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Blog – Page 11037

In Brief

  • Just a few micrometers in diameter, this quasicrystal is the third to be found in this particular meteorite, but it differs from the other two in both structure and chemical composition.
  • While many applications have been discovered for synthetic quasicrystals, the rarity of naturally occurring ones has made them difficult to study.

A team led by Luca Bindi, a geologist from the University of Florence, has found an ultra-rare quasicrystal just a few micrometres wide in a meteorite that landed in Russia five years ago. The discovery has been detailed in Scientific Reports.

Two other quasicrystals have already been discovered in this particular meteorite, but the latest is different from its predecessors in both structure and chemical composition. This new quasicrystal is composed of aluminum, copper, and iron atoms structured in an arrangement very similar to the pentagon-based pattern of a soccer ball, a first of its kind in nature.

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A new way to treat brain cancer with our own immune cells.

Injecting genetically modified immune cells directly into the brain and spinal fluid has had remarkable effects on a deadly brain cancer

Glioblastoma is a particularly virulent form of brain cancer. Around 20,000 people in the United States are diagnosed each year and the disease typically has poor survival rates. In a new case reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, a man has undergone experimental CAR-T therapy to treat the condition. CAR-T therapy is a branch of immunotherapy, the field taking cancer treatment by storm, and involves infusing genetically modified T cells back into a patient to target cancer cells.

A new hope

Continue reading “A Direct Infusion Of Immune Cells Could Fight Cancer” | >

Microsoft announced this morning that it has acquired Maluuba, a Toronto startup focused on using deep learning for natural language processing. Deep learning is an approach to artificial intelligence currently in vogue that has driven incredible gains in the field over the last five years. As Microsoft wrote in the blog post announcing the purchase, “We’ve recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next — machine reading and writing.”

The Verge covered Maluuba in the summer of 2016, when the startup shared the results of an AI system that could read and comprehend text with near human capability, outperforming similar systems shown off by Google and Facebook. Along with acquiring the company, Microsoft has also established closer ties with Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in the field of deep learning who served as an advisor to Maluuba, and will now become and advisor to Microsoft’s AI division.

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A synthetic cardiac stem cell (left) mirroring a real cardiac stem cell (right), offering therapeutic benefits without the associated risks (credit: Alice Harvey/NC State University)

Scientists have created the first synthetic version of a cardiac stem cell, offering therapeutic benefits comparable to those from natural stem cells — but without the risks and limitations, according to researchers from North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University in China.

The newly created synthetic stem cells cannot replicate. That means they could reduce some of the risks associated with natural stem-cell therapies — including tumor growth and immune rejection. The synthetic stem calls would also avoid the fragility of natural stem cells, which require careful storage and a multi-step process of typing and characterization before they can be used.

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In Brief

  • Scientists are a little bit closer to unlocking the mystery of how the rules of the quantum realm translate to the rules of the classical physics of the observable world.
  • Experts predict that the materials used in this research, topological insulators, will play a key role in furthering this development.

It’s no surprise that quantum physics can be disorienting to the casual observer; after all, it does follow its own set of rules quite different from those of classical physics which rule over our everyday experience. In the quantum realm, things can and cannot be at the same time (to a certain extent) or are continually moving without spending energy. These don’t apply to the physics of macro-level matter.

These two realms are related, in so far as they occur in the same physical space. This relationship is what N. Peter Armitage, an associate professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, wanted to figure out in a study published in the journal Science. “We found a particular material that is straddling these two regimes,” Armitage said.

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