The assays don’t always yield results, but the information they offer can, at times, alter the course of treatment or prevention.
A team of researchers at Columbia University has developed a speech brain-computer interface system that translates brain signals into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the system can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. The breakthrough, reported in the journal Scientific Reports, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain, and lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak.
Through treating everything from strokes to car accident traumas, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch knows the brain’s inability to repair itself all too well. But now, she suggests, she and her colleagues may have found the key to neural repair: Doublecortin-positive cells. Similar to stem cells, they are extremely adaptable and, when extracted from a brain, cultured and then re-injected in a lesioned area of the same brain, they can help repair and rebuild it. “With a little help,” Bloch says, “the brain may be able to help itself.”
Demonstrating the preservation of cells after a living organism is pronounced dead and revived is not a traditional bioart topic. But it is an important one. It is a crucial step for advances in the use of lowered temperatures for sustaining the efficacy of organs and organisms during medical procedures, and especially of preserving neurons for the science cryonics.
My recent bioart research is a breakthrough that will help to build momentum toward more advanced studies on information storage within the brain, as well as short-term behaviors of episodic, semantic, procedural, and working memory.
In this article, I will review how I became involved in this research, the guidance along the way, my initial training at 21st Century Medicine, pitching the research project to Alcor, and submitting my proposal to its Research Center (ARC). I will then take you into the lab, the process of trial and error in our first studies, developing a protocol based on olfactory imprinting and applying several cryopreservation methods, developing the migration index, and the rewards of working with a lab technician who became an admiral colleague.
An experimental drug may help people with type 2 diabetes curb their blood sugar without causing it to drop to dangerously low levels.
Researchers found that the compound—dubbed TTP399 for now—improved patients’ blood sugar control when it was added to the standard medication metformin for six months.
And it did so without causing hypoglycemia—blood sugar drops that, if severe, can lead to convulsions or loss of consciousness.
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