This case demonstrates the use of ictal SPECT as an objective way to localize surface-EEG–negative insular seizures.
A 43-year-old woman presented with events characterized by a “funny” feeling in the head, nausea, and right-hand numbness/cramping. Events lasted minutes, without impaired awareness. Onset occurred 1.5 years after an embolic left middle cerebral artery stroke. MRI showed left temporoparietal and insular T2 changes.
“This proof-of-concept study highlights MRT as a promising non-invasive therapy for drug-resistant focal epilepsies with optimal peak doses of 125–250 Gy, and it suggests that distributing the dose through multiple angles optimizes the therapeutic effect. MRT could provide a safer alternative to surgery, warranting further investigations.”
Read this open-access research article from Epilepsia Journal at doi.org/10.1002/epi.70063.
Objective One-third of patients with epilepsy, particularly those with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE), remain resistant to medication. Resective surgery, the gold standard, is highly invasive and carries significant risks. Here, using a mouse model, we explored the potential of microbeam radiation therapy (MRT), a new technique based on the spatial microfractionation of high-flux X-rays, as a non-invasive alternative for treating MTLE.
The Politecnico di Milano has created the first integrated and fully tunable device based on spin waves, opening up new possibilities for the telecommunications of the future, far beyond current 5G and 6G standards. The study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, was conducted by a research group led by Riccardo Bertacco of the Department of Physics of the Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with Philipp Pirro of Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität and Silvia Tacchi of Istituto Officina dei Materiali—CNR-IOM.
Magnonics is an emerging technology that uses spin waves —collective excitations of electronic spins in magnetic materials—as an alternative to electrical signals. The spread of this technology has been restricted until now by the need for an external magnetic field, which has prevented it being incorporated into chips.
The new device developed at the Politecnico overcomes this hurdle: it is miniaturized (100 × 150 square micrometers, so much smaller than current radiofrequency signal processing devices based on acoustic waves); it is fully integrated on silicon—and therefore compatible with existing electronic platforms, and it functions without external magnets, thanks to an innovative combination of permanent SmCo micromagnets and magnetic flux concentrators.
Researchers from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have reported the first observation of a dynamic magnetochiral instability in a solid-state material. Their findings, published in Nature Physics, bridge ideas from nuclear and high-energy physics with materials science and condensed matter physics to explain how the interplay between symmetry and magnetism can amplify electromagnetic waves.
A material’s behavior is heavily influenced by its symmetries. One unique symmetry of interest to many physicists is chirality. Chiral materials have non-superimposable mirror images, like a right and left hand. For physicists like Fahad Mahmood, Rafael Fernandes and Jorge Noronha, the nonlinear interaction between chiral materials and light is of particular interest. How do these materials respond when light triggers effects beyond the straightforward, linear response?
“If I have a shiny crystal and I put a red laser on it, I’ll get red light back; that’s a linear response, as the frequencies—or colors—of the incoming and outgoing light are the same,” Mahmood said. “You can go a little further and try to excite some frequency so that it sends back a different color: you put red light on something, and it shines back as green, blue or yellow. That’s nonlinear response.”
Researchers have designed a new device that can efficiently create multiple frequency-entangled photons, a feat that cannot be achieved with today’s optical devices. The new approach could open a path to more powerful quantum communication and computing technologies.
“Entangling particles efficiently is a critical capability for unlocking the full power of quantum technologies—whether to accelerate computations, surpass fundamental limits in precision measurement, or guarantee unbreakable security using the laws of quantum physics,” said Nicolas Fabre from Telecom Paris at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris.
“Photons are ideal because they can travel long distances through optical fibers or free space; however, there hasn’t been a way to efficiently generate frequency entanglement between more than two photons.”
Our nearest neighbor, the moon, is still something of a mystery to us. For decades, scientists have wondered why it appears so lopsided, with dark volcanic plains on the near side (the side we see) and rugged, cratered mountains and a thicker crust on the far side. Now we might be closer to knowing why.
Analysis of lunar soil and rock brought back from the far side by China’s Chang’e-6 mission suggests that a massive impact long ago changed the moon’s interior.
The samples were collected from the South Pole-Aitken basin, a massive impact crater covering nearly one-quarter of the moon’s surface. Because it is so deep, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences wanted to see whether the impact had reached the moon’s mantle and changed its chemistry.
A team of New York University scientists has created a gear mechanism that relies on fluids to generate rotation. The invention holds potential for a new generation of mechanical devices that offer greater flexibility and durability than do existing gears—whose origins date back to ancient China.
The breakthrough is reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“We invented new types of gears that engage by spinning up fluid rather than interlocking teeth—and we discovered new capabilities for controlling the rotation speed and even direction,” says Jun Zhang, a professor of mathematics and physics at NYU and NYU Shanghai and the senior author of the paper.
Guanidine is an organic compound primarily used as a denaturing reagent to disrupt the structures of proteins and nucleic acids. Together with partner institutions, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have demonstrated that cyanobacteria, which play a central role in global biogeochemical cycles, use guanidine as a nitrogen source.
The results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers shed light on the underlying mechanisms and the potential for a new tool for sustainable biotechnological applications.
Researchers from the Optics Group at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón have managed to correct in real time problems related to image aberrations in single-pixel microscopy using a recent technology: programmable deformable lenses. The new method was described by the research team in an open-access article recently published in Nature Communications and is part of the development of the European CONcISE project.
The solution proposed by this team combines an adaptive lens (which “shapes” the light wavefront in real time) with a sensorless method that evaluates image sharpness directly from the data, without complex algorithms. This approach corrects distortions caused both by the system and by the sample itself, producing sharper images, close to the physical resolution limit, without adding complexity to the microscope.
This adaptive lens is known as a “multi-actuator adaptive lens” (M-AL), which can be easily integrated into the system without significantly modifying the traditional configuration of a single-pixel microscope based on structured illumination. These types of lenses consist of an optically transparent and deformable membrane (similar to a thin sheet of glass or polymer) that can change shape via actuators distributed around or behind it.
For years, countries have told the United Nations how much methane they emit using a kind of bottom-up bookkeeping: Count the cows and oil barrels, estimate the volume of trash, and multiply by standard emission factors.
Those ledgers can miss the mark, suggest measurements from aircraft and satellites. But the tools to translate that data into national emissions estimates have largely remained the domain of specialists.
A team at Harvard is changing that. In a recent Nature Communications paper, the researchers describe Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI), an open-access system designed to let governments, researchers and civil society independently evaluate national methane claims against what satellites detect in the atmosphere, year after year.