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Groove is in the brain: Music supercharges brain stimulation

Music affects us so deeply that it can essentially take control of our brain waves and get our bodies moving. Now, neuroscientists at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute are taking advantage of music’s power to synchronize brain waves to boost the effectiveness of a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a promising tool for both basic brain research and treating neuropsychiatric disorders.

Specifically, institute affiliate Jessica Ross and colleagues used TMS pulses to induce movements in people’s hands—a common testing ground for new ideas in the field. By carefully timing those pulses to music, the team found they could double the impact of TMS.

“Because there’s this really strong connection to movement, music can engage motor pathways in the brain. If you’re listening to a certain kind of rhythm, there are going to be very specific times at which your brain is most ready for the TMS effect,” said Ross, an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Medicine.

Smart device uses AI and bioelectronics to speed up wound healing process

As a wound heals, it goes through several stages: clotting to stop bleeding, immune system response, scabbing, and scarring. A wearable device called “a-Heal,” designed by engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to optimize each stage of the process. The system uses a tiny camera and AI to detect the stage of healing and deliver a treatment in the form of medication or an electric field. The system responds to the unique healing process of the patient, offering personalized treatment.

The portable, wireless device could make wound therapy more accessible to patients in remote areas or with limited mobility. Initial preclinical results, published in the journal npj Biomedical Innovations, show the device successfully speeds up the healing process.

Cytokine Profile in Predicting the Effectiveness of Advanced Therapy for Ulcerative Colitis: A Narrative Review

Cytokine-targeted therapies have shown efficacy in treating patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), but responses to these advanced therapies can vary. This variability may be due to differences in cytokine profiles among patients with UC. While the etiology of UC is not fully understood, abnormalities of the cytokine profiles are deeply involved in its pathophysiology. Therefore, an approach focused on the cytokine profile of individual patients with UC is ideal. Recent studies have demonstrated that molecular analysis of cytokine profiles in UC can predict response to each advanced therapy. This narrative review summarizes the molecules involved in the efficacy of various advanced therapies for UC. Understanding these associations may be helpful in selecting optimal therapeutic agents.

NASA Satellite Swarm’s Expanded Mission Powers Smarter Operations

NASA continues to study how autonomy will assist future exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other worlds. As exploration continues to evolve, future spacecraft swarms will one day “see” and communicate with each other autonomously, navigating new destinations more efficiently.

The success of NASA’s Starling mission extension, called Starling 1.5+, shows greater autonomy in space missions can give spacecraft a higher degree of independence, allowing them to make decisions and coordinate actions without the constant oversight of human operators. Improving this technology opens doors to operating swarms of spacecraft farther from Earth, like at the Moon or Mars, where communications are limited, and autonomy could play a critical role.

Mars Perseverance rover data suggests presence of past microbial life

A new study co-authored by Texas A&M University geologist Dr. Michael Tice has revealed potential chemical signatures of ancient Martian microbial life in rocks examined by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The findings, published by a large international team of scientists, focus on a region of Jezero Crater known as the Bright Angel formation—a name chosen from locations in Grand Canyon National Park because of the light-colored Martian rocks. This area in Mars’s Neretva Vallis channel contains fine-grained mudstones rich in oxidized iron (rust), phosphorus, sulfur and—most notably—organic carbon. Although organic carbon, potentially from non-living sources like meteorites, has been found on Mars before, this combination of materials could have been a rich source of energy for early microorganisms.

“When the rover entered Bright Angel and started measuring the compositions of the local rocks, the team was immediately struck by how different they were from what we had seen before,” said Tice, a geobiologist and astrobiologist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

“Quantum Computing Works at Room Temperature”: Physics Breakthrough Terrifies Tech Giants While Computing Revolution Explodes

Researchers have long faced a significant hurdle in the development of practical quantum devices: the requirement for ultra-cold environments to maintain

A more precise CRISPR platform enables large-scale gene screening in live mouse brains

Over the past few decades, biomedical researchers and neuroscientists have devised increasingly advanced techniques to study and alter neurophysiological processes. These include CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a sophisticated tool to edit specific genes in some animals, including mice, rats, zebrafish and fruit flies.

Researchers at University of California, San Francisco led by Martin Kampmann recently introduced a more precise CRISPR screening platform that can be applied directly in living tissue, enabling the screening of a larger number of genes at once. The new technique, called CRISPR screening by AAV episome sequencing (CrAAVe-seq), was introduced in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience.

“Human cell-based systems are valuable but cannot fully capture the complexity of the brain,” Biswa Ramani, co-first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Mice often remain the most effective model for many because their brains preserve the diversity and organization of cell types that cannot be replicated in a dish.”

Novel gene therapy for hereditary hearing loss developed at Tel Aviv University

Scientists from the Gray Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences at Tel Aviv University introduced an innovative gene therapy method to treat impairments in hearing and balance caused by inner ear dysfunction. According to the researchers, “This treatment constitutes an improvement over existing strategies, demonstrating enhanced efficiency and holds promise for treating a wide range of mutations that cause hearing loss.”

The study was led by Prof. Karen Avraham, Dean of the Gray Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences, and Roni Hahn, a PhD student from the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. The study was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey Holt and Dr. Gwenaëlle Géléoc from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), the National Institutes of Health/NIDCD and the Israel Science Foundation Breakthrough Research Program. The study was featured on the cover of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.

Prof. Avraham explains: “The inner ear consists of two highly coordinated systems: the auditory system, which detects, processes, and transmits sound signals to the brain, and the vestibular system, which enables spatial orientation and balance. A wide range of genetic variants in DNA can affect the function of these systems, leading to sensorineural hearing loss and balance problems. Indeed, hearing loss is the most common sensory impairment worldwide, with over half of congenital cases caused by genetic factors. In this study, we aimed to investigate an effective gene therapy for these cases using an approach that has not been applied in this context before.”

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