The push to make people show ID to access the internet assumes those documents will stay secure. A database of 153 million license scans shows how reckless that assumption is.
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The composer still making music four years after his death — thanks to an artificial brain
I love this kind of synergy between art and technology — another demonstration of how these two concepts really aren’t separate after all. People build up so many experiences over their lives, each moment layering on the previous one to create a uniquely complex tapestry. When we die, all of this is lost to thermal noise. While this particular artistic iteration may not exactly capture memory engrams, I hope that future posthumous neuro-arts find a way to transmit more of the original person’s experiential tapestry. I think it is a lovely idea to try to keep at least part of a person’s uniqueness growing, changing, and creating even after death.
In Australia, a team of artists and scientists have resurrected the US composer Alvin Lucier. It raises a storm of questions about AI and authorship – and it’s also incredibly beautiful.
Tau’s Surprise Birthplace Offers a Clue to How Alzheimer’s Tangles Begin
Two groundbreaking studies have fundamentally challenged established paradigms of Alzheimer’s disease progression by revealing previously unrecognized mechanisms of neurodegeneration. First, researchers from Columbia University overturned long-held assumptions about the tau protein, discovering that it is produced locally in neuronal dendrites rather than migrating from axons as previously believed, suggesting that neurotoxic tau accumulation can originate directly at the synaptic level. Second, a concurrent study from Washington University in St. Louis demonstrated that the destructive immune response exacerbating brain damage is initiated outside the central nervous system; the harmful T-cells found in the brain are actually activated and instructed by peripheral dendritic cells located in lymph nodes and other extraneural tissues. Together, these paradigm-shifting discoveries identify localized dendritic tau production and peripheral immune system modulation as critical new drivers of Alzheimer’s pathology, significantly expanding our understanding of the disease and opening novel avenues for therapeutic intervention.
In healthy neurons, tau proteins are normally concentrated in axons, the long projections that transmit signals. In Alzheimer’s disease, tau accumulates in the cell body and dendrites and clumps together into filaments and tangles. The prevailing explanation has been that mature axonal tau detaches from microtubules and redistributes into these compartments. Many researchers are trying to find ways to block the travel of tau to prevent or treat the disease.
But the new study, published in Nature Neuroscience, proposes a very different explanation for tau’s presence in the dendrites: The proteins are born there.
Using a new imaging technique the researchers developed to pinpoint the birthplace of any protein (read more about the technique below), Ramachandran’s team found that tau proteins are synthesized solely in a neuron’s dendrites.
T Cell Therapy Shows Promise in Treating Aggressive Brain Cancer
Furthermore, the researchers observed that in over half of the participants, the tumors stopped growing or reduced in size for as long as three years post-treatment—including one participant whose cancer has remained to this day in complete remission. B7-H3-targeting CAR-T cell therapy could bring new hope to patients living with treatment-resistant recurrent glioblastomas who currently have few, if any, options, the team says.
“We are excited about figuring out how to treat currently untreatable cancers,” says Lieping Chen, MD, PhD, United Technologies Corporation Professor in Cancer Research and professor of immunobiology and of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and one of the study’s co-principal investigators.
Collaborators on the study included a neurosurgical team at Beijing Tiantan Hospital led by Nan Ji, MD, and a team led by Gangxiong Huang, MD, at Tcelltech, a biotech company preparing clinical grade CAR-T cells.
