Lifeboat Foundation

Before undergoing surgeries and other invasive medical procedures, patients typically undergo anesthesia. Anesthesia consists in giving patients a class of drugs (i.e., anesthetics) that cause them to lose feeling in specific areas of the body (i.e., local anesthesia) or fully lose awareness during a procedure (i.e., general anesthesia). These anesthetics can be administered to patients via injection, inhalation, skin-numbing lotions, and other means.

In the past, doctors and medical researchers viewed general anesthesia as a passive process that could not be influenced or interrupted once anesthetic drugs were administered. More recently, however, studies showed that it is in fact an active brain process that can be experimentally controlled and acted on.

A research team at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently carried out a study investigating the processes underpinning brain states while under general anesthesia and those associated with the subsequent re-emergence of awareness. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlight possible strategies that could help anesthesiologists to extend and deepen or shorten periods of anesthesia.

Online romance fraud is an increasingly common phenomenon, which can affect people of all ages worldwide. This type of fraud occurs when a malicious individual or members of a criminal organization engage with users online pretending to be romantically interested in them, while trying to trick them into sending money or sharing confidential information with them.

Online romance scams can have a detrimental effect on a victim’s life, causing them to spend all their savings, become indebted, and even be subjected to blackmail or identity theft. A team of researchers at Abertay University in the U.K. recently reviewed existing literature focusing on romance fraud and then summarized some of the most recurring findings in a paper pre-published on arXiv.

“Romance fraud has been growing over the last decade or so and was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which saw a surge in cybercrime and cyberattacks,” Dr. Lynsay Shepherd, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Our paper provides a comprehensive overview of romance fraud research, which could serve as a starting point for future research in the field.”

Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have analyzed RNA editing in postmortem brains of four schizophrenia cohorts and uncovered a significant and reproducible trend of hypo-editing in patients of European descent.

The paper “Widespread RNA hypo-editing in schizophrenia and its relevance to mitochondrial function,” published in Science Advances, details the research team’s efforts to isolate functionally impacting RNA editing sites to understand how dysregulated editing contributes to various disorders.

In the data analysis, researchers identified 26,841 unique differential editing sites. They observed a significant trend of lower than expected amounts of RNA editing in the schizophrenia groups, which was reproduced in three of the four cohorts of European individuals.

Quantum information is a powerful technology for increasing the amount of information that can be processed and communicated securely. Using quantum entanglement to securely distribute a secret quantum state among multiple parties is known as “quantum state sharing.”

An important protocol in quantum networks and cryptography, quantum state sharing works like this (in simple terms): a secret quantum state is divided into n shares and given to n players. The secret state can only be reconstructed if k (where kn/2) players cooperate, while the remaining n-k players cannot access the information. This protocol can also be used for quantum error correction, allowing the reconstruction of the secret state even if some of the information is lost.

In quantum information, there are two types of systems: discrete variable and continuous variable systems. Discrete variable systems are good because they don’t lose information easily, while continuous variable systems are good because the generation and processing of quantum states are deterministic rather than probabilistic, which enables a high degree of precision.

A new study has shown how the brain’s cognitive maps are used and updated for reasoning, allowing us to make decisions in unfamiliar situations.

Some mysteries in science vanish with more accurate measurements, resolving gaps with a puff of new data. And sometimes, a second look simply reinforces the fact you have a mystery on your hands.

It’s the latter in the case of a new study that challenges the Universe’s most fundamental laws of physics.

The Hubble constant is an expression of the speed of Universe’s expansion. Unfortunately, there’s more than one solution for it, depending on how it’s measured.

Dr. H. Rusty Harris, an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has discovered a novel circuit element referred to as a meminductor.

A circuit element refers to an electrical component utilized to regulate and guide the flow of electricity within an electrical circuit. The traditional three circuit elements are the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Recently, within the past 15 years, two additional circuit elements, the memristor, and the memcapacitor, have been discovered. These newer circuit components are referred to as the “mem-” versions of their classical counterparts and exhibit unique current and voltage properties that depend on previous values of current or voltage in time, acting like a memory.

“Those two discoveries set the world a little bit on its head as far as electrical engineering,” Harris said. “All of a sudden, we thought we had three, but now we found these two others. And so that led us to think, ‘OK, there’s got to be more then, but how do we understand what they are? How do we map all of these things relative to each other?’ And it turns out, there is a relationship between each of the resistors and its family and each of the capacitors and its family.”

A team of researchers at Kyoto University is exploring the use of higher dimensions in de Sitter space to explain gravity in the early universe. By developing a method to compute correlation functions among fluctuations, they aim to bridge the gap between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. This could potentially validate superstring theory and enable practical calculations about the early universe’s subtle changes. Although initially tested in a three-dimensional universe, the analysis may be extended to a four-dimensional universe for real-world applications.

Having more tools helps; having the right tools is better. Utilizing multiple dimensions may simplify difficult problems — not only in science fiction but also in physics — and tie together conflicting theories.

For example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity — which resides in the fabric of space-time warped by planetary or other massive objects — explains how gravity works in most cases. However, the theory breaks down under extreme conditions such as those existing in black holes and cosmic primordial soups.

Promising results in clinical studies have been demonstrated by the utilization of electrothermal agents (ETAs) in cancer therapy. However, a difficulty arises from the balance between facilitating the degradation of ETAs, and at the same time, increasing the electrothermal performance/stability required for highly efficient treatment. In this study, we controlled the thermal signature of the MoS2 by harnessing MoS2 nanostructures with M13 phage (MNM) via the structural assembling (hydrophobic interaction) phenomena and developed a combined PANC-1 cancer cell–MNM alternating current (AC)-stimulus framework for cancer cell ablation and electrothermal therapy. A percentage decrease in the cell viability of ~23% was achieved, as well as a degradation time of 2 weeks; a stimulus length of 100 μs was also achieved.