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Nothing can go faster than light. It’s a rule of physics woven into the very fabric of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The faster something goes, the closer it gets to its perspective of time freezing to a standstill.

Go faster still, and you run into issues of time reversing, messing with notions of causality.

But researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore have now pushed the limits of relativity to come up with a system that doesn’t run afoul of existing physics, and might even point the way to new theories.

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𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚 𝐰𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐮𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐬

𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙖𝙩 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙙 𝙈𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙙𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙡𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙙 𝙖 𝙨𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙬𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙙𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙘𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙬𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙡𝙮 𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙪𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙨.

Researchers think a wireless implant to treat brain tumors could eliminate hospital visits for cancer treatment. [Image courtesy of Stanford Medicine]

According to the researchers, brain tumors are some of the most deadly and difficult-to-treat cancers. Glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain tumor, kills more than 10,000 Americans a year.

Continue reading “Stanford researchers think a wireless brain implant could remove tumors” | >

Could knowing where your ancestors came from be the key to better cancer treatments? Maybe, but where would that key fit? How can we trace cancer’s ancestral roots to modern-day solutions? For Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Research Professor Alexander Krasnitz, the answers may lie deep within vast databases and hospital archives containing hundreds of thousands of tumor samples.

Krasnitz and CSHL Postdoctoral Fellow Pascal Belleau are working to reveal the genealogical connections between and race or ethnicity. They’ve developed new software that accurately infers continental from tumor DNA and RNA. Their latest study is published in Cancer Research, and their work may help clinicians develop new strategies for early cancer detection and personalized treatments.

“Why do people of different races and ethnicities get sick at different rates with different types of cancer? They have different habits, living conditions, exposures—all kinds of social and . But there may be a as well,” Krasnitz says.

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The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.

For the first time since 2006, we have two joint recipients of the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award. This year’s recipients are Jerome C. Glenn and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who are defending against world existential risks and country existential risks, respectively.

Jerome C. Glenn and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are winners of the 2022 Guardian Award.

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To learn to socialize, zebrafish need to trust their gut.

Gut microbes encourage specialized cells to prune back extra connections in brain circuits that control social behavior, new University of Oregon research in zebrafish shows. The pruning is essential for the development of normal social behavior.

The researchers also found that these ‘social’ neurons are similar in zebrafish and mice. That suggests the findings might translate between species — and could possibly point the way to treatments for a range of neurodevelopmental conditions.

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Summary: By inhibiting NMDA receptors, ketamine increases noise to gamma frequencies in one layer of the thalamic nucleus and one lay of the somatosensory cortex. Findings suggest psychosis may be triggered by an increase in background noise impairing thalamocortical neurons which may be caused by a malfunction in NMDA receptors affecting the balance of inhibition and excitation in the brain.

Source: HSE

An international team of researchers including Sofya Kulikova, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE University-Perm, found that ketamine, being an NMDA receptor inhibitor, increases the brain’s background noise, causing higher entropy of incoming sensory signals and disrupting their transmission between the thalamus and the cortex.

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