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A multispectral, super-low-dose photoacoustic microscopy (SLD-PAM) system developed by City University of Hong Kong (CUHK) achieves significantly higher sensitivity than traditional optical resolution photoacoustic imaging.

By providing an exceptionally high level of sensitivity, SLD-PAM could help broaden the use of photoacoustic microscopy in biomedical applications. In the future, it could translate to clinical settings; for example, it could be used for ophthalmic exams where a low-power laser is preferred for the patient’s safety and comfort. Long-term monitoring of pharmacokinetics or blood flow also requires low-dose imaging to alleviate perturbation to tissue function.

General-purpose automation could radically improve society by vastly accelerating construction, manufacturing, and R&D. Just as the scale and complexity of today’s cities would have been unimaginable 200 years ago, we may see a similar factor of value growth over the next 50 years. Quality of life may dramatically increase as well. I envision that billions could be lifted out of poverty and the average person may live like today’s wealthiest top 1%. Space colonization might be made feasible. Keep in mind these projections are highly speculative. Nonetheless, it is worth considering the remarkable possibilities! #automation #tech #robotics #futurism

The rise of humanoid robots didn’t happen overnight, but a kind of perfect storm has accelerated the phenomenon over the past year and change. The foundation, of course, is decades of research.

Toiling away in research facilities and R&D departments laid the ground work for a new generation of technology. The necessary software and components have come a long way, driven by innovations in industrial robotics, autonomous driving and even the smartphone industry.

Continue reading “This is Apptronik’s humanoid robot, Apollo” »

One promising approach to treating type 1 diabetes is implanting pancreatic islet cells that can produce insulin when needed, which can free patients from giving themselves frequent insulin injections. However, one major obstacle to this approach is that once the cells are implanted, they eventually run out of oxygen and stop producing insulin.

To overcome that hurdle, MIT engineers have designed a new implantable device that not only carries hundreds of thousands of insulin-producing islet cells, but also has its own on-board oxygen factory, which generates oxygen by splitting water vapor found in the body.

The researchers showed that when implanted into diabetic mice, this device could keep the mice’s blood glucose levels stable for at least a month. The researchers now hope to create a larger version of the device, about the size of a stick of chewing gum, that could eventually be tested in people with type 1 diabetes.

Shared Access Signature (SAS) link exposed a storage bucket with 38TB of private data, including passwords, Teams messages, and the backups of two Microsoft AI research employees’ workstations.

Discover the evolution of Android trojans — ‘Hook’ inherits its powers from ‘ERMAC.’ How does it outperform its predecessor? Read on.

While immunotherapies have shown great promise in treating blood cancers, most clinical trials aimed at treating solid tumors such as pancreatic or lung cancer have failed. Researchers have long thought that solid tumors’ resistance to treatment is due to the tumor microenvironment—the cells and matrix that surround solid tumors—but the exact mechanisms behind this blockade were unclear, until now.

In a new study, University of Pennsylvania researchers reveal how the tumor microenvironment prevents T cells from attacking tumors. Using mouse models, they showed that cancer-associated fibroblasts along with extracellular matrix within the tumor microenvironment create a physical barrier to T cell entry, and these cells also actively suppress T cell function. When the researchers used CAR T cells to target and remove these fibroblasts, rather than targeting the tumor cells themselves, T cells were able to infiltrate and attack the tumor.

“The physical barrier and immunosuppressive environment derived from cancer-associated fibroblasts limits or traps T cells and prevents them from entering into the tumor,” says first author Zebin Xiao, a physician and postdoctoral researcher in the School of Veterinary Medicine. “We showed that targeting those fibroblasts can disrupt that barrier and has a very great tumor inhibition effect.”

Zachary Schug, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center at The Wistar Institute, has published a new paper in the journal Nature Cancer. Schug’s paper, titled “Acetate acts as a metabolic immunomodulator by bolstering T-cell effector function and potentiating antitumor immunity in breast cancer,” demonstrates a double-acting mechanism for fighting a particularly aggressive, difficult-to-treat form of breast cancer. Schug’s research shows how silencing a certain gene, ACSS2, may improve existing treatments for patients.

Triple-negative breast cancer, or TNBC, affects 10–15% of patients with breast cancer in the US. TNBC is called “triple-negative” because the cancer lacks an estrogen receptor, a progesterone receptor, and a HER2 (human epidermal growth factor) receptor. The absence of any of these receptors—receptors that when present in other forms of breast cancer, can be effectively targeted during treatment—makes treating TNBC quite difficult, and patients with TNBC have limited treatment options.

TNBC’s notorious aggression makes the technical challenge of finding a reliably effective treatment target all the more serious: compared to other breast cancers, TNBC grows faster and resists treatment more stubbornly. All these factors contribute to the fact that TNBC patients suffer from worse prognoses.

Magnetic skyrmions have received much attention as promising, topologically protected quasiparticles with applications in spintronics. Skyrmions are small, swirling topological magnetic excitations with particle-like properties. Nevertheless, the lower stability of magnetic skyrmions only allow them to exist in a narrow temperature range, with low density of the particles, thus implying the need for an external magnetic field, which greatly limits their wider applications.

In a new report published in Science Advances, Yuzhu Song and a team of researchers formed high-density, spontaneous magnetic biskyrmions without a magnetic field in ferrimagnets via the thermal expansion of the lattice.

The team noted a strong connection between the atomic-scale ferrimagnetic structure and nanoscale magnetic domains in a ferrimagnet compound by using neutron powder diffraction and Lorentz transmission electron microscopy measurements.

Conventional manufacturing methods such as soft lithography and hot embossing processes can be used to bioengineer microfluidic chips, albeit with limitations, including difficulty in preparing multilayered structures, cost-and labor-consuming fabrication processes as well as low productivity.

Materials scientists have introduced digital light processing as a cost-effective microfabrication approach to 3D print microfluidic chips, although the fabrication resolution of these microchannels are limited to a scale of sub-100 microns.

In a new report published in Microsystems and Nanoengineering, Zhuming Luo and a scientific team in biomedical engineering, and chemical engineering in China developed an innovative digital light processing method.