Profile: 933d97b0...
**'Dream Glove' Boosts Creativity During Sleep**
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Is there something about dreaming that enhances our creativity? Or is it just sleep itself? Scientists say they're closer to an answer, thanks to an unusual study that used an electronic glove to guide people's dreams while they slumbered. To conduct the work, researchers invited 50 volunteers, mostly students and professors, to either stay awake or take a nap in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those in the nap group laid down with an eye mask, while wearing a Dormio, a glovelike device with sensors that measure heart rate and muscle tone changes to track sleep stages. A computer linked to the device relayed audio cues to inspire the wearers to dream about specific subjects -- a process called "targeted dream incubation."
Overall, volunteers who dreamt about trees scored 78% higher on the creativity metrics than those who stayed awake just observing their thoughts and 63% higher than those who stayed awake thinking about trees. Participants who napped without hearing the prompt still got a creativity boost, but those who dreamed about trees still performed 48% better than them. The researchers also noticed that the volunteers used the content of their dreams to answer the tests. The person who dreamed that their limbs were made of old wood wrote a story about an oak king with a wood body, for example. The person who dreamed of becoming bigger than trees, meanwhile, listed "toothpick for a giant" as an alternative use for a tree. The research was published in Scientific Reports.
(https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png" class="embedded-image" loading="lazy"> (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F23%2F05%2F16%2F047215%2Fdream-glove-boosts-creativity-during-sleep%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook)
Read more of this story (https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/05/16/047215/dream-glove-boosts-creativity-during-sleep?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed) at Slashdot.
**Gene Editing Makes Bacteria-killing Viruses Even More Deadly**
An anonymous reader shares a report: Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug -- SNIPR001 -- is currently in clinical trials. The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream.
The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15-20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections. The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance. After testing the ability of these eight engineered phages to kill the E. coli panel alone and in combination, they decided that a group of four of them was the most effective, naming the mixture SNIPR001. But four engineered phages do not make a drug; the team confirmed that SNIPR001 remains stable for five months in storage and that it does not affect any other gut bacteria.
(https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png" class="embedded-image" loading="lazy"> (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F23%2F05%2F08%2F182227%2Fgene-editing-makes-bacteria-killing-viruses-even-more-deadly%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook)
Read more of this story (https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/05/08/182227/gene-editing-makes-bacteria-killing-viruses-even-more-deadly?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed) at Slashdot.