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Researchers Create a New Antivenom That Can Combat Bites From 17 Snake Species, Trials in Mice Suggest

The study points to a few other benefits: Modern antivenoms don’t address the tissue damage that can be wrought by snake venom, but the nanobodies in the new product seemed to decrease tissue injury in mice, even with delayed treatment. And since nanobodies are less likely to cause serious immune reactions, per the statement, clinicians could theoretically administer the new antivenom before the appearance of clear symptoms, instead of waiting in an attempt to avoid severe side effects.

Still, because the experiments were performed on lab animals, not humans, the new antivenom is nowhere near commercial availability—first, the concept must be proven in human subjects. As such, the team is working on improving the antivenom and securing more funding.

“We have both a moral and global responsibility to contribute to solving this problem,” Laustsen-Kiel says in the statement. “Our antivenom has the potential to fundamentally change how snakebites are treated around the world.”

Analysis of 14 million children finds COVID-19 infection poses greater heart complication risk than vaccination

A new study shows children and young people face long-lasting and higher risks of rare heart and inflammatory complications after COVID-19 infection, compared to before or without an infection. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccination was only linked to a short-term higher risk of myocarditis and pericarditis.

The study is the largest of its kind in this population, and is published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health. It was led by scientists at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, and University College London, with support from the BHF Data Science Center at Health Data Research UK.

Principal author Dr. Alexia Sampri, University of Cambridge, said, “Our whole-population study during the pandemic showed that although these conditions were rare, children and young people were more likely to experience heart, vascular or inflammatory problems after a COVID-19 infection than after having the vaccine—and the risks after infection lasted much longer.”

The Lunar Module Descent Engine: Apollo’s Most Complex Rocket Motor

The Lunar Module’s Descent Propulsion System (DPS) was the first engine in history that could throttle continuously in deep space — a breakthrough that made Apollo’s lunar landing possible. This engine had to ignite once, vary its thrust smoothly from 10 to 100 percent, avoid combustion instability, and hold steady while the LM hovered just feet above the Moon.
In this video, we explore the real engineering behind the DPS: its hypergolic fuels, injector plate design, the early “chugging” instability problem, throttle control logic, and how the engine kept working even as Apollo 11 pushed it to its limits.
If you enjoy deep dives into Apollo engineering, this one’s for you.

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Spins influence solid oxygen’s crystal structure under extreme magnetic fields, study finds

Placing materials under extremely strong magnetic fields can give rise to unusual and fascinating physical phenomena or behavior. Specifically, studies show that under magnetic fields above 100 tesla (T), spins (i.e., intrinsic magnetic orientations of electrons) and atoms start forming new arrangements, promoting new phases of matter or stretching a crystal lattice.

One physical effect that can take place under these is known as magnetostriction. This effect essentially prompts a material’s crystal structure to stretch out, shrink or deform.

When magnetic fields above 100 T are produced experimentally, they can only be maintained for a very short time, typically for only a few microseconds. This is because their generation poses great stress on the wires used to produce the fields (i.e., coils), causing them to break almost immediately.

Introducing Nested Learning: A new ML paradigm for continual learning

The last decade has seen incredible progress in machine learning (ML), primarily driven by powerful neural network architectures and the algorithms used to train them. However, despite the success of large language models (LLMs), a few fundamental challenges persist, especially around continual learning, the ability for a model to actively acquire new knowledge and skills over time without forgetting old ones.

When it comes to continual learning and self-improvement, the human brain is the gold standard. It adapts through neuroplasticity — the remarkable capacity to change its structure in response to new experiences, memories, and learning. Without this ability, a person is limited to immediate context (like anterograde amnesia). We see a similar limitation in current LLMs: their knowledge is confined to either the immediate context of their input window or the static information that they learn during pre-training.

The simple approach, continually updating a model’s parameters with new data, often leads to “catastrophic forgetting” (CF), where learning new tasks sacrifices proficiency on old tasks. Researchers traditionally combat CF through architectural tweaks or better optimization rules. However, for too long, we have treated the model’s architecture (the network structure) and the optimization algorithm (the training rule) as two separate things, which prevents us from achieving a truly unified, efficient learning system.

Mapping chromatin structure at base-pair resolution unveils a unified model of cis-regulatory element interactions

Now online! Li et al. apply base-pair resolution Micro Capture-C ultra to map chromatin contacts between individual motifs within cis-regulatory elements and reveal a unified model of biophysically mediated enhancer-promoter communication.

HCN channels in rod bipolar cells of rat retina: subcellular localization, kinetic properties and functional dynamics

  • Liu, J. H., Singh, J. B., Veruki, M. L., & Hartveit, E. (2021). Morphological properties of the axon initial segment-like process of AII amacrine cells in the rat retina. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 529 (16), 3,593 – 3,620.

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    • Promising drug can inhibit aggressive breast cancer

    New research reveals a drug developed by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University may develop into a new treatment for an especially aggressive form of breast cancer.

    A developed by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University offers a promising avenue to treat intractable cases of —a form of cancer that is notoriously aggressive and lacks effective treatments.

    In a study published today in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, researchers describe the effect of a molecule known as SU212 to inhibit an enzyme that is critical to cancer progression. The research was conducted in a humanized mouse model.

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