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Category: biotech/medical – Page 207

Tactile sensors are less important than the order of learning experiences for robotic hands, study shows

How does a robotic arm or a prosthetic hand learn a complex task like grasping and rotating a ball? The challenge for the human, prosthetic or robotic hand has always been to correctly learn to control the fingers to exert forces on an object.

The and nerve endings that cover our hands have been attributed with helping us learn and adapt to our manipulation, so roboticists have insisted on incorporating sensors into robotic hands. But–given that you can still learn to handle objects with gloves on– there must be something else at play.

This mystery is what inspired researchers in the ValeroLab in the Viterbi School of Engineering to explore if tactile sensation is really always necessary for learning to control the fingers.

Humans have a third set of teeth: Scientists discover medicine to grow them

Imagine a world where losing a tooth doesn’t mean living with dentures or undergoing expensive implants. It might sound like science fiction, but researchers in Japan are on the verge of making this dream a reality. A groundbreaking discovery suggests that humans possess a third set of teeth —dormant tooth buds that typically never develop.

This revolutionary finding could transform dental care as we know it. Scientists have identified a way to activate these dormant tooth buds through a newly developed medication. If successful, this treatment could enable people to regrow lost teeth, making dentures and implants a thing of the past.

Let’s dive into the science behind this discovery and explore how it might change the future of dentistry.

How the brain decodes changes in the pitch of our speech to shape meaning

To explore how the brain deciphers the melody of speech, researchers worked with the rare group of patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of epilepsy treatment. While these patients actively listened to an audiobook recording of “Alice in Wonderland,” scientists tracked activity in multiple brain regions in real time.

Using the intracerebral recordings from the electrodes deep in the patient’s brain, researchers noted the Heschl’s gyrus section processed subtle changes in voice pitch — not just as sound, but as meaningful linguistic units. The brain encoded pitch accents separately from the sounds that make up words.

The author says the research also revealed that the hidden layer of meaning carried by prosodic contours — the rise and fall of speech — is encoded much earlier in auditory processing than previously thought.

Similar research was conducted in non-human primates, but researchers found those brains lacked this abstraction, despite processing the same acoustic cues.

By unlocking the hidden layer of speech, the team discovered how the brain processes pitch accents, revealing profound implications for various fields.

“Our findings could transform speech rehabilitation, AI-powered voice assistants, and our understanding of what makes human communication unique,” the author said.

Continue reading “How the brain decodes changes in the pitch of our speech to shape meaning” | >

Uncovering the mechanism for polar sequestration of the major bacterial sugar regulator by high-throughput screens and 3D interaction modeling

Professor Kenji Osafune (Department of Cell Growth and Differentiation) and his team of researchers have devised an effective means to grow iPS cell-derived kidney progenitor cells, paving the way for renal regenerative therapies to become a reality. The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Modern medicine continues to be hampered by the lack of effective treatments for (AKI) and (CKD). Regenerative medicine, such as cell replacement therapies, represents a new hope for patients. Yet, such therapeutic approaches require large-scale production of the necessary cells, which had remained a challenge until this discovery.

Using a mouse model of AKI, the research team first demonstrated the therapeutic potential of human iPS cell-derived nephron progenitor cells (hiPSC-NPCs). When these cells were transplanted into the kidneys of AKI mouse models induced by an anti-cancer drug, cisplatin, the animals’ survival was vastly improved by preventing the deterioration of kidney function.

One-year-old infants already display compositional abilities, study finds

To understand complex objects, humans are known to mentally transform them and represent them as a combination of simpler elements. This ability, known as compositionality, was so far assumed to require fluency in language, thus emerging in childhood after humans have learned to speak and understand others.

Researchers at Aix-Marseille University-CNRS and PSL University École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales-CNRS recently explored the possibility that compositionality is based on simple processes and might therefore already be present in infants. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, provides evidence that infants as young as 1-year-old already possess basic compositional abilities.

“We are generally interested in understanding what is in place before language takes off in an infant’s mind,” Isabelle Dautriche, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “One of the central properties of language is compositionality, which is a long word that simply means the capacity to put words together to understand sentences.

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