Lifeboat Foundation

Vanderbilt researchers have developed a way to more quickly and precisely trap nanoscale objects such as potentially cancerous extracellular vesicles using cutting-edge plasmonic nanotweezers.

The practice by Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and Chuchuan Hong, a recently graduated Ph.D. student from the Ndukaife Research Group, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northwestern University, has been published in Nature Communications.

Optical tweezers, as acknowledged with a 2018 Physics Nobel Prize, have proven adept at manipulating micron-scale matter like biological cells. But their effectiveness wanes when dealing with nanoscale objects. This limitation arises from the diffraction limit of light that precludes focusing of light to the nanoscale.

This device can generate deep-UV light with a very narrow wavelength range that is safe for humans but lethal for germs.

A new device that can generate deep-ultraviolet (UV) light to kill germs without harming humans has been developed by a team of researchers from Osaka University, Japan. The device uses a novel method of combining two visible photons into one deep-UV photon inside a thin waveguide made of aluminum nitride, a material that has nonlinear optical properties.

The research, named “229 nm far-ultraviolet second harmonic generation in a vertical polarity inverted AlN bilayer channel waveguide,” has been published in the journal Applied Physics Express.

Back to AI in healthcare – we’ve looked at this from a number of angles, but what about some of the pros and cons of using AI/ML systems in a clinical context? And also, what about how to conquer disease with AI models?

There’s a broader theory that AI is going to allow for trail-blazing research on everything from cancer and heart disease to trauma and bone and muscle health — and everything in between. Now, we have more defined solutions coming to the table, and they’re well worth looking at!

In this IIA talk, cardiologist Collin Stultz talks about the treatment of disorders, and new tools, starting with a dramatic emphasis on heart disease.

Serious Science — http://serious-science.org.

Behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin on twin studies, genetic influence of parents on their children, and 1% of DNA that makes people different.

Continue reading “DNA and Behavioral Genetics — Robert Plomin” »

Decades of Alzheimer’s research might have missed a cellular culprit hiding in plain sight: the cellular powerhouses known as mitochondria.

A surgical team from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis recently performed the first robotic liver transplant in the U.S. The successful transplant, accomplished in May at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, extends to liver transplants the advantages of minimally invasive robotic surgery: a smaller incision resulting in less pain and faster recoveries, plus the precision needed to perform one of the most challenging abdominal procedures.

The patient, a man in his 60s who needed a transplant because of liver cancer and cirrhosis caused by hepatitis C virus, is doing well and has resumed normal, daily activities. Typically, liver transplant recipients require at least six weeks before they can walk without any discomfort. The patient was walking easily six weeks after surgery and cleared to resume golfing and swimming seven weeks after the surgery.

Groundbreaking surgery performed at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

Continue reading “First robotic liver transplant in U.S. performed by Washington University surgeons” »

Breast cancer in its various forms affects more than 250,000 Americans a year. One particularly aggressive and hard-to-treat type is triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which lacks specific receptors targeted by existing treatments. The rapid growth and metastasis of this cancer also make it challenging to manage, leading to limited therapy options and an often poor prognosis for patients.

A promising new approach that uses minuscule tubes to deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to the tumor site while preserving healthy cells has been developed by Johns Hopkins engineers. The team’s research appeared in Nanoscale.

“In this paper, we showed that we can use nanotubes to specifically target both proliferating and senescent TNBC cells with chemotherapeutics and senolytics, killing them without targeting healthy breast cells,” said Efie Kokkoli, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, a core researcher at the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology, and a specialist in engineering targeted nanoparticles for the delivery of cancer therapeutics.

Ecologists have shown that the genetic material that species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

A mathematical model shows how increased intricacy of cognitive tasks can break the mirror symmetry of the brain’s neural network.

The neural networks of animal brains are partly mirror symmetric, with asymmetries thought to be more common in more cognitively advanced species. This assumption stems from a long-standing theory that increased complexity of neural tasks can turn mirror-symmetric neural circuits into circuits existing in only one side of the brain. This hypothesis has now received support from a mathematical model developed by Luís Seoane at the National Center for Biotechnology in Spain [1]. The researcher’s findings could help explain how the brain’s architecture is shaped not only by cognitively demanding tasks but also by damage or aging.

A mirror-symmetric neural network is useful when controlling body parts that are themselves mirror symmetric, such as arms and legs. Moreover, the presence of duplicate circuits on each side of the brain can help increase computing accuracy and offer a replacement circuit if one becomes faulty. However, the redundancy created by such duplication can lead to increased energy consumption. This trade-off raises an important question: Does the optimal degree of mirror symmetry depend on the complexity of the cognitive tasks performed by the neural network?