Inspired by insects, these robots follow local cues like turns and distance to build honeycomb patterns that resist failure.

Want to know more? See our corrisponding Substack episode. Weâre living through the largest uncontrolled experiment on human cognition in history, and most people donât even know theyâre subjects. While the world moved on from pandemic panic tâŠ
A gene-editing delivery system developed by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers simultaneously targeted the liver and lungs of a preclinical model of a rare genetic disease known as alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), significantly improving symptoms for months after a single treatment, a new study shows.
A gene-editing delivery system developed by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers simultaneously targeted the liver and lungs of a preclinical model of a rare genetic disease known as alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), significantly improving symptoms for months after a single treatment, a new study shows. The findings, published in Nature Biotechnology, could lead to new therapies for a variety of genetic diseases that affect multiple organs.
âMulti-organ diseases may need to be treated in more than one place. The development of multi-organ-targeted therapeutics opens the door to realizing those opportunities for this and other diseases,â said study leader Daniel Siegwart, Ph.D., Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Biochemistry, and in the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern.
Gene editingâa group of technologies designed to correct disease-causing mutations in the genomeâhas the potential to revolutionize medicine, Dr. Siegwart explained. Targeting these technologies to specific organs, tissues, or cell populations will be necessary to effectively and safely treat patients.
The brains of humans and other primates are known to execute various sophisticated functions, one of which is the representation of the space immediately surrounding the body. This area, also sometimes referred to as âperipersonal space,â is where most interactions between people and their surrounding environment typically take place.
Researchers at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and other institutes recently investigated the neural processes through which the brain represents the area around the body, using brain-inspired computational models. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that receptive fields surrounding different parts of the body contribute to building a modular model of the space immediately surrounding a person or artificial intelligence (AI) agent.
âOur journey into this field began truly serendipitously, during unfunded experiments done purely out of curiosity,â Giandomenico Iannetti, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. âWe discovered that the hand-blink reflex, which is evoked by electrically shocking the hand, was strongly modulated by the position of the hand with respect to the eye.