New studies on astronauts and space biology bring humanity one step closer to the final frontier.
The Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) package of manuscripts, data, protocols, and code represents the largest-ever compendium of data for aerospace medicine and space biology.
In Arizona, cases of valley fever — a disease spread by a fungus that lives in the dirt — have more than doubled in the past year, 12News reported. The spike in cases may be related to conditions brought about by the ongoing overheating of our planet, officials said.
Valley fever is a lung infection that causes symptoms similar to those that come with pneumonia. These symptoms include fatigue, cough, fever, headache, shortness of breath, night sweats, muscle aches, and rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Though more than 60% of people who are infected with valley fever do not get sick from it, in some cases the infection is severe enough that patients require hospitalization.
Acetic acid, also known as acetate, and other products that can be developed from acetic acid are used in a variety of industries, from food production to medicine to agriculture. Currently, acetate production uses a significant amount of energy and results in harmful waste products. The efficient and sustainable production of acetate is an important target for researchers interested in improving industrial sustainability.
A paper published in Carbon Future (“CO 2 electroreduction to acetate by enhanced tandem effects of surface intermediate over Co 3 O 4 supported polyaniline catalyst”) outlines a method using a polyaniline catalyst with cobalt oxide nanoparticles to produce acetate through carbon dioxide electroreduction.
This image shows a polyaniline catalyst coated in cobalt oxide nanoparticles and demonstrates how the catalyst facilitates the conversion of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide to acetate. (Image: Carbon Future)
By Douglas Whitbread via SWNS
Footage shows a Parkinson’s sufferer’s “life-changing” transformation after taking a new wonder treatment — for just one week.
Damian Gath, 52, who previously went to the gym four times a week, was diagnosed with the incurable brain condition — which causes involuntary shaking — ten years ago.
Worm-Derived Therapeutics For Debilitating Diseases — Dr. Andrea Choe, MD, Ph.D. — CEO, Holoclara Inc
Dr. Andrea Choe, MD, Ph.D. is the CEO and Co-Founder of Holoclara (https://www.holoclara.com/), a company focused on creating novel, safe, orally bioavailable worm-derived therapeutics with a focus on indications such as allergies and autoimmune disorders.
While pursuing her doctorate at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Choe uncovered a unique pheromone language shared by roundworms that may have evolved over hundreds of millions of years.
Dr. Choe’s research, including her discovery of novel molecules derived from worms that blocked formation of disease in animal models of allergic and autoimmune disease, has led to advances in the fields of evolutionary biology and extreme biology. Her work has become the foundation of Holoclara’s technology and mission to pioneer a new class of therapeutics that can provide relief for millions of people living with chronic and debilitating diseases.
Dr. Choe is a winner of the Emerging Women Founders in Biotech Award. She received her MD at USC Keck School of Medicine and her PhD at Caltech.
The behavior of the cells that make up our blood vessels is crucial to our well-being. Conditions such as inflammation, oxygen deprivation and viral infection can stress these cells and disrupt the formation of new, often pathological, blood vessels. Now a team of researchers led by Jean-Philippe Gratton, chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at Université de Montréal and a specialist in vascular biology, has discovered a previously unknown pathway leading to the formation of new blood vessels, a process known as angiogenesis.
Furthermore, many experimental factors, such as fabrication errors and physical misalignments, can affect the performance of diffractive processors during the experimental deployment stage. Investigating the inherent robustness of different nonlinear encoding strategies to such imperfections, as well as their integration with vaccination-based training strategies39 or in situ training methods40, would provide more comprehensive guidance on the implementation and limitations of these approaches. These considerations would be crucial for future research and practical implementations of diffractive optical processors.
Throughout the manuscript, our analyses assumed that diffractive optical processors consist of several stacked diffractive layers interconnected through free-space light propagation, as commonly used in the literature10,13,41,42. Our forward model employs the angular spectrum method for light propagation, a broadly applicable technique known for its accuracy, covering all the propagating modes in free space. While our forward model does not account for multiple reflections between the diffractive layers, it is important to note that such cascaded reflections are much weaker than the transmitted light and, thus, have a negligible impact on the optimization process. This simplification does not compromise the model’s experimental validity since a given diffractive model also acts as a 3D filter for such undesired secondary sources that were ignored in the optimization process; stated differently, a by-product of the entire optimization process is that the resulting diffractive layers collectively filter out some of these undesired sources of secondary reflections, scattering them outside the output FOV. The foundation of our model has been extensively validated through various experiments10,11,16,18,43, providing a good match to the corresponding numerical model in each case, further supporting the accuracy of our forward model and diffractive processor design scheme.
Finally, our numerical analyses were conducted using coherent monochromatic light, which has many practical, real-world applications such as holographic microscopy and sensing, laser-based imaging systems, optical communications, and biomedical imaging. These applications, and many others, benefit from the precise control of the wave information carried by coherent light. In addition to coherent illumination, diffractive optical processors can also be designed to accommodate temporally and spatially incoherent illumination. By optimizing the layers for multiple wavelengths of illumination, a diffractive processor can be effectively designed to operate under broadband illumination conditions18,19,29,43,44,45,46,47. Similarly, by incorporating spatial incoherence into the forward model simulations, we can design diffractive processors that function effectively with spatially incoherent illumination30,48. Without loss of generality, our current study focuses on coherent monochromatic light to establish a foundational understanding of nonlinear encoding strategies in diffractive information processing using linear optical materials by leveraging the precise control that coherent processors offer. Future work could explore the extension of these principles to spatially or temporally incoherent illumination scenarios, further broadening the applicability of diffractive optical processors in practical settings.
A brain-computer interface from the startup Inbrain could be used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
Recently, human brain organoids have raised increasing interest from scholars of many fields and a dynamic discussion in bioethics is ongoing. There is a serious concern that these in vitro models of brain development based on innovative methods for three-dimensional stem cell culture might deserve a specific moral status [1, 2]. This would especially be the case if these small stem cell constructs were to develop physiological features of organisms endowed with nervous systems, suggesting that they may be able to feel pain or develop some form of sentience or consciousness. Whether one wants to envision or discard the possibility of conscious brain organoids and whether one wants to acknowledge or dispute its moral relevance, the notion of consciousness is a main pillar of this discussion (even if not the only issue involved [3]). However, consciousness is itself a difficult notion, its nature and definition having been discussed for decades [4, 5]. As a consequence, the ethical debate surrounding brain organoids is deeply entangled with epistemological uncertainty pertaining to the conceptual underpinnings of the science of consciousness and its empirical endeavor.
It has been argued that neuroethics should circumvent this fundamental uncertainty by adhering to a precautionary principle [6]. Even if we do not know with certainty at which point brain organoids could become conscious, following some experimental design principles would ensure that the research does not raise any ethically problematic features in the years to come. It has also been proposed to redirect the inquiry to the “what-kind” issue (rather than the “whether or not” issue) in order to rely on more graspable features for ethical assessment [7]. These strategies, however, make the epistemological issue even more relevant. The question of whether or not current and future organoids can develop a certain form of consciousness (without presupposing what these different forms of consciousness might be) and how to assess this potentiality in existing biological systems is bound to stay with the field of brain organoid technology for a certain time. Even if it is not for advancing ethical issues, there is a theoretical interest in determining the boundary conditions of consciousness and its potential emergence in artificial entities. Although the methodological and knowledge gap is still wide between the research community on cellular biology and stem cell culture on the one side and the research community on consciousness such as cognitive neuroscience on the other, there will be more and more circulation of ideas and methods in the coming years. The results of this scientific endeavor will, in turn, impact ethics.
In this article, I look back at the history of consciousness research to find new perspectives on this contemporary epistemological conundrum. In particular, I suggest the distinction between “global” theories of consciousness and “local” theories of consciousness as a thought-provoking one for those engaged in the difficult task of adapting models of consciousness to the biological reality of brain organoids. The first section introduces the consciousness assessment issue as a general framework and a challenge for any discussion related to the putative consciousness of brain organoids. In the second section, I describe and critically assess the main attempt, so far, at solving the consciousness assessment issue relying on integrated information theory. In the third section, I propose to rely on the distinction between local and global theories of consciousness as a tool to navigate the theoretical landscape, before turning to the analysis of a notable local theory of consciousness, Semir Zeki’s theory of microconsciousness, in the fourth section. I conclude by drawing the epistemological and ethical lessons from this theoretical exploration.
