Facial recognition programs don’t recognize minorities as often as they do Caucasian faces — and here is why.
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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.”
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Faster websites with fewer bugs
Posted in internet, robotics/AI
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.
“In 2010, nobody was talking about autonomous driving. We were pioneers in developing and deploying the first mobility on demand for people with self-driving golf buggies,” says Rus. “And look where we stand today! Every single car maker is investing millions of dollars to advance autonomous driving. Singapore did not hesitate to provide us, at an early stage, with all the financial, logistical, and transportation resources to facilitate our work.”
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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.
Seoul virus is a member of the Hantavirus family of rodent-borne viruses and is carried by wild Norway rats worldwide. Most rats infected with the virus do not appear sick.
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.
The researchers found that the median OS was 2.27 months, and 11 percent of patients were alive at one year. There was a positive correlation for RT dose and survival for the entire study cohort, for those receiving systemic therapy, and for those with stage IVA, B, and C disease. Older age, one or more comorbidities, and distant metastases correlated with OS in multivariate analyses (hazard ratios, 1.317, 1.587, and 1.385, respectively); there were also correlations for receipt of systemic therapy (hazard ratio, 0.637) and for receipt of RT versus no RT (45 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.843; 45 to 59.9 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.596; and 60 to 75 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.419). Propensity-score matching confirmed the RT dose-survival correlation for patients who received higher (60 to 75 Gy) versus lower (45 to 59.9 Gy) therapeutic doses.
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.
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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.
The probe, which is the size of a human hair, uses an infrared light to look through the brain.
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The high tech sector is often the backbone of a healthy economy, and this sector of the economy is growing rapidly in many parts of the world. While growth of the technology sector is likely to continue in the developed world, high tech growth is often especially rapid in the developing world. Here are some countries where high tech sector growth is taking place at a particularly rapid pace:
China: China is experiencing rapid economic growth in general, and this includes the country’s high tech sector. While the high tech sector of China has been growing for some time, it may grow at an even faster rate in the future. China’s economy is thought to be making a transition from an industrial to a post industrial nation. This transition often leads to growth in the high tech sector.
Since people in China are spending more on merchandise in general, more people in China are purchasing high tech gadgets. You can see this trend from the increase in internet usage that has been happening throughout China. It is estimated that there is a new internet user in China every 1.6 seconds. Currently, nearly 600 million people in China already use the internet. This is nearly double the population of the United States, and this figure is expected to continue rising rapidly!
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