Summary: Advancements in brain mapping and the development of new digital tools over the past decade have opened the door to exciting new discoveries in neuroscience and brain sciences.
Source: University of Oslo.
A billion people worldwide suffer from brain diseases such as dementia, addiction and depression. Scientists carrying out brain research at UiO are now contributing to a more efficient utilization of research data by developing 3D brain atlases and new analytic tools.
Is Director of the Division of Research, Innovation and Ventures (DRIVe — https://drive.hhs.gov/) at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (https://aspr.hhs.gov/AboutASPR/ProgramOffices/BARDA/Pages/default.aspx), a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) office responsible for the procurement and development of medical countermeasures, principally against bioterrorism, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats, as well as pandemic influenza and emerging diseases.
Dr. Patel is committed to advancing high-impact science, building new products, and launching collaborative programs and initiatives with public and private organizations to advance human health and wellness. As the DRIVe Director, Dr. Patel leads a dynamic team built to tackle complex national health security threats by rapidly developing and deploying innovative technologies and approaches that draw from a broad range of disciplines.
Dr. Patel brings extensive experience in public-private partnerships to DRIVe. Prior to joining the DRIVe team, he served as the HHS Open Innovation Manager. In that role, he focused on advancing innovative policy and funding solutions to complex, long-standing problems in healthcare. During his tenure, he successfully built KidneyX, a public-private partnership to spur development of an artificial kidney, helped design and execute the Advancing American Kidney Health Initiative, designed to catalyze innovation, double the number of organs available for transplant, and shift the paradigm of kidney care to be patient-centric and preventative, and included a Presidential Executive Order signed in July 2019. He also created the largest public-facing open innovation program in the U.S. government with more than 190 competitions and $45 million in awards since 2011.
Prior to his tenure at HHS, Dr. Patel co-founded Omusono Labs, a 3D printing and prototyping services company based in Kampala, Uganda; served as a scientific analyst with Discovery Logic, (a Thomson Reuters company) a provider of systems, data, and analytics for real-time portfolio management; and was a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. He also served as a scientist at a nanotechnology startup, Kava Technology.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, Ph.D. is the inaugural director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H — https://arpa-h.gov/), an agency that supports the development of high-impact research to drive biomedical and health breakthroughs to deliver transformative, sustainable, and equitable health solutions for everyone. ARPA-H’s mission focuses on leveraging research advances for real world impact.
Previously, Dr. Wegrzyn served as a vice president of business development at Ginkgo Bioworks and head of Innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she focused on applying synthetic biology to outpace infectious diseases—including Covid-19—through biomanufacturing, vaccine innovation and biosurveillance of pathogens at scale.
Prior to Ginkgo, Dr. Wegrzyn was program manager in the Biological Technologies Office at DARPA, where she leveraged the tools of synthetic biology and gene editing to enhance biosecurity, promote public health and support the domestic bioeconomy. Her DARPA portfolio included the Living Foundries: 1,000 Molecules, Safe Genes, Preemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements and the Detect it with Gene Editing Technologies programs.
Dr. Wegrzyn received the Superior Public Service Medal for her work and contributions at DARPA. Prior to joining DARPA, she led technical teams in private industry in the areas of biosecurity, gene therapies, emerging infectious disease, neuromodulation, synthetic biology, as well as research and development teams commercializing multiplex immunoassays and peptide-based disease diagnostics.
Students often sacrifice sleep to study for exams, but lack of sleep can negatively impact memory. Now, University of Groningen neuroscientist Robbert Havekes has found that sleep deprivation hinders recall, not retention of information. Havekes and his team used optogenetics and the drug roflumilast to make “hidden knowledge” obtained while sleep-deprived accessible again days later. Their findings were recently published in the journal Current Biology.
Havekes, associate professor of Neuroscience of Memory and Sleep at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his team have extensively studied how sleep deprivation affects memory processes. “We previously focused on finding ways to support memory processes during a sleep deprivation episode”, says Havekes.
However, in his latest study, his team examined whether amnesia as a result of sleep deprivation was a direct result of information loss, or merely caused by difficulties retrieving information.
After six years of peace, the two tech giants are on course to butt heads again over the future of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft is about to go head-to-head with Google in a battle for the future of search. At a press event later today, Microsoft is widely expected to detail plans to bring OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to its Bing search engine. Google has already tried to preempt the news, making a rushed announcement yesterday to introduce Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, and promising more details on its AI future in a press event on Wednesday.
The announcements put the two tech behemoths, known for their previous skirmishes with each other, on a collision course as they compete to define the next generation of search.
Both companies are chasing a revolutionary new future for search engines: one where the results look more like short, simple answers generated by AI than a collection of links and boxes to click on. Google teased its Bard chatbot yesterday, with queries that seem to be similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And today, Microsoft is expected to boost its Bing search ambitions with the addition of a ChatGPT-like interface that will answer questions in a way no search engine has before.
The more humanlike answers could be revolutionary for search. ChatGPT — which is built by AI company OpenAI — brought conversational AI to the mainstream last year, and if the Bing integration works as intended, the use cases can genuinely shave hours off of research, spreadsheets, coding, and much more.
Just 31 light-years away TechSpot is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Why it matters: A team of international astronomers announced the discovery of an exoplanet that is both eerily similar and close to Earth on a galactic scale.
Saudi Arabian mining company Ma’aden, together with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Innovation Ventures Fund, are investing $6 million USD into Lithium Infinity (Lihytech). The KAUST startup’s battery-grade lithium will be a key component in driving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s commitment to developing the entire value chain of electric vehicles (EVs).
Lihytech has patented a membrane-based lithium extraction technology developed by Professor Zhiping Lai at KAUST. The innovative technology can extract the alkali metal from sources such as seawater, brine, red mud and more. Based on KAUST research, the startup was funded through the KAUST Near Term Grand Challenge, a research translation program, and the technology is being developed on the campus.
This investment will take the technology from lab to commercial pilot scale. Ma’aden is leading the investment with $4 million and KAUST Innovation Ventures is investing $2 million. The University’s venture capital arm, KAUST Innovation Ventures, supports deep tech startups that look to offer solutions to pressing scientific and technological challenges, such as lithium extraction. Lihytech will use the infusion of capital to build a pilot facility at KAUST to extract lithium from the Red Sea and other in-Kingdom resources.
Blue Origin was selected to perform a Mars mission for NASA.
The U.S. space agency announced in a statement that it had contracted billionaire Jeff Bezos’ private space firm to launch a mission next year to study the magnetic field around Mars.
The “one-shot” process paves the path for cutting-edge 3D cell culture methods with biomedical engineering applications, claim the scientists.
German scientists have created a new technology that helps them print 3D objects with sound waves.
The design creates pressure fields using several acoustic holograms, which can be used to print solid particles, gel beads, and even living cells, according to the study released on Thursday.
Carloscastilla/iStock.
What’s next?
Increasingly it seems there is nothing that ChatGPT cannot do, even consulting judges in cases and boosting research. Now, the AI chatbot has been found to score at or around the approximately 60 percent passing threshold for the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), “with responses that make coherent, internal sense and contain frequent insights.”
This is according to a study published on Thursday in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health.
AndreyPopov/iStock.
