Articles of Impeachment

[greenstinky]

A Good place to store fun reads

[greenstinky]

Surprising Evidence Suggests The Uterus Plays A Role In Cognition

A new study conducted in rats is challenging the longstanding dogma that the uterus has no function outside of pregnancy. A series of experiments conducted by scientists at Arizona State University suggests that the organ influences working memory – the type of short-term information processing involved in carrying out complex tasks such as learning, reasoning, and navigation.

“People talk a lot about the ovary-brain connection because we know now that estrogen and progesterone have such marked effects on things like memory. But we hope that scientists will start thinking about the uterus-ovary-brain system instead of just the ovary-brain system,” Heather Bimonte-Nelson, senior author of the research published in Endocrinology, told Discover.

According to Bimonte-Nelson’s team, about one-third of women have had their uterus removed by age 60, and a majority of these surgeries occur prior to the onset of menopause. The most common reasons for hysterectomy are fibroids (painful benign lesions), endometriosis, uterine prolapse, hyperplasia (when the uterine lining is abnormally thick, causing heavy bleeding), and cancer. And because the available evidence up until this point implied that a uterus had no purpose outside childbearing, physicians are usually keen to recommend a hysterectomy to post-childbearing women (or those uninterested in children) when doing so could improve quality of life.

Approximately one-half of women who undergo hysterectomies have their ovaries removed (oophorectomy) as well, whereas the other half retain their ovaries. In addition to producing eggs, the ovaries are the female body’s primary source of estrogen and progesterone, hormones that regulate the menstrual cycle and have widespread impacts on other organs and physiological processes.

In their study, the team randomized rats into four interventions: a hysterectomy group, a hysterectomy plus oophorectomy group, a no surgery control group, and a sham surgery group, which allowed the researchers to separate the potential effects of invasively opening the abdominal cavity from those of actual organ removal. Each group contained 14 to 15 rats.



After a six-week recovery period, each animal’s working memory was tested in a water maze with eight passages radiating from a central point. At the end of four passages were hidden platforms the rats could crawl onto. The rats were placed into the center of the maze, and if they swam to a platform, they were pulled from the maze. Each rat was then placed into the maze again so they could learn which arms contained platforms.

Source: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me...Hyr5FqM-C4

[toma]

Wow, that's gonna be a nice chat! I will bring my AP text, see if that brings another level of hilarity. LOL
Immediately, it made me think of early onset and standard Alzheimers and any possible link there...to, say...I don't know, maybe as a possible means by the deep state to control women and keep them subjugated through Osteoporosis and Alzheimers...Naaaaaaaaaah, too sciFi channel, huh? LMAO

[greenstinky]

Pig-Monkey Chimeras Have Been Brought to Term For The First Time
MICHELLE STARR9 DEC 2019
Pigs engineered to have a small amount of monkey cells have been brought to full term and were even born alive, surviving for a few days after birth. Although the piglets died, it is claimed the experiment - performed in China - marks a major milestone for the future of lab-grown organs.

"This is the first report of full-term pig-monkey chimeras," Tang Hai of the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing told New Scientist.

The research is part of an ongoing effort to develop animals - whether they are sheep or pigs - that can grow human organs we could then harvest for transplants, a process called xenogeneic organogenesis.

Research has been done on both pig and sheep embryos with transplanted human stem cells; in both cases, the embryos continued to develop until the experiment was deliberately terminated.

That's because, due to ethical concerns, these chimeras - organisms that incorporate the genetic material of another species - cannot be cultivated or studied in the later stages of embryonic development. Some scientists worry that some of the human stem cells could end up in other parts of the animal or even in its brain, with unintended consequences.

For that reason, in this experiment the team used stem cells from crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis). These were imbued with fluorescent proteins so that they would glow under fluorescent light, and derived to produce fluorescing embryonic cells.

These cells were then injected into over 4,000 five-day-old pig embryos fertilised using IVF; the modified pig embryos were subsequently implanted into sows.

This fiddly and painstaking work produced just 10 piglets that made it to full term and were born alive. And only two of these were chimeric, with between one in 1,000 and one in 10,000 functional monkey cells to pig cells.

The monkey cells had migrated to the heart, liver, lungs, spleen and skin of the piglet hosts, but were not found in other organs, such as testes and ovaries, due to the low rate of chimerism, the researchers said.

Sadly, before a week was out, the piglets died - not just the two chimeras, but the other eight normal piglets, too. Because all the pigs died, Hai told New Scientist, the cause of death likely had less to do with chimerism, and more to do with IVF - a procedure that is notoriously tricky in pigs.

The low chimerism rate is also somewhat discouraging. However, the researchers remain optimistic. Although the birth rate was low, and the pigs didn't survive, the team now has a wealth of data they can apply to future experiments.

The scientists are planning to try again, increasing the chimeric cell ratio. And they believe their data may help other scientists working in the field.

"Here, we have used monkey cells to explore the potential of reconstructing chimeric human organs in a large animal model," they wrote in their paper.

"We believe this work will facilitate the development of xenogeneic organogenesis by providing a better understanding of the processes of xenogeneic recognition, fate determination, and the proliferation and differentiation of primate stem cells during porcine development.

"The findings could pave the way toward overcoming the obstacles in the re-engineering of heterogeneous organs and achieve the ultimate goal of human organ reconstruction in a large animal."

The research has been published in Protein & Cell.

source = https://www.sciencealert.com/pig-monkey-...2zUYE2PSAw