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A new method developed at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) uses DNA sequencing to efficiently map long-range connections between different regions of the brain. The approach dramatically reduces the cost of mapping brain-wide connections compared to traditional microscopy-based methods.

Neuroscientists need anatomical maps to understand how information flows from one region of the brain to another. “Charting the cellular connections between different parts of the brain—the connectome—can help reveal how the nervous system processes information, as well as how faulty wiring contributes to mental illness and other disorders,” says Longwen Huang, a postdoctoral researcher in CSHL Professor Anthony Zador’s lab. Creating these maps has been expensive and time-consuming, demanding massive efforts that are out of reach for most research teams.

Continue reading “How to map brain connections using DNA barcodes” »

#HubbleClassic On January 19, 2015, Hubble captured a global map of Jupiter. This video was made from the observations.

Today, Jupiter is at opposition, meaning it shines in our sky all night long and is the closest to Earth that it’ll be all year.

#NASA #Hubble #classic #jupiter #planet #video #solarsystem #astronomy #space #science

Admin and Founder of The Secrets of the Universe and former intern at Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, I am a science student pursuing Master’s in Physics from India. I love to study and write about Stellar Astrophysics, Relativity & Quantum Mechanics.

Mercury.

Great.

NASA is sending a small helicopter called Ingenuity with the Perseverance rover to Mars. It will be the first aircraft to fly in Mars if all goes well. [NASA has built a helicopter to explore Mars and it’s finally ready to launch](https://www.space.com/first-mars-helicopter-ready-to-launch.html)

Continue reading “NASA helicopter ‘Ingenuity’ will be ‘first aircraft on Mars’” »

Moderna, Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 will advance to a 30,000-participant Phase III trial later this month, following publication of additional positive Phase I data from a study led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Moderna said its closely-watched COVID-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 will advance to a 30,000-participant Phase III trial later this month, following publication of additional positive Phase I data from a study led by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The Phase III “COVE” study (NCT04470427) is expected to begin registration at study centers nationwide beginning on July 21 with study initiation set for six days later. The primary endpoint of the randomized, 1:1 placebo-controlled trial will be the prevention of symptomatic COVID-19 disease. Key secondary endpoints include prevention of severe COVID-19 disease as defined by the need for hospitalization, and prevention of infection by SARS-CoV-2, Moderna said.

Continue reading “Moderna Advancing COVID-19 Vaccine into Phase III after Positive Initial Clinical Results” »

The first episode of “Hubble – Eye in the Sky” is here! 🎥

Have you ever wondered how a telescope in space is operated from down on Earth? Welcome to the Hubble control center. Find out how extraordinarily detailed observations are made with an orbiting space telescope, and get a look at Hubble’s on-the-ground replica that engineers and scientists use down here to fix problems up there.

For more on this video series, visit https://go.nasa.gov/3eveFO1.

Starlink beta trials will start in Northern US and parts of Canada, new FAQ says.

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a new link between impaired brain energy metabolism and delirium—a disorienting and distressing disorder particularly common in the elderly and one that is currently occurring in a large proportion of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 [15th of July 2020].

While much of the research was conducted in mice, additional work suggests overlapping mechanisms are at play in humans because cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collected from patients suffering from delirium also contained tell-tale markers of altered brain glucose metabolism.

Collectively, the research, which has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that therapies focusing on brain energy metabolism may offer new routes to mitigating delirium.

No industry will be spared.

The pharmaceutical business is perhaps the only industry on the planet, where to get the product from idea to market the company needs to spend about a decade, several billion dollars, and there is about 90% chance of failure. It is very different from the IT business, where only the paranoid survive but a business where executives need to plan decades ahead and execute. So when the revolution in artificial intelligence fueled by credible advances in deep learning hit in 2013–2014, the pharmaceutical industry executives got interested but did not immediately jump on the bandwagon. Many pharmaceutical companies started investing heavily in internal data science R&D but without a coordinated strategy it looked more like re-branding exercise with the many heads of data science, digital, and AI in one organization and often in one department. And while some of the pharmaceutical companies invested in AI startups no sizable acquisitions were made to date. Most discussions with AI startups started with “show me a clinical asset in Phase III where you identified a target and generated a molecule using AI?” or “how are you different from a myriad of other AI startups?” often coming from the newly-minted heads of data science strategy who, in theory, need to know the market.

However, some of the pharmaceutical companies managed to demonstrate very impressive results in the individual segments of drug discovery and development. For example, around 2018 AstraZeneca started publishing in generative chemistry and by 2019 published several impressive papers that were noticed by the community. Several other pharmaceutical companies demonstrated impressive internal modules and Eli Lilly built an impressive AI-powered robotics lab in cooperation with a startup.

Continue reading “Deep Dive Into Big Pharma AI Productivity: One Study Shaking The Pharmaceutical Industry” »