Here the authors introduce Brain2Qwerty, a deep learning model that decodes typed sentences from non-invasive brain activity with character error rate down to 18%. This opens a pathway for non-invasive communication neuroprostheses.
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Self-Amplifying RNA: Advantages and Challenges of a Versatile Platform for Vaccine Development
Self-amplifying RNA is synthetic nucleic acid engineered to replicate within cells without generating viral particles. Derived from alphavirus genomes, saRNA retains the non-structural elements essential for replication while replacing the structural elements with an antigen of interest. By enabling efficient intracellular amplification, saRNA offers a promising alternative to conventional mRNA vaccines, enhancing antigen expression while requiring lower doses. However, this advantage comes with challenges. In this review, we highlight the key limitations of saRNA technology and explore potential strategies to overcome them. By identifying these challenges, we aim to provide insights that can guide the future design of saRNA-based therapeutics, extending their potential beyond vaccine applications.
Cachexia-induced alterations of miR-27a-3p drive cell-type specific effects in FAPs and tumor cells that coincide with muscle wasting
Self-amplifying RNA is synthetic nucleic acid engineered to replicate within cells without generating viral particles. Derived from alphavirus genomes, saRNA retains the non-structural elements essential for replication while replacing the structural elements with an antigen of interest. By enabling efficient intracellular amplification, saRNA offers a promising alternative to conventional mRNA vaccines, enhancing antigen expression while requiring lower doses. However, this advantage comes with challenges. In this review, we highlight the key limitations of saRNA technology and explore potential strategies to overcome them. By identifying these challenges, we aim to provide insights that can guide the future design of saRNA-based therapeutics, extending their potential beyond vaccine applications.
Urine: A Pitfall for Molecular Detection of Toscana Virus? An Analytical Proof-of-Concept Study
Toscana virus (TOSV), a sandfly-borne virus, is an important etiological agent in human acute meningitis and meningoencephalitis in the Mediterranean area during the summer. However, the actual number of TOSV infections is underestimated. Laboratory confirmation is necessary because TOSV infection has overlapping clinical features with other neuro-invasive viral infections. Nowadays, the reference test for direct diagnosis in the acute phase of TOSV infection is the PCR based method for detecting TOSV in cerebrospinal fluid and/or plasma, serum, or blood. Although poorly employed, urine is another helpful biological matrix for TOSV detection. Urine is a matrix rich in PCR inhibitors that affect PCR efficiency; consequently, false negatives could be generated.
AI analyses of eye scans can detect diseases like diabetes, osteoporosis and thyroid disease in seconds
A new study presents an artificial intelligence system that scans images of the retina to detect signs of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout, osteoporosis and thyroid disease in seconds. The program—called Reti-Pioneer—is a step toward being able to diagnose many different conditions from a scan of the eye, providing people a quicker diagnosis for common conditions and increasing access to crucial testing.
Associate Professor Lisa Zhuoting Zhu, head of ophthalmic epidemiology at CERA, is one of the leading authors on the paper published in Nature Medicine. She says this technology is making disease diagnosis more efficient, particularly in remote or regional communities.
“This technology will be a real benefit to public health,” says Zhu. “Patients would be able to get information about their health instantly and start interventions as soon as possible instead of waiting for more time-consuming test results.”
What one sleepless night does to brain connections and why sleep may reset them
A night without sleep produced increased markers of connections between brain cells, showing that sleep in humans may be important for restoring cellular balance in the brain, according to a study published in PLOS Biology by David Elmenhorst from the Forschungszentrum Jülich Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and colleagues.
Scientists have long wondered why humans and other animals need to sleep. One potential mechanism is that sleep is required to restore synaptic connections and homeostasis in the brain. Synapses—the connections between brain cells—become stronger during wakefulness.
This increases the amount of energy the brain needs and leads to a buildup of proteins in the brain. Sleep is thought to reset these levels, reducing synaptic connections and restoring homeostasis, but evidence has thus far been limited to animal models.
Solar storms leave their mark on cosmic rays that reach Earth
A new study has revealed an unexpected link between solar storms and the flux of high-energy cosmic rays arriving at Earth. The findings, made using one of the world’s largest cosmic ray detectors, could open up a new way to probe the magnetic structures inside solar storms—and potentially improve our ability to forecast their effects on Earth. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Earth’s magnetic field is constantly being bombarded by energetic charged particles, originating from two very different sources. While some of these particles are cosmic rays, which come toward Earth from all directions across the galaxy, the rest originate from solar storms: violent outbursts from the sun that hurl vast clouds of magnetized plasma into space.
So far, the effects of these two phenomena have often been treated as independent. Although scientists have long known that solar storms can reduce the number of lower-energy cosmic rays reaching Earth by trapping them in the storm’s twisted magnetic fields, higher-energy cosmic rays were thought to be too energetic to be affected. At these energies, the particles were expected to punch straight through the magnetic structures without being deflected.
Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium
WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab is acquiring satellite telecommunications company Iridium for $8 billion as part of its effort to become an end-to-end space company.
The companies announced an agreement June 29 under which Rocket Lab will acquire Iridium for $54 a share in cash and stock, valuing Iridium at $8 billion. That is a 24% premium over the closing price of Iridium’s shares June 26. The deal is projected to close in mid-2027 pending regulatory and other approvals.
Iridium operates a constellation of 66 satellites, with 14 on-orbit spares, that provides phone and data services using L-band spectrum. That includes aviation tracking services from Aireon, which Iridium acquired in May for $367 million by purchasing the 61% stake it did not already own, as well as a recent push into positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT, services.
Private industry and government to completely abandon traditional cybersecurity postures
The threat landscape is no longer just malicious actors on keyboards. Attackers are accelerating their capabilities with agentic AI, automating attacks at scale, and creating zero-day exploits at unprecedented speeds.
Functionalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2016 Edition)
Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle’s conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes’s conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’ is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states.
The following sections will trace the intellectual antecedents of contemporary functionalism, sketch the different types of functionalist theories, and discuss the most serious objections to them.