Can you pass me the whatchamacallit? It’s right over there next to the thingamajig.
Many of us will experience “lethologica”, or difficulty finding words, in everyday life. And it usually becomes more prominent with age.
Frequent difficulty finding the right word can signal changes in the brain consistent with the early (“preclinical”) stages of Alzheimer’s disease – before more obvious symptoms emerge.
Mind Control: Past and Future https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/24_Meier_02.pdf
On Jan. 28, 2024, Noland Arbaugh became the first person to receive a brain chip implant from Neuralink, the neurotechnology company owned by Elon Musk. The implant seemed to work: Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, learned to control a computer mouse with his mind and even to play online chess.
The device is part of a class of therapeutics, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), that show promise for helping people with disabilities control prosthetic limbs, operate a computer, or translate their thoughts directly into speech. Current use of the technology is limited, but with millions of global cases of spinal cord injuries, strokes, and other conditions, some estimates put the market for BCIs at around $400 billion in the U.S. alone.
A new discussion paper from the Carr Center for Human Rights welcomes the potential benefits but offers a note of caution drawn from the past, detailing unsettling parallels between an era of new therapies and one of America’s darkest chapters: experiments into psychological manipulation and mind control.
The common diabetes drug metformin works partly by excreting sugar from the bloodstream into the intestines, where gut bacteria then convert it into chemicals that improve the insulin response.
A new study has been published in Nature Communications, presenting the first comprehensive atlas of allele-specific DNA methylation across 39 primary human cell types. The study was led by Ph.D. student Jonathan Rosenski under the guidance of Prof. Tommy Kaplan from the School of Computer Science and Engineering and Prof. Yuval Dor from the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hadassah Medical Center.
Using machine learning algorithms and deep whole-genome bisulfite sequencing on freshly isolated and purified cell populations, the study unveils a detailed landscape of genetic and epigenetic regulation that could reshape our understanding of gene expression and disease.
A key focus of the research is the success in identifying differences between the two alleles and, in some cases, demonstrating that these differences result from genomic imprinting —meaning that it is not the sequence (genetics) that matters, but rather whether the allele is inherited from the mother or the father. These findings could reshape our understanding of gene expression and disease.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers at Georgia Tech has discovered how lateral inhibition helps our brains process visual information, and it could expand our knowledge of sensory perception, leading to applications in neuro-medicine and artificial intelligence.
Lateral inhibition is when certain neurons suppress the activity of their neighboring neurons. Imagine an artist drawing, darkening the lines around the contours, highlighting the boundaries between objects and space, or objects and other objects. Comparably, in the visual system, lateral inhibition sharpens the contrast between different visual stimuli.
“This research is really getting at how our visual system not only highlights important things, but also actively suppresses irrelevant information in the background,” said lead researcher Bilal Haider, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “That ability to filter out distractions is crucial.”
Oxygen is essential for life and a reactive player in many chemical processes. Accordingly, methods that accurately measure oxygen are relevant for numerous industrial and medical applications: They analyze exhaust gases from combustion processes, enable the oxygen-free processing of food and medicines, monitor the oxygen content of the air we breathe or the oxygen saturation in blood.
Oxygen analysis is also playing an increasingly important role in environmental monitoring.
“However, such measurements usually require bulky, power-hungry, and expensive devices that are hardly suitable for mobile applications or continuous outdoor use,” says Máté Bezdek, Professor of Functional Coordination Chemistry at ETH Zurich. His group uses molecular design methods to find new sensors for environmental gases.
Researchers at Michigan State University have refined an innovation that has the potential to improve safety, reduce severe injury and increase survival rates in situations ranging from car accidents, sports, law enforcement operations and more.
In 2020 and 2022, Weiyi Lu, an associate professor in MSU’s College of Engineering, developed a liquid nanofoam material made up of tiny holes surrounded by water that has been shown to protect the brain against traumatic injuries when used as a liner in football helmets. Now, MSU engineers and scientists have improved this technology to shield vital internal organs as well.
Falls, motor vehicle crashes and other kinds of collisions can cause blunt force trauma and damage to bodily organs that can lead to life-threatening emergencies. These injuries are often the result of intense mechanical force or pressure that doesn’t penetrate the body like a cut, but causes serious damage to the body’s organs, including internal lacerations, ruptures, bleeding and organ failure.
Early diagnosis is crucial in disease prevention and treatment. Many diseases can be identified not just through physical signs and symptoms but also through changes at the cellular and molecular levels.
When it comes to a majority of chronic conditions, early detection, particularly at the cellular level, gives patients a better chance for successful treatment. Detection of early changes at the cellular level can also dramatically improve cancer outcomes.
It’s against this backdrop that a University of Rhode Island professor and a former Ph.D. graduate student looked at understanding the smallest changes between two similar cells.
Empa researchers are working on producing artificial muscles that can keep up with the real thing. They have now developed a method of producing the soft and elastic yet powerful structures using 3D printing.
One day, these could be used in medicine or robotics—and anywhere else where things need to move at the touch of a button. The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.
Artificial muscles don’t just get robots moving: One day, they could support people at work or when walking, or replace injured muscle tissue. However, developing artificial muscles that can compare to the real thing is a major technical challenge.
For decades, scientists have focused on amyloid plaques—abnormal clumps of misfolded proteins that accumulate between neurons—as a therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s disease. But anti-amyloid therapies haven’t made strong headway in treating the devastating condition.
Now, researchers at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) are zeroing in on a byproduct of these plaques, called axonal spheroids, and exploring how to reverse their growth. They published their findings March 10 in Nature Aging.
Axonal spheroids are bubble-like structures on axons—the part of the neuron that sends messages through electrical impulses—that form due to swelling induced by amyloid plaques. Previous research at YSM has shown that as these spheroids grow, they block electricity conduction in the axons, which can hinder the ability to communicate with other neurons.
