1 . PRACTITIONERS

4 . Research into social robots has shown that machines that are at the cutting edge of interaction can respond to feelings and emotionally care for the weak, the elderly and children.

Robin was designed as a companion robot to provide emotional support for children receiving medical treatment. Robin explains medical procedures to them, plays games and tells stories, and during treatment distracts them to reduce their sense of pain. The robot uses AI to understand other people’s feelings, remembering facial expressions and conversations to build dialogue for follow-up sessions. In trials at the Wigmore Medical (UK) Pediatric Clinic in Yerevan, Armenia, the team found that Robin led to a 34% decrease in stress and an increase in happiness of 26% in the 120 children who interacted with him at least once.

Healthcare robots could all benefit from displaying emotional intelligence, both recognizing and responding to human emotions, and to some extent, managing them. The problem with this is the fear that human jobs may be lost as robots become better at handling social situations.

Population trends suggest that the demand for robots to work alongside people in care situations will grow over time. By 2050, the number of people aged 65 and over globally will be 1.6 billion (17%), roughly twice the proportion of what it is today. An extra 3.5 million care workers will be needed and that will include emotionally intelligent robots.

Today’s simple systems are being trained to meet that demand. This includes a little wheeled robot that can guess how you are feeling from the way you walk, and the robot from the University of Lincoln in the UK —who helps elderly people to stay physically and mentally active.

The impact of social robots on our lives to date has been tiny. But new models are being introduced that could make the breakthrough. Human emotions are difficult to define, but as trust in robots increases, breaking down the psychological barrier becomes easier to imagine.

5 . An internship (实习) is a great way to gain valuable experience in your chosen future career. Here, we offer some fantastic worldwide internships with opportunities to help you gain some really unique and diverse experience.

Dental Internship in South Africa

Join our dental elective to boost your dental work experience. You'll work with a professional dentist and assist in day-to-day tasks at check-up camps. Compare the dental care between your home country and South Africa.

Requirement: Interns should be studying dentistry(牙科)

Journalism Internship in Ghana

See all aspects of Ghanaian life by reporting on day-to-day life and taking part in a varied journalism internship in Accra. Work for a newspaper, radio or TV station and get hands-on experience in the media industry.

Requirement: Good English speakers and general level of fitness

Medical Internship in Palampur

If you are considering a career in medicine or nursing, this is the medical internship for you. Based in northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, you will shadow local doctors and nurses and learn lots about the Indian medical system.

Requirement: Interns should have an interest in, or already be studying, a medical related course

Medical Internship in Romania

Take part in a highly rated medical internship on a mobile medical unit and within a children's hospital. Work in a variety of medical settings and with a mixture of cases, shadowing doctors and nurses and actively contributing to the care of the patients.

Requirement: Minimum requirement of a first aid certificate

6 . Researchers have successfully changed the blood type of a donated human lung by treating it with enzymes(酶) marking an important step towards making universal donor organs.

Blood types are largely defined by the presence or absence of certain sugar molecules (分子) called antigens(抗原) on the surface of cells. These can occur not just on the cells of the blood itself, but other tissues. If an antigen isn’t recognized by the body’s immune system, it will mount an attack on these cells. This leads to the rejection of transplanted organs from a donor with a different blood type.

People with the most common blood type, O, lack these antigens on their cells, so their organs can be accepted by people with other blood types. If all donor organs could be made type O, for example, the lungs from someone with blood type A, this could be beneficial.

To try this, Cypel and his team used a pair of enzymes in the human stomach to digest sugars. They found the enzymes could remove 97 percent of type A antigens in the lungs from a type A donor in 4 hours, which meant the cells had been effectively changed to blood type O.

After this treatment, the altered lungs were kept alive using a system known as ex-vivo lung perfusion (离体肺灌注), which supplies organs with nutritious fluid so they are ready for transplantation. To simulate a transplant, Cypel’s team added type O blood, which contains antibodies that would attack type A antigens, to the fluid supplying the lungs. The treated lungs had minimal antibody damage compared with untreated lungs.

Although cells rid of antigens tend to produce new ones over time, Cypel hopes the lack of antigens would last long enough for the body to get through the dangerous first few days and weeks after a transplant. The team now intends to test the procedure in animals. The study only looked at the effects of a simulated transplantation over the short term, which isn’t enough to assess whether the resurfaced antigens could eventually have a negative effect.

7 . On January 7, David Bennett went into the operating room at the University of Maryland Medical Center for a surgical procedure never performed before on a human. The 57-year-old Maryland resident had been hospitalized for months due to a life threatening disease. His heart was failing him and he needed a new one.

Bennett’s condition left him unresponsive to treatment and ineligible (不合格) for the transplant list or an artificial heart pump. The physician-scientists at the center, however, had another-also risky- option: transplant (移植) a heart from a genetically-modified pig.

“It was either die or do this transplant,” Bennett had told surgeons a day before the operation. “I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s also my last choice.”

It took the medical team eight hours to finish the operation, making Bennett the first human to successfully receive a pig’s heart. “It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before,” Barkley Griffith, who led the transplant team, told the New York Times.

While it’s only been five days since the operation, the surgeons say that Bennett’s new pig heart was, so far, functioning as expected and his body wasn’t rejecting (排斥) the organ. They are still monitoring his condition closely.

“I think it’s extremely exciting,” says Robert Montgomery, transplant surgeon and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who was not involved in Bennett’s operation. The result of the procedure was also personally meaningful for Montgomery, who received a heart transplant in 2018 due to a genetic disease that may also affect members of his family in the future. “It’s still in the early days, but still the heart seems to be functioning. And that in and of itself is an extraordinary thing. Up to now most experimental heart transplant procedures have been done between pigs and other animals. This is the first time that surgeons have taken it into a living human.”

8 . Healthy human skin is covered with bacteria (细菌) that are quick to settle in an open wound. To prevent these organisms from spreading through the body, which can permanently injure or kill a person, the infected wound may need to be cleaned and treated with antibiotics. Medical professionals typically identify infections by unwrapping and observing a wound or by swabbing (用拭子擦拭) it and conducting a laboratory test. But removing a wound dressing can slow down the healing process. Plus, observations are subjective, while swab tests take time and require that a patient be physically present.

To address these issues, some research teams are developing devices that sit under bandages and continuously monitor indirect signs of infection, such as changes in wound temperature or acidity. And scientists at the National University of Singapore have now created an even more direct infection sensor.

This sensor can detect an enzyme (酶) called DNase. The enzyme acts as a reliable infection indicator because disease-causing bacteria produce it in large amounts inside wounds, whereas bacteria on healthy skin do not—so testing for the substance reduces the chance of a false positive result. Furthermore, DNase builds up before other infection signs appear. The new alert system, nicknamed the“wireless infection detection on wounds” (WINDOW) sensor, was detailed in Science Advances.

WINDOWs enzyme-sensing parts rely on a material called DNAgel. There searchers developed a particular kind of DNAgel that remains stable in watery environments, such as the human body, but begins to break down in the presence of DNase. They connected this gel (凝胶) to a chip that senses when the gel responds by sending a signal to a smartphone.

Thus far, the team has exposed the DNAgel to wound swabs from 18 people’s wounds to see how much the material degraded in the presence of the bacteria. There searchers also used the device on six living lab mice whose wounds were exposed to the same bacterial species, and it successfully detected infections.

9 . Imagine a simple blood test that could flag most kinds of cancers at the earliest, most curable stage. Liquid biopsies could, in theory, detect a tumor (肿瘤) well before it could be found by touch, symptoms or imaging. Blood tests could avoid the need for surgeons to cut tissue samples and make it possible to reveal cancer hiding in places needles and scalpels cannot safely reach. They could also determine what type of cancer is taking root to help doctors decide what treatment might work best to destroy it.

Liquid biopsies are not yet in hand, because it is hard to find definitive cancer signals in a tube of blood, but progress in recent years has been impressive. Last year the journal Science published the first big prospective study of a liquid biopsy for DNA and proteins from multiple types of cancers. Though far from perfect, the blood test called CancerSEEK found 26 tumors that had not been discovered with conventional screenings.

Liquid biopsies can rely on a variety of biomarkers in addition to tumor DNA and proteins, such as free-floating cancer cells themselves. But what makes the search difficult, Ana Robles, a cancer biologist of the National Cancer Institute, explains, is that “if you have an early-stage cancer or certain types of cancer, there might not be a lot of tumor DNA,” and tests might miss it. The ideal blood test will be both very specific and very sensitive so that even tiny tumors can be found. To tackle this challenge, CancerSEEK looks for cancer-specific mutations (突变) on 16 genes, and for eight proteins that are linked to cancer and for which there are highly sensitive tests.

Simple detection is not the only goal. An ideal liquid biopsy will also determine the likely location of the cancer so that it can be treated. “Mutations are often shared among different kinds of cancer, so if you find them in blood, you don’t know if that mutation is coming from a stomach cancer or lung cancer,” says Anirban Maitra, a cancer scientist at the Anderson Cancer Center. To solve that problem, some newer liquid biopsies look for changes in gene expression. Such changes, Maitra notes, are “more organ-specific”.

On the nearer horizon are liquid biopsies to help people already diagnosed with cancer. Last year the government approved the first two such tests, which scan for tumor DNA so doctors can select mutation-targeted drugs. Scientists are working on blood tests to detect the first signs of cancer recurrence (复发) in patients who have completed treatment. This work is moving fast, but does it save lives?

That is the question companies such as Thrive and Grail must answer for their broadly ambitious screening tests. “These companies have to prove that they can detect early cancer and, more important, that the early detection can have an impact on cancer survival,” Maitra observes.

10 . Until the 1940s, blood transfusions (输血) often went wrong because some main blood-group systems had yet to be discovered. This phenomenon is now a thing of the past, but finding a well-matched donor can still be difficult, especially for patients with rare blood types. Recently, a team of British researchers announced a step towards solving this problem by successfully transfusing into two healthy volunteers red blood cells grown from appropriate stem cells donated by others.

By now, such manufactured red cells have been given only to those whose own stem cells had been the source. The stem cells used for this experiment, however, were extracted from blood donated in the normal way. Then, the harvested stem cells were grown and multiplied in a nutrient solution for about 20 days, which served to turn them into young versions of red blood cells called reticulocytes, which, once transfused, quickly develop into the real McCoy. The lab-made red blood cells would be expected to last longer in a receiver’s body than those from a normal transfusion, since transfused blood unavoidably contains some cells that are on their last legs. The next step is to measure how long the manufactured cells actually do last.

If they do indeed survive traditionally transfused cells, then receivers will not need frequent transfusions. That will help a lot. At the moment, patients with blood disorders such as sickle-cell disease and thalassemia may require a transfusion as often as every four to six weeks. As a consequence, some develop iron overload, which causes severe complications (并发症). Others end up forming antibodies against many blood types, which makes finding a matching donor harder.

If all goes well, the trial will be extended to more volunteers. But larger tests, including tests on actual patients, will be needed before this approach can be put into practice. Even then, the technique will probably be reserved for a favored few-those possessing rare blood types being at the head of the queue. Unless some unforeseen breakthrough occurs, making the cells in quantity will be challenging.