In the United States – the world’s biggest and most advanced pharmaceutical market – of the 46 new drugs given consent for marketing by regulators last year, 28 were developed by US firms and the realisation of all but four of the rest were led by European firms. None were Chinese.
China’s big ambitions to become a powerhouse of pharmaceutical innovation is as much about the well-being of its people as it is about narrowing the gap with the West.
Current brain-computer interface (BCI) research helps people who have lost the ability to affect their environment in ways many of us take for granted. Future BCIs may go beyond motor function, perhaps aiding with memory recall, decision-making, and other cognitive functions.
Have you ever studied a foreign language and wished you could upload the vocabulary lists directly into your brain so that you could retain them? Would you like to do mental math with the speed and accuracy of a calculator? Do you want a literal photographic memory? Well, these dreams are still the stuff of science fiction, but the brave new world of brain-computer interfaces, or BCI, is well on its way to making technological miracles of this sort a reality.
The story of BCI begins with the discovery of electrical signals emitted by the brain. In 1924, German scientist Hans Berger recorded the first electroencephalogram, or EEG, by placing electrodes under a person’s scalp. Although his research was at first met with derision, a whole new way to study the brain was born from his work. It is now well accepted that the human brain emits electric signals at a variety of frequencies currently known as brainwaves.
BCI researchers attempt to harness these signals to create some desired effect in the world outside the brain. In other words, BCI seeks to make things happen based on a thought in a person’s head. Actually, humans do this all the time when they decide to do anything. A person thinks, “I’m thirsty; I need a drink,” and then the brain sends a litany of instructions to the extremities that allows the person to pour a glass of water, lift it to their mouth, swallow the water, and so on. Most of us go through our days executing these kinds of actions, which require complex interaction between the body and brain, without giving them a second thought.
Optical frequency combs can enable ultrafast processes in physics, biology, and chemistry, as well as improve communication and navigation, medical testing, and security. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2005 was awarded to the developers of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique, and microresonator combs have become an intense focus of research over the past decade.
A major challenge has been how to make such comb sources smaller and more robust and portable. In the past 10 years, major advances have been made in the use of monolithic, chip-based microresonators to produce such combs. While the microresonators generating the frequency combs are tiny—smaller than a human hair—they have always relied on external lasers that are often much larger, expensive, and power-hungry.
Researchers at Columbia Engineering announced today in Nature that they have built a Kerr frequency comb generator that, for the first time, integrates the laser together with the microresonator, significantly shrinking the system’s size and power requirements. They designed the laser so that half of the laser cavity is based on a semiconductor waveguide section with high optical gain, while the other half is based on waveguides, made of silicon nitride, a very low-loss material. Their results showed that they no longer need to connect separate devices in the lab using fiber—they can now integrate it all on photonic chips that are compact and energy efficient.
Today, we are going to be taking a look at GAIM and what it might mean for treating amyloid-based diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyloidosis. This approach has the potential to treat multiple age-related diseases at once by targeting a common characteristic that they all share.
Misfolded proteins cause multiple age-related diseases
Proteins are large, complex molecules that regulate almost everything in our bodies, either directly or indirectly. They do the majority of the work in cells and are critical for the function, regulation, and structure of tissues and organs.
