The dying process usually begins well before death actually occurs.
Death is a personal journey that each individual approaches in their own unique way. Nothing is concrete, nothing is set in stone. There are many paths one can take on this journey but all lead to the same destination.
As one comes close to death, a process begins; a journey from the known life of this world to the unknown of what lies ahead.
Most of us would rather not think about what happens to our bodies after death. But that breakdown gives birth to new life in unexpected ways, writes Moheb Costandi.
“It might take a little bit of force to break this up,” says mortician Holly Williams, lifting John’s arm and gently bending it at the fingers, elbow and wrist. “Usually, the fresher a body is, the easier it is for me to work on.”
Williams speaks softly and has a happy-go-lucky demeanor that belies the nature of her work. Raised and now employed at a family-run funeral home in north Texas, she has seen and handled dead bodies on an almost daily basis since childhood. Now 28 years old, she estimates that she has worked on something like 1,000 bodies.
A team of British scientists has released a major study that could represent a breakthrough in the treatment of human neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team said that it had halted brain cell death in mice by using a drug-like compound that was injected into the animals’ stomachs through a mouth tube.
The team induced a neurodegenerative disease caused by abnormal prion proteins — the nearest model of human disorders that can be found in animals — before treating one group with the compound. According to the study, the mice who were treated remained free of symptoms like memory loss, impaired reflexes, and limb dragging five weeks later. The treated mice also lived longer than the untreated mice.
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This undated file image provided by Merck & Co., shows a cross section of a normal brain, right, and one of a brain damaged by advanced Alzheimer’s disease. A dramatic shift is beginning in the disappointing struggle to find something to slow the damage of Alzheimer’s disease: The first U.S. experiments with “brain pacemakers” for Alzheimer’s are getting under way. Scientists are looking beyond drugs to implants in the hunt for much-needed new treatments. (AP/Merck & Co.)
Scientists believe they have discovered a new reason why we need to sleep – it replenishes a type of brain cell.
Sleep ramps up the production of cells that go on to make an insulating material known as myelin which protects our brain’s circuitry.
The findings, so far in mice, could lead to insights about sleep’s role in brain repair and growth as well as the disease MS, says the Wisconsin team.
The work is in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Dr Chiara Cirelli and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin found that the production rate of the myelin making cells, immature oligodendrocytes, doubled as mice slept.
The increase was most marked during the type of sleep that is associated with dreaming – REM or rapid eye movement sleep – and was driven by genes.
In contrast, the genes involved in cell death and stress responses were turned on when the mice were forced to stay awake.
Precisely why we need to sleep has baffled scientists for centuries. It’s obvious that we need to sleep to feel rested and for our mind to function well – but the biological processes that go on as we slumber have only started to be uncovered relatively recently.
In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors’ wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries.
Galen’s texts wouldn’t be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections — often in public — surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren’t as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.
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This anatomical specimen dating to the 1200s is the oldest known in Europe.
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Sometime in mid-July, Anthony Dowdell put on his favorite plaid shirt, drove his Dodge pickup to the parking lot of a Sam’s Club in Linden, N.J., leaned back in the driver’s seat, and shot himself.
Nobody knows exactly when the 39-year-old, who went by the online moniker “Dare Dellcan,” took his life. Nobody knows why the normally cheery creative director and design company owner did it. And for the first couple of days, few people besides the police officers who found his body on July 16 knew he was dead.
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Hi everybody. Cara Santa Maria here. Perhaps you’re one of the eight million Americans who claim to have had a near-death experience. Did you see a bright white light at the end of a tunnel? Maybe you floated above yourself in an out-of-body experience. Overwhelmingly, people who’ve had so-called near-death symptoms report a calmness, lack of fear, and feeling of being one with the universe.
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