Lifeboat Foundation

Discovery made possible by state-of-the-art imaging and more than 60 million worms.

For the first time and in near-atomic detail, scientists at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have revealed the structure of the key part of the inner ear responsible for hearing.

“This is the last sensory system in which that fundamental molecular machinery has remained unknown,” said senior author Eric Gouaux, Ph.D. He is a senior scientist with the OHSU Vollum Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The molecular machinery that carries out this absolutely amazing process has been unresolved for decades.”

The first-in-human trial of FLASH radiotherapy found the experimental treatment to be safe and effective — suggesting that there may be a faster, less painful way to use radiation against cancer.

The status quo: Radiation therapy is a common cancer treatment that uses high doses of radiation to kill or slow the growth of cancer cells. Usually, this is done by aiming a beam of radiation directly at a tumor for a few minutes. This part of the process is painless, like getting an X-ray.

Patients typically undergo daily treatments five days a week for several weeks, and including setup time, a treatment usually takes about 15 to 30 minutes.

Concern is rising over the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Uganda that is now swiftly spreading in the densely populated capital city of Kampala. The outbreak is caused by a lesser-seen species of Ebolavirus, the Sudan virus, for which there is no proven vaccine or treatment.

Uganda’s Ministry of Health declared an outbreak on September 20, a day after a 24-year-old man from a rural area in central Uganda died of the disease. Since then, the virus has spread to seven districts in the country, with the ministry reporting a total of 109 confirmed cases and 30 deaths. Health workers accounted for 15 of the confirmed cases and six of the confirmed deaths. There are also unofficial reports of probable cases and deaths.

Health experts are particularly concerned about the spread into Kampala, which government officials reported only Sunday. As of Wednesday, the city of more than 1.6 million has seen at least 15 confirmed cases. Of the 15 cases, six are school-age children from the same family.

Associate Professor of the Department of Information Technologies and Computer Sciences at MISIS University, Ph.D., mathematician and doctor Alexandra Bernadotte has developed algorithms that significantly increase the accuracy of recognition of mental commands by robotic devices. The result is achieved by optimizing the selection of a dictionary. Algorithms implemented in robotic devices can be used to transmit information through noisy communication channels. The results have been published in the peer-reviewed international scientific journal Mathematics.

The task of improving the object (audio, video or electromagnetic signals) classification accuracy, when compiling so-called “dictionaries” of devices is faced by developers of different systems aimed to improve the quality of human life.

The simplest example is a voice assistant. Audio or video transmission devices for remote control of an object in the line-of-sight zone use a limited set of commands. At the same time, it is important that the commands classifier based on the neural network accurately understands and does not confuse the commands included in the device dictionary. It also means that the recognition accuracy should not fall below a certain value in the presence of extraneous noise.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of skeletal F-actin show solvent-driven rearrangements governing actin filament assembly and aging with potential application in design of drugs and small molecules for imaging and therapy.

The overexpression of a gene tied to cell division and the structure and function of neurons may prevent and protect against cognitive decline in both mice and humans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

The gene, Kinesin-5 or KIF11, does this despite the presence of amyloid beta (Abeta), the main component of plaques in the brains of those with AD. Scientists have traditionally targeted the plaques when looking for treatments for the fatal disease. In this case, they went around them.

The study was published online last week in the journal iScience.

I guess it’s time for Twitter execs to go home, and for me to start using Twitter again. They killed my chamber of commerce account, then when I opened a personal account, they kept asking for my phone number every time I logged in. If I give you my number once and you send me an sms, I’m not giving it to you again, as that’s not safe.

It ends months of bad blood between the two parties regarding the takeover, with Elon Musk complaining about fake accounts on the platform and claims by a whistleblower that Twitter misled regulators about security risks.

Werner Syndrome and Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome are two examples of the rare genetic disorders known as progeroid syndromes that cause signs of premature aging in children and young adults. Patients with progeroid syndromes have pathologies and symptoms that are often linked to aging, including osteoporosis, cataracts, heart disease, and type II diabetes.

This aging is characterized by the gradual loss of nuclear architecture and an underlying tissue-specific genetic program, but the causes are unclear. Scientists have discovered a potential new target for treating these syndromes by preventing nuclear architecture loss.

New imaging of patients with Alzheimer’s demonstrates how a telltale protein spreads throughout the brain based on the phenotype of the disease, i.e., whether the condition is dominated by forgetfulness, or atrophy in a specific brain region. The research offers a host of illuminating clues that ultimately may inform new treatment strategies.

The protein is known as tau and a large multi-disciplinary team of brain researchers at McGill University in Montreal has been able to trace the protein’s patterns in living patients via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Alzheimer’s disease is intimately linked to tau, which can form tangles in the brain that irrevocably damage neurons.

The patterns detected by McGill scientists apparently are unique to the phenotype of Alzheimer’s afflicting the patient. This staggering finding opens an intriguing new window into the molecular mechanisms of the disease. And while many features of Alzheimer’s are the same from one patient to the next, phenotypes are a hallmark of the condition. Tracking tau patterns is a specialty of the scientists at McGill, who found that the intrinsic connectivity of the human brain itself provides the scaffolding for the aggregation of tau in distinct variants of the disease.