An important innovation for communication of neuroscience to the public! “Sloan’s planetarium film premiered during the weeklong BrainFest event in Seattle in March… Sloan says he plans to make the film freely available and hopes it will eventually be shown at planetariums around the world.”
Neuroscientists should take a cue from astrophysicists and use planetariums to inspire awe, argues Tyler Sloan. His new film takes a first step.
Ependymoma accounts for 6.7% of all pediatric brain tumors, the majority of which occur in patients under 5 years of age.1 Though chemotherapeutic regimens have been employed with some benefit,2–6 the general frontline treatment strategy for localized disease includes maximal safe surgical resection followed by adjuvant focal radiotherapy (RT). Ependymomas can arise anywhere in the brain or spine, but the majority occur in the posterior fossa near the brainstem and other important cranial nerves and structures.7 Tumor location and the young age of patients pose technical challenges in achieving local control while minimizing late effects of treatment.
Proton radiotherapy (PRT) is a form of particle radiation that has unique properties which allow for conformal delivery of radiation dose to the target with reduced dose to surrounding normal structures. This reduced radiation exposure to healthy tissues should minimize the incidence and severity of late adverse side effects, which can negatively impact the quality of life of childhood cancer survivors.8,9 We have previously published early clinical outcomes of 70 pediatric patients with ependymoma who were treated with PRT at our institution.10 In this study, we report mature clinical outcomes in a large proton treated cohort—including disease control outcomes, patterns of failure, the incidence of neurologic injury and secondary malignancies, and the effects of clinical variables on outcomes.
When cancer cells learn to survive a drug designed to stop them, where do you turn next? A new study points to an unexpected possibility: a medicine used to treat parasitic worms.
Researchers combined the deworming medicine with a targeted lung cancer drug. In laboratory experiments, the pairing reduced resistant cancer-cell viability. In mice, tumors took longer to double in size with the combination than with either drug alone.
The idea was to find a weakness in cells that had learned to withstand treatment, then put that weakness under pressure.
The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years.
The rock we live on will probably be long gone by then, but Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune might not make it either.
Traditional models assumed that the outer solar system would survive for billions of years before a passing star might disturb it. However, recent modeling by theoretical astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Jim Fuller at the California Institute of Technology and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan shows that the dying sun could trigger a relatively rapid and chaotic upheaval.
One of the questions that stayed with me throughout my Ph.D. was surprisingly simple: Why are some tissues so much harder to break down with histotripsy than others? Histotripsy is a focused ultrasound technique that uses cavitation bubbles to mechanically break down tissue. Unlike thermal ablation, the goal is not to heat the tissue. Instead, the rapid activity of these bubbles creates mechanical stresses that progressively disrupt tissue structure.
This process can be very effective in many soft tissues. Fibrous tissues, however, can behave quite differently. This was especially interesting to me because my doctoral research was motivated in part by benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH tissue can contain substantial amounts of smooth muscle and collagen, and these fibromuscular components can make the tissue mechanically tough and more resistant to histotripsy.
To study that problem in a controlled way, we developed fibrous tissue-mimicking materials that reproduced important mechanical characteristics of prostate tissue and were intentionally difficult to break down. Once we had a material that resisted treatment, another question became increasingly important to me: If we deliver the same overall amount of ultrasound exposure, does it matter how that exposure is distributed in time?
A new battery binder—the glue that holds together a battery’s internal parts—could make lithium-ion batteries more environmentally friendly and easier to recycle without sacrificing performance.
By creating a binder that is fluorine-free and dissolves in water, engineers at the University of California San Diego showed that they can simplify both battery manufacturing and recycling by cutting down on toxic ingredients, energy use and waste. Batteries made with the new binder performed just as well as conventional lithium-ion batteries.
The advance, published Oct. 9 in Nature Communications, was a collaboration between the lab of Zheng Chen, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and John Muldoon at Toyota Research Institute of North America.
Electronic devices are no longer limited to conventional systems with a screen, keyboard and processing components. Over the past decades, some electronics engineers have been developing thin electronic fibers that could be used to create wearable devices or flexible sensors for robots.
Despite their potential, electronic fibers can be difficult to assemble reliably into components or devices for specific applications. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at Donghua University in China introduced a new manufacturing method to build customizable circuits directly inside electronic fibers.
“This work grew out of a simple question: Can a soft fiber be more than a carrier for electronics and instead become the circuit itself?” Hengda Sun, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “For embodied intelligence, electronic systems need to conform to complex, moving robot bodies while combining sensing, information processing and interaction.”