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Medical researchers have saved the life of a seven-year-old boy by growing genetically-modified replacement skin for him. The young German boy suffered from a deadly congenital condition called epidermolysis bullosa, a condition that cases the sufferer’s skin to tear and blister, as if it had been burned. The procedure not only saved his life, but he’s now able to participate in sports with his classmates.

By 2015 the patient had been admitted to the burns unit at Bochum Children’s Hospital in Germany: at that point, two-thirds of his skin was either was either badly damaged or outright missing, and traditional treatments failed to yield results, including skin grafts from a donor.
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 Researchers in Belgium have developed a technique that allows coma patients that are in a minimally-conscious state to become aware enough to communicate — for up to a week — using mild electrical stimulation to their brains.

Building on the results of a 2014 study that showed that electrical stimulation of the brain could briefly help raise the state of awareness in coma patients, a research team from Belgium’s University of Liège performed a similar experiment using longer sessions, where 16 participants, either in a minimally conscious or vegetative state, were given 20-minute treatments for five days.
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Our medical science has become quite adept at extending the human lifespan, leading to the presence of centenarians as commonplace in our culture. However, the race to find ways to keep the population healthy as it grows older – to stave off the actual effects of aging – has been a difficult one. Recently, researchers at Moscow State University have made a successful test of a new medication that slowed the aging process and extended the lifespan of mice, a medication that may very well work to improve the conditions of humans as we grow older.
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Brain implants that allow the direct interface between the human brain and machines have been in development for some time now. However, aside from the daunting task of figuring out how to couple solid-state electronics with what amounts to a biological computer, another problem faced by researchers is the body’s reaction to foreign objects: implanted electrodes work just fine when initially inserted, but over time scar tissue builds up over them, hampering their ability to both read and transmit electrical signals between themselves and their targeted neurons. However, researchers at Harvard Medical School have come up with a new method of implantation that may be able to avoid this problem, allowing for long-term use of such implants.
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