Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A new speech prosthetic offers hope for those with speech-impairing neurological disorders.

By converting brain signals into speech using high-density sensors and machine learning, the technology represents a significant advancement over current slower communication aids.

Though still in early stages, the device has achieved a 40% accuracy in decoding spoken data during limited trials and is moving towards a cordless design.

Summary: Researchers challenge a 75-year-old neuroscience hypothesis, suggesting dendrites play a crucial role in brain computation, not just the neuronal soma.

Experiments conducted under non-physiological conditions revealed that neuron features like firing frequency and stimulation threshold are controlled by dendrites.

This groundbreaking discovery implies that dendrites could be pivotal in learning processes and may even influence our understanding of brain states and degenerative diseases.

Equivalent to an 80-year-old human reverting to the age of 26.

A groundbreaking study into anti-aging has reported significant rejuvenation effects using exosomes, tiny particles which can be extracted from biological fluids such as blood plasma.

Old and young rat. Image generated by DALL·E 3

Continue reading “New treatment reverses epigenetic age of rats by 67.4%” »

This research is still in the initial stages and needs further investigation before it becomes part of the pacemakers used today.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle successfully designed a leadless pacemaker that can be partially charged using energy generated by the beating heart. The research findings will be presented at the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Scientific Sessions to be held later this weekend, a press release said.

Pacemakers are small devices that detect a patient’s heartbeat and send electrical pulses to the heart if it needs to be paced. According to the AHA’s report, as many as 93,000 pacemaker and defibrillator procedures were performed in the US in 2018.

The new material mimics human tissue under X-rays, allowing for more accurate and safer imaging of tumors, bones, and organs.

Researchers at the University of Surrey have developed a new type of flexible X-ray detector.

Credit: Dr Prabodhi Nanayakkara.

Continue reading “New flexible X-Ray detectors could revolutionise cancer treatment” »

The breakthrough opens the way for designing and building more complex structures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on patterns of infectious disease spillover. Climate and land-use changes are predicted to increase the frequency of zoonotic spillover events, which have been the cause of most modern epidemics. Characterising historical trends in zoonotic spillover can provide insights into the expected frequency and severity of future epidemics, but historical epidemiological data remains largely fragmented and difficult to analyse. We utilised our extensive epidemiological database to analyse a specific subset of high-consequence zoonotic spillover events for trends in the annual frequency and severity of outbreaks. Our analysis, which excludes the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, shows that the number of spillover events and reported deaths have been increasing by 4.98% (confidence interval [CI]95% [3.22%; 6.76%]) and 8.7% (CI 95% [4.06%; 13.62%]) annually, respectively. This trend can be altered by concerted global efforts to improve our capacity to prevent and contain outbreaks. Such efforts are needed to address this large and growing risk to global health.

Harnessing and controlling light plays a pivotal role in technological advancement, impacting energy harvesting, computation, communications, and biomedical sensing. Nevertheless, in real-world scenarios, the intricate behavior of light presents challenges for efficient control.

Physicist Andrea Alù draws a parallel between the behavior of light in chaotic systems and a game of billiards, where slight variations in the cue ball’s launch result in different ball trajectories on the table.

“In billiards, tiny variations in the way you launch the cue ball will lead to different patterns of the balls bouncing around the table,” said Alù, Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center and distinguished professor at CUNY. “Light rays operate in a similar way in a chaotic cavity. It becomes difficult to model to predict what will happen because you could run an experiment many times with similar settings, and you’ll get a different response every time.”

Researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute have conducted a study revealing that residing in areas with average air pollution levels is associated with a 56% increased risk of Parkinson’s disease when compared to those living in regions with the lowest level of air pollution.

The study, which was recently published in Neurology – the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology – was conducted to identify national, geographic patterns of Parkinson’s disease and test for nationwide and region-specific associations with fine particulate matter.

“Previous studies have shown fine particulate matter to cause inflammation in the brain, a known mechanism by which Parkinson’s disease could develop,” says Brittany Krzyzanowski, PhD, a researcher at Barrow Neurological Institute, who led the study. “Using state-of-the-art geospatial analytical techniques, we were, for the first time, able to confirm a strong nationwide association between incident Parkinson’s disease and fine particulate matter in the U.S.”