Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a potential new way to measure a person’s stroke risk that is cost-effective and noninvasive, akin to a cardiac stress test. If validated through further tests, the device could transform stroke care, making early detection of increased risk a standard part of medical exams around the world.

Anyone familiar with optics labs is familiar with the extremes of light coherence: laser beams are highly coherent, producing clear interference patterns used for precise applications like atomic manipulation or precise sensing. In contrast, light from sources like flashlights is incoherent, typically unable to produce such patterns without considerable effort, or at the cost of considerable optical power losses.

Europe’s physics lab CERN said Sunday that some 500 scientists linked to Russian institutes will be affected when it stops cooperation with Russia in late November as planned.

We know that beneath its crater-pocked silicate crust, the moon has an olivine mantle and a metallic core. Some research has also suggested that a partially molten layer may lie at the base of the otherwise solid mantle, sandwiched between it and the solid core. But other evidence disagrees.

Its abundance of sunlight and heavy investment in solar cell technology has positioned Saudi Arabia well in its transition to becoming a leading exporter of renewable energy. Indeed, solar energy currently makes up more than 80% of the Kingdom’s green energy capacity. However, these cells bring a twisted irony, as their operation exposes them to overheating risks. Cooling systems are therefore necessary, but many depend on electricity.

An international research team led by KAUST Professor Qiaoqiang Gan has designed a potential solution. Their device needs no electricity, as it extracts water from the air using nothing more than gravity and relies on cheap, readily available materials.

Along with keeping the solar cells and other semiconductor technologies cool, the water can be repurposed for irrigation, washing, cooling buildings on which the solar cells are placed, and other applications.

New steps have been taken towards a better understanding of the immediate and long-term impact of COVID-19 on the brain in the UK’s largest study to date.

Published in Nature Medicine, the study from researchers led by the University of Liverpool alongside King’s College London and the University of Cambridge as part of the COVID-CNS Consortium shows that 12–18 months after hospitalisation due to COVID-19, patients have worse cognitive function than matched control participants. Importantly, these findings correlate with reduced brain volume in key areas on MRI scans as well as evidence of abnormally high levels of brain injury proteins in the blood.

Strikingly, the post-COVID cognitive deficits seen in this study were equivalent to twenty years of normal ageing. It is important to emphasise that these were patients who had experienced COVID, requiring hospitalisation, and these results shouldn’t be too widely generalised to all people with lived experience of COVID. However, the scale of deficit in all the cognitive skills tested, and the links to brain injury in the brain scans and blood tests, provide the clearest evidence to date that COVID can have significant impacts on brain and mind health long after recovery from respiratory problems.

A powerful new analytical tool offers a closer look at how tumor cells “shape-shift” to become more aggressive and untreatable, as shown in a study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center.

A tumor cell shape-shifts by changing its cell type or state, thus altering its basic pattern of activity and perhaps even its appearance. This changeability or “plasticity” is a characteristic of cancer that leads to diverse tumor-cell populations and ultimately the emergence of cell types enabling treatment resistance and metastatic spread.

The new tool, described Sept. 24 in a paper in Nature Genetics, can be used to quantify this plasticity in samples of tumor cells. The researchers demonstrated it with analyses of tumor samples from animal models and human patients, identifying, for example, a key transitional cell state in glioblastoma, the most common form of brain cancer.

The FDA has approved a new targeted drug specifically for brain tumors called low-grade gliomas. The drug, vorasidenib, was shown in clinical trials to delay progression of low-grade gliomas that had mutations in the IDH1 or IDH2 genes.

“Although there have been other targeted therapies for the treatment of brain tumors with the IDH mutation, [this one] has been one of the most successful in survival prolongation of brain tumor patients,” said Darell Bigner, MD, PhD, the E. L. and Lucille F. Jones Cancer Distinguished Research Professor and founding director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke.

In clinical trials, progression-free survival was estimated to be 27.7 months for people in the vorasidenib group versus 11.1 months for those in the placebo group.

University of Maryland scientists uncovered evidence of an ancient seafloor that sank deep into Earth during the age of dinosaurs, challenging existing theories about Earth’s interior structure.

UMD geologists discover a mysterious subduction zone deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, reshaping our understanding.