Lifeboat Foundation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A ransomware attack has prompted a healthcare chain that operates 30 hospitals in six states to divert patients from at least some of its emergency rooms to other hospitals, while putting certain elective procedures on pause, the company announced.

In a statement Monday, Ardent Health Services said the attack occurred Nov. 23 and the company took its network offline, suspending user access to its information technology applications, including the software used to document patient care.

The Nashville, Tennessee-based company said it cannot yet confirm the extent of any patient health or financial information that has been compromised. Ardent says it reported the issue to law enforcement and retained third-party forensic and threat intelligence advisors, while working with cybersecurity specialists to restore IT functions as quickly as possible. There’s no timeline yet on when the problems will be resolved.

A new ingestible capsule can monitor vital signs from within the patient’s GI tract. The sensor could be used for less intrusive monitoring of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, or for detecting opioid overdoses.

Diagnosing sleep disorders such as sleep apnea usually requires a patient to spend the night in a sleep lab, hooked up to a variety of sensors and monitors. Researchers from MIT, Celero Systems, and West Virginia University hope to make that process less intrusive, using an ingestible capsule they developed that can monitor vital signs from within the patient’s GI tract.

The capsule, which is about the size of a multivitamin, uses an accelerometer to measure the patient’s breathing rate and heart rate. In addition to diagnosing sleep apnea, the device could also be useful for detecting opioid overdoses in people at high risk, the researchers say.

New research suggests that biological age, as indicated by DNA methylation, more significantly impacts cognitive abilities like memory and processing speed than chronological age. This finding could reshape our understanding of aging and cognitive health.

Scientists may have figured out a brand new way to treat lung cancer by using a protein that inhibits tumor growth.

This previously unknown molecule pathway could help researchers develop personalized lung cancer treatments, a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals.

The researchers found that a protein called RBM10—previously known to be a tumor suppressor—can inhibit the growth of lung cancer by stopping the function of another protein called c-Myc drives cancer cell growth when it is overexpressed in the body.

Researchers have been able to reduce dramatically the level of bad cholesterol in human subjects after injecting them with an experimental gene editing treatment, according to the science journal Nature, which is the first time this technique, called base editing, has been done on humans.

But at least one person died after receiving an infusion, prompting a round of safety concerns.

In the clinical trial, 10 subjects with congenitally high levels of bad cholesterol, aka low-density lipoprotein (LDL), were given an injection of VERVE-101, a gene-editing treatment that uses the base editing technique. This treatment then turned off the gene for the protein PCSK9, which is found in the liver and regulates LDL. High levels of LDL can lead to coronary heart disease.

Activity of neurons embedded in networks is an inseparable composition of evoked and intrinsic processes. Prevalence of either component depends on the neuron’s function and state (e.g. low/high conductance or depolarization states). Dominant intrinsic firing is thought functionally normal for the pacemaker neuron, but not for the sensory afferent neuron or spinal motoneuron serving to transmit rather than to originate signals. Activity of the multi-functional networked cell, depending on its intrinsic states, bears both cell-and network-defined features. Complex firing patterns of a neuron are conventionally attributed to complex spatial-temporal organization of inputs received from the network-mates via synapses, in vast majority dendritic. This attribution reflects widespread views of the within-cell job sharing, such that the main function of the dendrites is to receive signals and deliver them to the axo-somatic trigger zone, which actually generates the output pattern. However, these views require revisiting with account of active properties of the dendrites due to voltage-dependent channels found in the dendritic membrane of practically all types of explored neurons. Like soma and axon, the dendrites with active membrane are able to generate self-maintained, propagating depolarizations and thus share intrinsic pattern-forming role with the trigger zone. Unlike the trigger zone, the dendrites have complex geometry, which is subject to developmental, activity-dependent, or neurodegenerative changes. Structural features of the arborization inevitably impact on electrical states and cooperative behavior of its constituting parts at different levels of organization, from branches and sub-trees to voltage-and ligand-gated ion channels populating the membrane. Nearly two decades of studies have brought numerous phenomenological demonstrations of influence of the dendritic structure on firing patterns in neurons. A necessary step forward is to comprehend these findings and build a firm theoretical basis, including quantitative relationships between geometrical and electrical characteristics determining intrinsic firing of neurons. This Research Topic is aimed at bringing together contributions of researches from different domains of expertise and building a conceptual framework for deeper insight into the nature of dynamic intrinsic motifs in the firing patterns.

We welcome research and methodology papers, mini-reviews, conceptual generalizations and opinions on the following issues:

1. Electrical states of heterogeneous populations of ion channels: definition, life-times, meta-and multi-stability.

Despite substantial work, we are still unsure which brain regions are involved and how they are impacted when consciousness is disrupted.

States of unconsciousness, such as those that occur during sleep or while under the effect of anesthesia, have been the focus of countless past neuroscience studies. While these works have identified some brain regions that are active and inactive when humans are unconscious, the precise contribution of each of these regions to consciousness remains largely unclear.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the activity of different regions of the cortex, the outer layer of the mammalian brain, during different states of unconsciousness, namely sleep and general anesthesia. Their paper, published in Neuron, identifies distinct cortical networks that are engaged during different states of unconsciousness.

Continue reading “Study unveils the engagement of different cortical networks while humans are unconscious” »

An important #AI report for breast cancer leading to the potential of sparing chemotherapy for many. The 1st comprehensive analysis of both cancerous and non-cancerous tissue in hundreds of thousands of patient tissues->HiPS score https://nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02643-7

Deep learning enables comprehensive and interpretable scoring for breast cancer prognosis prediction, outperforming pathologists in multicenter validation and providing insight on prognostic biomarkers.

Optothermal nanotweezers are an innovative optical design method that has revolutionized classical optical techniques to capture a broad range of nanoparticles. While the optothermal temperature field can be employed for in situ regulation of nanoparticles, challenges remain in identifying their potential for regulating bionanoparticles.

To observe the synergistic effects of optothermal manipulation and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-based biodetection, the researchers developed a combination of CRISPR-powered optothermal nanotweezers abbreviated as CRONT.

In a new report in Light: Science & Applications, Jiajie Chen and a research team in optoelectronics engineering, biomedical engineering, and physics, accomplished this by harnessing diffusiophoresis and thermo-osmotic flows for optothermal excitation by successfully enriching DNA functionalized gold nanoparticles, CRISPR-associated proteins, and DNA strands.