New research shows that we might be able to revive bodies we once thought beyond repair. That could increase medical inequities, but it’s still worth pursuing.
Google AI announced the launch of the Google Research YouTube channel today. The channel is set to focus on a wide range of subjects like AI/ML, robotics, theory and algorithms, quantum computing, health and bioscience.
By scientists from Inserm, CNRS, and Université de Montpellier at the Structural Biology Center in Montpellier. The nano-robot could lead to a closer study of the mechanical forces applied at microscopic levels, which are important for various biological and pathological processes.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
Cellular Mechanosensitivity
Summary: Increasing neurogenesis by deleting the Bax gene in mouse models of Alzheimer’s improved the animals’ performance in tests measuring spatial recognition and contextual memory.
Source: Rockefeller University.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered that increasing the production of new neurons in mice with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) rescues the animals’ memory defects.
Summary: Researchers have developed a new sensor that allows scientists to image the brain without missing signals for an extended period of time and deeper in the brain than current technology allows.
Source: Baylor College of Medicine.
As you are reading these words, certain regions of your brain are displaying a flurry of millisecond-fast electrical activity. Visualizing and measuring this electrical activity is crucial to understand how the brain enables us to see, move, behave or read these words.
The Brain Chemical Involved in Consciousness
So how do we help these people? The brain is more than just a congregation of different areas. Brain cells also rely on a number of chemicals to communicate with other cells, enabling a number of brain functions. Before our study, there was already some evidence that dopamine, well known for its role in reward, also plays a role in disorders of consciousness.
For example, one study showed that dopamine release in the brain is impaired in minimally conscious patients. Moreover, a number of small-scale studies have shown that patients’ consciousness can improve by giving them drugs that act through dopamine.
Flexible electronics have enabled the design of sensors, actuators, microfluidics and electronics on flexible, conformal and/or stretchable sublayers for wearable, implantable or ingestible applications. However, these devices have very different mechanical and biological properties when compared to human tissue and thus cannot be integrated with the human body.
A team of researchers at Texas A&M University has developed a new class of biomaterial inks that mimic native characteristics of highly conductive human tissue, much like skin, which are essential for the ink to be used in 3D printing.
This biomaterial ink leverages a new class of 2D nanomaterials known as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). The thin-layered structure of MoS2 contains defect centers to make it chemically active and, combined with modified gelatin to obtain a flexible hydrogel, comparable to the structure of Jell-O.
And these miniaturized brains could save regular-sized brains.
Electroencephalography (EEG) caps are medical devices doctors use to diagnose brain disorders like epilepsy and seizures in patients. In the past decade, scientists have created 3D mini-brains called brain organoids from human-derived stem cells that mimic some aspects of brain development. A team of researchers at John Hopkins University has recently developed the world’s smallest EEG caps to study these more efficiently. The micro EEG caps can be used on a brain organoid the size of a pen dot.
Continue reading “Mind-Reading Neural Network Uses Brain Waves to Recreate Human Thoughts” »
For many processes important for life such as cell division, cell migration, and the development of organs, the spatially and temporally correct formation of biological patterns is essential. To understand these processes, the principal task consists not in explaining how patterns form out of a homogeneous initial condition, but in explaining how simple patterns change into increasingly complex ones. Illuminating the mechanisms of this complex self-organization on various spatial and temporal scales is a key challenge for science.
So-called “coarse-graining” techniques allow such multiscale systems to be simplified, such that they can be described with a reduced model at large length and time scales. “The price you pay for coarse-graining, however, is that important information about the patterns on small scales—like the pattern type—is lost. But the thing is that these patterns play a decisive role in biological systems. To give one example, they control important cellular processes,” explains Laeschkir Würthner, member of the team led by LMU physicist Prof. Erwin Frey and lead author of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that overcomes this issue.
In collaboration with the research group of Prof. Cees Dekker (TU Delft), Frey’s team has developed a new coarse-graining approach for so-called mass-conserving reaction-diffusion systems, in which the large-scale analysis of the total densities of the particles involved enables the prediction of patterns on small scales.
