Scientists at Imperial College London, UK have proved that a modern surgical knife dubbed iKnife can “smell tumours”, effectively detecting womb cancer within seconds. The breakthrough could enable thousands of women to get an earlier cancer diagnosis.
“The iKnife reliably diagnosed endometrial cancer in seconds, with a diagnostic accuracy of 89%, minimising the current delays for women whilst awaiting a histopathological diagnosis,” said the researchers in the finding published in the journal Cancers.
Notably, the iKnife is already being used to treat breast and brain cancers, reported the Guardian, and now it can also accurately detect the presence of endometrial cancer.
Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders.
Over a decade ago, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed a way to grow organized clusters of cells, called organoids, that resemble the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. They coaxed human skin cells reprogrammed to act as stem cells to develop into layers of several types of retinal cells that sense light and ultimately transmit what we see to the brain.
“We wanted to use the cells from those organoids as replacement parts for the same types of cells that have been lost in the course of retinal diseases,” says David Gamm, the UW-Madison ophthalmology professor and director of the McPherson Eye Research Institute whose lab developed the organoids. “But after being grown in a laboratory dish for months as compact clusters, the question remained—will the cells behave appropriately after we tease them apart? Because that is key to introducing them into a patient’s eye.”
Australian scientists have created the most detailed map ever of the communication links between the hippocampus, the brain’s memory control center, and the rest of the brain, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of human memory.
“We were surprised to find fewer connections between the hippocampus and frontal cortical areas, and more connections with early visual processing areas than we expected to see,” said Dr. Marshall Dalton, a Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. “Although, this makes sense considering the hippocampus plays an important role not only in memory but also imagination and our ability to construct mental images in our mind’s eye.”
Located within the brain, the hippocampus is a complex structure that resembles a seahorse. It is essential for the brain and plays a crucial role in memory formation as well as the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage. In addition to these functions, the hippocampus also plays a role in navigation, the ability to imagine future or fictitious experiences, the creation of mental imagery, and even in visual perception and decision-making.
New research published in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology on December 7 has identified three genes and their expressed proteins that may be involved in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis.
By comparing information on the genes and proteins expressed in the brains of thousands of individuals with and without multiple sclerosis, investigators discovered different expression levels of the SHMT1, FAM120B, and ICA1L genes (and their proteins) in brain tissues of patients versus controls.
Studying the functions of these genes may uncover new information on the mechanisms involved in the development and progression of multiple sclerosis. “Our findings shed new light on the pathogenesis of MS and prioritized promising targets for future therapy research,” the authors wrote.
Irina Rish is a world-renowned professor of computer science and operations research at the Université de Montréal and a core member of the prestigious Mila organisation. She is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous AI. Irina holds an MSc and PhD in AI from the University of California, Irvine as well as an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Gubkin Institute. Her research focuses on machine learning, neural data analysis, and neuroscience-inspired AI. In particular, she is exploring continual lifelong learning, optimization algorithms for deep neural networks, sparse modelling and probabilistic inference, dialog generation, biologically plausible reinforcement learning, and dynamical systems approaches to brain imaging analysis. Prof. Rish holds 64 patents, has published over 80 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books, and a monograph on Sparse Modelling. She has served as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML. Irina’s research is focussed on taking us closer to the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence. She continues to push the boundaries of machine learning, continually striving to make advancements in neuroscience-inspired AI.
In a conversation about artificial intelligence (AI), Irina and Tim discussed the idea of transhumanism and the potential for AI to improve human flourishing. Irina suggested that instead of looking at AI as something to be controlled and regulated, people should view it as a tool to augment human capabilities. She argued that attempting to create an AI that is smarter than humans is not the best approach, and that a hybrid of human and AI intelligence is much more beneficial. As an example, she mentioned how technology can be used as an extension of the human mind, to track mental states and improve self-understanding. Ultimately, Irina concluded that transhumanism is about having a symbiotic relationship with technology, which can have a positive effect on both parties.
Tim then discussed the contrasting types of intelligence and how this could lead to something interesting emerging from the combination. He brought up the Trolley Problem and how difficult moral quandaries could be programmed into an AI. Irina then referenced The Garden of Forking Paths, a story which explores the idea of how different paths in life can be taken and how decisions from the past can have an effect on the present.
To better understand AI and intelligence, Irina suggested looking at it from multiple perspectives and understanding the importance of complex systems science in programming and understanding dynamical systems. She discussed the work of Michael Levin, who is looking into reprogramming biological computers with chemical interventions, and Tim mentioned Alex Mordvinsev, who is looking into the self-healing and repair of these systems. Ultimately, Irina argued that the key to understanding AI and intelligence is to recognize the complexity of the systems and to create hybrid models of human and AI intelligence.
Boltzmann brains are perhaps one of the spookiest ideas in physics. A Boltzmann brain is a single, isolated human brain complete with false memories that spontaneously fluctuates into existence from the void. They’re the kind of thing you’d find in a campfire horror story. The big problem, however, is that a range of plausible cosmological models (including our current cosmology) predict that Boltzmann brains will exist. Even worse, these brains should massively outnumber “ordinary” conscious observers like ourselves. At every moment of your existence, it is more likely that you are an isolated Boltzmann brain, falsely remembering your past, than a human being on a rocky planet in a low-entropy universe.
In this video I explain where the idea of Boltzmann brains originated, and why they haunt modern cosmology.
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While shedding and symptom may not be closely linked in general, we found total shedding and symptom severity to be highly correlated (Pearson 0.81, Supplementary Fig. S1). Furthermore, with one exception, low shedding implied low symptom severity and vice versa. Thus associations found between shedding and pre-inoculation biomarkers like the CPV are also present in symptom severity, although to a lesser degree. Therefore in the rest of this section we report associations for the less noisy shedding measurements. The total variance explained (\(R^2\) ) by a linear model relating CPV score to shedding titers is \(R^2=0.77\) (ratio of residual variance of linear regression to variance of titers). Furthermore, a logistic regression of total shedding onto the CPV score yielded a perfect discriminant between high and low shedders, respectively defined as those whose total shedding is below versus above the population median.
The correlation between shedding titers and CPV scores is robust to reductions in the number of NCPT variables composing the score. In fact the correlation between shedding and CPV increases to greater than 0.9 when only 6 NCPT measures are incorporated: digSym-time, digSym-correct, reaction-time, posner-tutorialTime, trail-time and trail-tutorialTime. Furthermore, the CVP score incorporating only the three basic NCPT measures digSym-time, digSym-correct, trail-time achieves a correlation level of approximately 0.7 (Fig. S2). We find that adding a fourth basic NCPT variable reaction time to the CPV score computation does not appreciably affect this level of correlation. On the other hand, replacing replacing either digSym-time or digSym-correct with posner-tutorialTime produces an increase in correlation to a level greater than 0.85.
To illustrate the role of the 18 individual NCPT variables in the CPV, we plot in Fig. 1e the univariate CPV scores for the two lowest shedding and the two highest shedding participants. This figure is extracted from Fig. S3 in the Supplementary that shows the sequence of univariate CPV scores for all 18 study participants. Superimposed on the plot of these variables is a boxplot indicating score sensitivity to session perturbation, determined by leave-one-out analysis where the univariate CPV was recomputed after successively leaving a single NCPT session out of each participant’s sequence (sans screening session). Figure 1e clearly shows that certain NCPT variables have significantly higher variability for the high shedders (lower two panels) than for the low shedders (top two panels). Note that the NCPT variable with highest variability (variable achieving peak score in each panel of Fig. 1e) differs across study participants.
For the first time, a new study has identified enlarged perivascular spaces in the brains of migraine sufferers. Results of the study were presented recently at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
“In people with chronic migraine and episodic migraine without aura, there are significant changes in the perivascular spaces of a brain region called the centrum semiovale,” said study co-author Wilson Xu, an M.D. candidate at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “These changes have never been reported before.”
Migraine is a common, often debilitating condition, involving a severe recurring headache. Migraines may also cause nausea, weakness, and light sensitivity. According to the American Migraine Foundation, over 37 million people in the U.S. are affected by migraine, and up to 148 million people worldwide suffer from chronic migraine.
The proteins can record histories of cellular events.
Researchers from MIT developed a technique to induce cells to record the history of cellular events in a long protein chain that can be imaged using a light microscope. The technique could help understand the critical steps involved in the processes, such as memory formation, response to drug treatment, and gene expression.
Studying the molecular processes within cells can provide important insights into their function and how they contribute to the overall functioning of an organ.
Design Cells/iStock.
“Biological systems are often composed of a large number of different types of cells. To understand those kinds of biological systems, we need to observe physiological events over time in these large cell populations,” said Changyang Linghu, Assistant Professor at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute and author of the study.
