Lifeboat Foundation

Even if you don’t live in Britain, the U.K.’s new “Snooper’s Charter” is worth watching. It could inspire other democratic nations to adopt aggressive surveillance policies.

Facial recognition programs don’t recognize minorities as often as they do Caucasian faces — and here is why.

A team of engineers has developed a new RNA delivery technique that uses short bursts of ultrasound to efficiently deliver RNA into cells, reducing colon inflammation.

MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have demonstrated that they can deliver strands of RNA efficiently to colon cells, using bursts of ultrasound waves that propel the RNA into the cells. Using this approach, the researchers dramatically turned down the production of a protein involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in mice.

“What we saw in this paper was the ultrasound can enable rapid delivery of these molecules,” says Carl Schoellhammer, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the study’s lead author. “In this case it was proinflammatory molecules that we were shutting off, and we saw tremendous knockdown of those proteins.”

Continue reading “New Delivery Technique Enables Rapid Treatment for Inflammation” »

Nice.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have designed a new system that automatically handles caching of database queries for web applications written in the web-programming language Ur/Web.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

Daniela Rus loves Singapore. As the MIT professor sits down in her Frank Gehry-designed office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to talk about her research conducted in Singapore, her face starts to relax in a big smile.

Her story with Singapore started in the summer of 2010, when she made her first visit to one of the most futuristic and forward-looking cities in the world. “It was love at first sight,” says the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). That summer, she came to Singapore to join the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) as the first principal investigator in residence for the Future of Urban Mobility Research Program.

Continue reading “Combining automation and mobility to create a smarter world” »

Eeek.

(HealthDay)—Eight people who worked at several rat-breeding facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin have been infected with a virus not commonly found in the United States, federal health officials said Friday.

This is the first known outbreak of Seoul virus associated with pet rats in the United States, although there have been several outbreaks in wild rats, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Continue reading “8 people infected in rare U.S. outbreak of rat virus” »

Not good to hear.

(HealthDay)—For patients with unresected anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC), overall survival (OS) is poor, but radiation therapy (RT) dose is associated with improved survival, according to a study published online Dec. 27 in Cancer.

Todd A. Pezzi, from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and colleagues examined the outcomes of patients with unresected ATC who underwent no surgery or grossly incomplete resection. The authors assessed correlates of OS for 1,288 patients.

Continue reading “Overall survival poor in unresected anaplastic thyroid CA” »

Neuroscientists at the University of Bristol are a step closer to understanding how the connections in our brain which control our episodic memory work in sync to make some memories stronger than others. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveal a previously unsuspected division of memory function in the pathways between two areas of the brain, and suggest that certain subnetworks within the brain work separately, to enhance the distinctiveness of memories.

The team studied the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex—two regions of the brain critical to memory function—as damage in these areas can induce severe memory loss.

Both areas are connected by a complex network of direct and indirect pathways, and the challenge has been until now, how to identify the precise routes through which these brain regions interact in memory formation.

A “smart” needle with an embedded camera is helping doctors perform safer brain surgery.

The device was developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and uses a tiny camera to identify at-risk blood vessels.

Continue reading “Internet of Things smart needle probes the brain during surgery” »