With IT systems down, staff at Ascension have to use manual processes they left behind some 20 years ago. It’s the latest in a string of attacks on health care systems that house private patient data.
Scientists put their heads together for an insane medical breakthrough.
Neuroscience and biomedical engineering startup BrainBridge announced that it has created an AI-mechanized system for performing head transplants.
The procedure would graft a head onto the body of a brain-dead donor, maintaining the memories, cognitive abilities and consciousness of the transplanted individual.
A new study, recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggests that people who participate in extreme exercise may live longer.
Researchers tracked a select group of elite runners capable of running a sub-4-minute mile and found they may live five years longer on average than the general population.
Columbia University researchers have found cells inside clogged arteries share similarities with cancer and aggravate atherosclerosis, raising the possibility that anticancer drugs could be used to treat atherosclerosis and prevent heart attacks.
Their study found that smooth muscle cells that normally line the inside of our arteries migrate into atherosclerotic plaques, change their cell identity, activate cancer genes, and proliferate inside the plaques.
“Our study shows that these transformed muscle cells are driving atherosclerosis, opening the door to new ways to treat the disease, potentially with existing cancer drugs,” says Muredach Reilly, MD, the Florence and Herbert Irving Endowed Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of Columbia’s Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.
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Dr. Melvin Vopson’s study delves into the intriguing concept of information entropy, which differs from traditional physical entropy. Physical entropy measures the disorder within a system’s physical states, whereas information entropy pertains to the arrangement and complexity of information within those states.
Vopson applied this principle to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, analyzing its mutations through an information entropy lens. He explained, “The physical entropy of a given system is a measure of all its possible physical microstates compatible with the macrostate…the additional entropy associated with them is called the entropy of information.”
In a pioneering achievement, a research team led by experts at Cincinnati Children’s have developed the world’s first human mini-brain that incorporates a fully functional blood-brain barrier (BBB).
This major advance, published May 15, 2024, in Cell Stem Cell, promises to accelerate the understanding and improved treatment of a wide range of brain disorders, including stroke, cerebral vascular disorders, brain cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative conditions.
“Lack of an authentic human BBB model has been a major hurdle in studying neurological diseases,” says lead corresponding author Ziyuan Guo, PhD, “Our breakthrough involves the generation of human BBB organoids from human pluripotent stem cells, mimicking human neurovascular development to produce a faithful representation of the barrier in growing, functioning brain tissue. This is an important advance because animal models we currently use in research do not accurately reflect human brain development and BBB functionality.”
A study in EBioMedicine reveals significant microplastic concentrations in thrombi from major blood vessels, linking microplastic levels to increased risk and severity of thrombotic events.
The FDA has allowed billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person after it proposed a fix for a problem that occurred in its first patient. Correspondent Brooke Shafer joins \.
Mao, H., Tian, Y., Wang, Z. et al. Discovery and engineering of Tsp2Cas9 for genome editing. Cell Discov 10, 55 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41421-024-00685-w.
Theory of mind —the ability to understand other people’s mental states—is what makes the social world of humans go around. It’s what helps you decide what to say in a tense situation, guess what drivers in other cars are about to do, and empathize with a character in a movie. And according to a new study, the large language models (LLM) that power ChatGPT and the like are surprisingly good at mimicking this quintessentially human trait.
“Before running the study, we were all convinced that large language models would not pass these tests, especially tests that evaluate subtle abilities to evaluate mental states,” says study coauthor Cristina Becchio, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. The results, which she calls “unexpected and surprising,” were published today —somewhat ironically, in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
The results don’t have everyone convinced that we’ve entered a new era of machines that think like we do, however. Two experts who reviewed the findings advised taking them “with a grain of salt” and cautioned about drawing conclusions on a topic that can create “hype and panic in the public.” Another outside expert warned of the dangers of anthropomorphizing software programs.
