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New Graphene Technology Matures Brain Organoids Faster, May Unlock Neurodegenerative Insights

Researchers from University of California San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute have developed a novel method to stimulate and mature human brain organoids using graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon. Published in Nature Communications, the study introduces Graphene-Mediated Optical Stimulation (GraMOS), a safe, non-genetic, biocompatible, non-damaging way to influence neural activity over days to weeks. The approach accelerates brain organoid development — especially important for modeling age-related conditions like Alzheimer’s disease — and even allows them to control robotic devices in real time.

“This is a game-changer for brain research,” said Alysson Muotri, Ph.D., corresponding author, professor of pediatrics, and director of the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute Integrated Space Stem Cell Orbital Research Center. “We can now speed up brain organoid maturation without altering their genetic code, opening doors for disease research, brain–machine interfaces and other systems combining living brain cells with technology.”

How to Spot (and Fix) 5 Common Performance Bottlenecks in pandas Workflows

Slow data loads, memory-intensive joins, and long-running operations—these are problems every Python practitioner has faced. They waste valuable time and make iterating on your ideas harder than it should be.

This post walks through five common pandas bottlenecks, how to recognize them, and some workarounds you can try on CPU with a few tweaks to your code—plus a GPU-powered drop-in accelerator, cudf.pandas, that delivers order-of-magnitude speedups with no code changes.

Don’t have a GPU on your machine? No problem—you can use cudf.pandas for free in Google Colab, where GPUs are available and the library comes pre-installed.

World’s first spinal cord transplant to take place in Israel, could allow patients to walk again

According to the World Health Organization, over 15 million people worldwide are living with spinal cord injuries, with the majority resulting from traumatic causes such as falls, road traffic accidents, and violence.

Currently, spinal cord injuries cannot be fully cured, so treatment focuses on stabilizing the patient, preventing further damage, and maximizing function. Emergency care often involves immobilizing the spine, reducing inflammation, and sometimes performing surgery to repair fractures or relieve pressure.

Rehabilitation includes physical and occupational therapy, as well as assistive devices like wheelchairs and braces. While experimental therapies—including stem cells and robotic devices—are being explored, no treatment yet reliably restores full spinal cord function.

Spinal cord injuries are one of the few human injuries where the body cannot naturally heal itself, and the tissue is both structurally complex and extremely sensitive.

“The spinal cord transmits electrical signals from the brain to all parts of the body. When it is severed by trauma—such as a car accident, a fall, or a combat injury—the chain is broken. Think of an electrical cable that has been cut: when the two ends no longer touch, the signal cannot pass, and the patient remains paralyzed below the injury,” explained Professor Tal Dvir, head of the Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology and the Nanotechnology Center at Tel Aviv University, who is leading the effort. Dvir is also the chief scientist at Matricelf, the Israeli biotech company commercializing the technology.

Tel Aviv University announced on Wednesday that the surgery will take place in Israel, marking a historic milestone in regenerative medicine.

Continue reading “World’s first spinal cord transplant to take place in Israel, could allow patients to walk again” | >

UPDATE: SpaceX Starship’s Historic 10th Flight Test | Launch, Landing, & Reentry Countdown

Join us LIVE for SpaceX’s Starship 10th Flight Test, streaming as soon as Sunday, August 24, 2025.This mission marks a major step forward following the Flight 9 investigation and Ship 36 static fire anomaly. Engineers have introduced critical hardware and operational upgrades to improve performance and reliability. For this flight, the Super Heavy Booster will conduct multiple experimental maneuvers, including: Landing burn tests to refine precision booster recovery Payload deployment trials to validate orbital operations Reentry experiments advancing Starship’s long-term reusability.

#SpaceX #Starship #StarshipFlight10 #ElonMusk #SpaceXLIVE #SuperHeavy #StarshipLaunch.

Credit: spacex.

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Prefrontal cortex astrocytes modulate distinct neuronal populations to control anxiety-like behavior

Whether and how prefrontal astrocyte Ca2+ signaling modulates different neuronal populations in aiding or inhibiting anxiety-like behavior remains not fully understood. Here authors show that prefrontal astrocytes encode anxiogenic cues and modulate excitatory and inhibitory neurons differently. Silencing prefrontal astrocytes heightens anxiety-like behavior and induces proteomic changes in astrocytes and neurons.

High-fidelity entangling gates connect remote superconducting quantum processors

Quantum computers hold the potential of solving some optimization and data processing problems that cannot be tackled by classical computers. Many of the most promising quantum computing platforms developed so far are based on superconducting qubits, tiny circuits based on superconducting materials.

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