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Reporting in Research Ideas and Outcomes, a Kyushu University researcher has developed a new technique for scanning various plants and animals and reconstructing them into highly detailed 3D models. To date, over 1,400 models have been made available online for public use.

Open any textbook or nature magazine and you will find stunning high-resolution pictures of the diverse flora and fauna that encompass our world. From the botanical illustrations in Dioscorides’ De materia medica (50−70 CE) to Robert Hooke’s sketches of the microscopic world in Micrographia (1665), scientists and artists alike have worked meticulously to draw the true majesty of nature.

Continue reading “Creating fast, reliable 3D scans of flora and fauna” »

Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

Over the past few weeks, researchers at MIT have detailed their work on a system to track the progression of Parkinson’s patients by continuously monitoring their gait speed. Elsewhere, Whale Safe, a project spearheaded by the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory and partners, launched buoys equipped with AI-powered sensors in an experiment to prevent ships from striking whales. Other aspects of ecology and academics also saw advances powered by machine learning.

Continue reading “Perceptron: AI saving whales, steadying gaits and banishing traffic” »

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a decoder that uses information from fMRI scans to reconstruct human thoughts. Jerry Tang, Amanda LeBel, Shailee Jain and Alexander Huth have published a paper describing their work on the preprint server bioRxiv.

Prior efforts to create technology that can monitor brain waves and decode them to reconstruct a person’s thoughts have all consisted of probes placed in the brains of willing patients. And while such technology has proven useful for research efforts, it is not practical for use in other applications such as helping people who have lost the ability to speak. In this new effort, the researchers have expanded on work from prior studies by applying findings about reading and interpreting brain waves to data obtained from fMRI scans.

Recognizing that attempting to reconstruct brainwaves into individual words using fMRI was impractical, the researchers designed a decoding device that sought to gain an overall understanding of what was going on in the mind rather than a word-for-word decoding. The decoder they built was a computer algorithm that accepted fMRI data and returned paragraphs describing general thoughts. To train their algorithm, the researchers asked two men and one woman to lie in an fMRI machine while they listened to podcasts and recordings of people telling stories.

There now genetic testing of breast cancer for men and women. The mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 Genes will cause cancer. I think in the future though error correction in the dna code could lead to the cure using crispr.

The contribution of BRCA1 and BRCA2 to inherited breast cancer was assessed by linkage and mutation analysis in 237 families, each with at least four cases of breast cancer, collected by the Breast Cancer Linkage Consortium. Families were included without regard to the occurrence of ovarian or other cancers. Overall, disease was linked to BRCA1 in an estimated 52% of families, to BRCA2 in 32% of families, and to neither gene in 16% (95% confidence interval [CI] 6%–28%), suggesting other predisposition genes. The majority (81%) of the breast-ovarian cancer families were due to BRCA1, with most others (14%) due to BRCA2. Conversely, the majority of families with male and female breast cancer were due to BRCA2 (76%). The largest proportion (67%) of families due to other genes was found in families with four or five cases of female breast cancer only. These estimates were not substantially affected either by changing the assumed penetrance model for BRCA1 or by including or excluding BRCA1 mutation data. Among those families with disease due to BRCA1 that were tested by one of the standard screening methods, mutations were detected in the coding sequence or splice sites in an estimated 63% (95% CI 51%–77%). The estimated sensitivity was identical for direct sequencing and other techniques. The penetrance of BRCA2 was estimated by maximizing the LOD score in BRCA2-mutation families, over all possible penetrance functions. The estimated cumulative risk of breast cancer reached 28% (95% CI 9%–44%) by age 50 years and 84% (95% CI 43%–95%) by age 70 years. The corresponding ovarian cancer risks were 0.4% (95% CI 0%–1%) by age 50 years and 27% (95% CI 0%–47%) by age 70 years. The lifetime risk of breast cancer appears similar to the risk in BRCA1 carriers, but there was some suggestion of a lower risk in BRCA2 carriers.

This is the first study to record such electrical activity from inside the brain.

How do people remember the things they’ve learned? To get to the bottom of the mystery, scientists undertook a study that looked deep inside the brain.

Neuroscientists from Northwestern University and clinicians from the University of Chicago Epilepsy Center examined the electrical activity in the brains of five patients at the center in response to sounds administered by the research team as part of a learning exercise.

Continue reading “Researchers looked deep inside the brain to see how memory is stored” »

He turned a crisis into an opportunity.

Brian Stanley is a living human cyborg. He has gone viral after sharing a video on social media with an eye flashlight that can light up the whole room. After losing one eye to cancer.

As Brian Stanley suggested in the video, the eye has a battery life of roughly 20 hours, and “it does not get hot.”

Continue reading “Video: An engineer produces a torch-like prosthetic for his lost eye” »

The artificial intelligence software speeds up the process of taking scans.

Philips received clearance from the FDA for its artificial intelligence MR platform that is used to detect cancerous tumors in the head and neck.

FDA clearance for AI technology

Continue reading “FDA gives clearance to Philips for its AI powered MRI scans” »

Recent evidence points out the role of the gut microbiota in the aging process. However, the specific changes and relevant interventions remain unclear. In this study, Senescence Accelerated Mouse-Prone 8 (SAMP8) mice were divided into four groups; young-FMT-group transplanted fecal microbiota from young donors (2–3°months old) and old-FMT-group transplanted from old donors (10–11°months old); additionally, other two groups either adult mice injected with saline solution or untreated mice served as the saline and blank control groups, respectively. All mice were intervened from their 7-months-old until 13-months-old. The open field test at 9 and 11°months of age showed that the mice transplanted with gut microbiota from young donors had significantly better locomotor and exploration ability than those of transplanted with old-donors gut microbiota and those of saline control while was comparable with the blank control. 16S rRNA gene sequencing showed that the gut microbiome of recipient mice of young donors was altered at 11°months of age, whereas the alternation of the gut microbiome of old-donor recipient mice was at 9°months. For comparison, the recipient mice in the blank and saline control groups exhibited changes in the gut microbiome at 10°months of age. The hallmark of aging-related gut microbiome change was an increase in the relative abundance of Akkermansia, which was significantly higher in the recipients transplanted with feces from older donors than younger donors at 9°months of age. This study shows that fecal microbiota transplantation from younger donors can delay aging-related declines in locomotor and exploration ability in mice by changing the gut microbiome.

Aging is inherently accompanied by the decline of physical and mental abilities, including locomotor, cognition, and bodily functions, to subsequently cause frailty syndrome, neurodegenerative diseases, and other age-related diseases, which reduce the quality of life of the aging population (Hou et al., 2019). Aging mechanisms and anti-aging interventions have long been a major focus of biomedical research, which is particularly relevant given the rapidly aging society.

The gut is a major organ for nutrients absorption, metabolism, and immunity, and contains hundreds of millions of microorganisms and their metabolites, which comprise the gut microbiota (Heintz and Mair, 2014) that interacts with host cells and tissues (Huang et al., 2021). Our previous study reported continuous changes in the gut microbiome of centenarians during their transition from a healthy status to death. The most significant changes of gut microbial communities in the period were found to occur at 7°months prior to death, suggesting that this may be a turning point of significant changes in the gut microbiome of centenarians (Luan et al., 2020). Recent studies have revealed an important relationship between the gut microbiome and aging-related diseases such as Alzheimer disease (Ticinesi et al., 2018; Haran and McCormick, 2021), suggesting that the gut microbiome plays an essential role in the aging process.

For COVID-19 sufferers who have lost their sense of smell there is the promis of a future bionic nose.

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University are building a neuroprosthetic to help those who lose their ability to smell.