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Oct 13, 2021

ECMO Support May Save Lives in COVID-19

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

In patients with severe lung disease caused by viral infections, physicians sometimes turn to ECMO—a life support machine that takes over the functions of the lungs, heart, or both when other support options appear to be failing. But initial reports of ECMO use in patients with COVID-19 described very high mortality, and some physicians recommended against its use.

New data from Columbia University and other ECMO centers throughout the world now show that more than 60% of severe COVID-19 patients who received ECMO have survived.

“The results of this large-scale international registry study, while hardly definitive evidence, provide a real-world understanding of the potential for ECMO to save lives in a highly select population of COVID-19 patients,” says senior author Daniel Brodie, MD, professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of the Adult ECMO Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Oct 13, 2021

NASA’s Perseverance Initiates Remarkable Sample Return Mission

Posted by in category: space

NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth.

Oct 13, 2021

How to watch NASA’s Lucy asteroid mission launch this week online

Posted by in category: space

NASA is getting ready to launch a new science spacecraft Saturday (Oct. 16) to study asteroids near Jupiter, and you can watch mission coverage live all week.

Lucy — which will study Trojan asteroids, or asteroids that share the orbit of the giant planet — will fly to space from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. With blast-off targeting 5:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT), live launch coverage will begin at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT) on NASA Television, the NASA app, NASA social media channels and here at Space.com.

Oct 13, 2021

Physicists Have Made the World’s Most Precise Measurement of Neutron Lifetime

Posted by in category: physics

An international team of researchers has made the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime, which may help answer questions about the early universe.

An international team of physicists led by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington has announced the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime.

The results from the team, which encompasses scientists from over 10 national labs and universities in the United States and abroad, represent a more than two-fold improvement over previous measurements — with an uncertainty of less than one-tenth of a percent.

Oct 13, 2021

The Human Brain Project: six achievements of Europe’s largest neuroscience programme

Posted by in categories: neuroscience, robotics/AI

Human Brain atlas.


From robotic hands to brain-like computers, the Human Brain Project has produced some intriguing results.

Continue reading “The Human Brain Project: six achievements of Europe’s largest neuroscience programme” »

Oct 13, 2021

Autonomous drones can now zip through the woods at insane speeds

Posted by in categories: drones, information science, robotics/AI

Thanks to artificial intelligence, drones can now fly autonomously at remarkably high speeds, while navigating unpredictable, complex obstacles using only their onboard sensing and computation.

This feat was achieved by getting the drone’s neural network to learn flying by watching a sort of “simulated expert” – an algorithm that flew a computer-generated drone through a simulated environment full of complex obstacles. Now, this “expert” could not be used outside of simulation, but its data was used to teach the neural network how to predict the best trajectory, based only on the data from the sensors.

Oct 13, 2021

Swimming robot inspired by 400-million-year-old parasitic fish

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

The robot AgnathaX is modeled on the lamprey, a jawless, blood-sucking fish that’s been largely unchanged by evolution for the past several hundred million years.

Oct 13, 2021

Uh Oh, They Strapped a Sniper Rifle to a Robot Dog

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The “T-01” going On Line.


Say it ain’t so.

Oct 12, 2021

Epic Particle Collider Experiment in US Could Reveal How Matter Holds Itself Together

Posted by in categories: particle physics, space

When the Nobel Prize-winning US physicist Robert Hofstadter and his team fired highly energetic electrons at a small vial of hydrogen at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1,956 they opened the door to a new era of physics.

Until then, it was thought that protons and neutrons, which make up an atom’s nucleus, were the most fundamental particles in nature.

They were considered to be ‘dots’ in space, lacking physical dimensions. Now it suddenly became clear that these particles were not fundamental at all, and had a size and complex internal structure as well.

Oct 12, 2021

Intradermal vaccination of live attenuated influenza vaccine protects mice against homologous and heterologous influenza challenges

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

To test whether LAIV is effective via intradermal route, 106 plaque forming units (PFU) of DelNS1-LAIV was i.d. injected to multiple groups of mice. One of the groups was boosted with second injection at 14 days after the prime vaccination. Unvaccinated control mice were injected with the same volume of PBS. The mice were intranasally challenged with 10x LD50 of H1N1/415742Md at 28 days after primary vaccination. Both single dose and two doses of i.d. vaccination induced good protection with no weight loss and 100% survival after virus challenge (Fig. 1a). Comparing i.d. vaccinated mice with i.n. vaccinated mice, there was no difference in body weight loss or survival rate (Fig. 1a), which suggested LAIV i.d. vaccination offered the same protective efficacy as i.n. vaccination. Remarkably, a single dose of i.d. vaccination fully protected mice against virus challenge with 100% survival and no weight loss (Fig. 1b).

To test the broadness of i.d. vaccination-induced immunity, H7N9 (A/Anhui/1/2013m) or H5N1 (A/VNM/1194/2004) challenges were performed at 28 days after a single dose of i.d. vaccination. H7N9 challenge caused sharp weight loss and 60% death in PBS control mice, while the vaccinated mice were 3 days quicker in body weight recovery and had 100% survival (Fig. 1c). However, i.d. DelNS1-LAIV only rescued the survival rate to 20% among the H5N1-challenged mice, versus 100% mortality in the PBS group (Fig. 1d).

We then studied the longevity of i.d. DelNS1-LAIV-induced immunity by challenging the vaccinated mice at 3 or 6 months after vaccination. Firstly, homologues virus H1N1/415742Md challenge did not cause body weight loss, nor lethality 3 or 6 months after vaccination (Fig. 1e), suggesting the protective immunity lasted at least for 6 months; Secondly, all vaccinated mice survived against an antigenically different H1N1 strain (PR8) challenge and regaining body weight starting day 7 post challenge (7dpi) (Fig. 1f). All vaccinated mice survived after H7N9 challenge though with a similar degree of weight loss comparing to the PBS control mice (Fig. 1g). The immunized mice challenged by H5N1 at 3 or 6 months had 30% and 20% survival, respectively, with a similar degree of weight loss comparing to the PBS controls (Fig. 1h).