to light in this way, and it has some experts questioning the irreversible nature of death in the central nervous system.
"We were able to wake up photoreceptor cells in the human macula, which is the part of the retina responsible for our central vision and our ability to see fine detail and color," explains biomedical scientist Fatima Abbas from the University of Utah.
"In eyes obtained up to five hours after an organ donor's death, these cells responded to bright light, colored lights, and even very dim flashes of light."
After death, it's possible to save some organs in the human body for transplantation. But after circulation ceases, the central nervous system as a whole stops responding far too quickly for any form of long-term recovery. READ MORE...
Money, and the dogged pursuit of it, have been known to change an individual. There’s even a term for it — affluenza — which is a combination of affluence (wealth) and influenza (disease). According to Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, it’s the “the damage done — to our health, our families, our communities, and our environment — by the obsessive quest for material gain.” But, how exactly does money affect rich people?
Wealthy people may have less empathy than those belonging to lower socio-economic classes — the latter was found to be better at reading others’ facial expressions, which is considered an important marker for developing empathy, according to research published in the journal Psychological Science.
“Lower-class environments are much different from upper-class environments,” study co-author and social psychologist, Michael Kraus, told Time. “Lower-class individuals have to respond chronically to a number of vulnerabilities and social threats. You really need to depend on others so they will tell you if a social threat or opportunity is coming and that makes you more perceptive of emotions.”
This lack of empathy in wealthy people has also been recorded in other social experiments: drivers of luxury cars were found to give pedestrians the right of way three times less than those driving less expensive vehicles; wealthy car drivers were also four times more likely to drive rashly and cut off others on the road, according to psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
Another experiment from the same group of researchers involved two individuals playing Monopoly, in which one player received more fake money at the start of the game than the other. The player with more money initially showed discomfort with the inequality of the game rules, which slowly dissipated as the game went on: the more fake wealth the player accumulated, the more aggressive he got toward the other player, made fun of him and showed off his wealth, which had been distributed unequally in the first place.
Even being exposed to money-related words and phrases can affect individuals’ thought processes and make them more prone to taking unethical decisions, such as lying, according to a study by Harvard University and the University of Utah researchers. “Even if we are well-intentioned, even if we think we know right from wrong, there may be factors influencing our decisions and behaviors that we’re not aware of,” study co-author and University of Utah professor Kristin Smith-Crowe told MarketWatch. READ MORE...
