Lifeboat Foundation

Recent technological advancements have opened invaluable opportunities for assisting people who are experiencing impairments or disabilities. For instance, they have enabled the creation of tools to support physical rehabilitation, to practice social skills, and to provide daily assistance with specific tasks.

Researchers at Meta AI recently developed a promising and non-invasive method to decode speech from a person’s brain activity, which could allow people who are unable to speak to relay their thoughts via a computer interface. Their proposed method, presented in Nature Machine Intelligence, merges the use of an imaging technique and machine learning.

“After a stroke, or a brain disease, many patients lose their ability to speak,” Jean Remi King, Research Scientist at Meta, told Medical Xpress. “In the past couple of years, major progress has been achieved to develop a neural prosthesis: a device, typically implanted on the motor cortex of the patients, which can be used, through AI, to control a computer interface. This possibility, however, still requires brain surgery, and is thus not without risks.”

With a processor that has fewer qubits, IBM has improved error correction, paving the way for the use of these processors in real life.

IBM has unveiled its much-awaited 1,000+ qubit quantum processor Condor, alongside a utility-scale processor dubbed IBM Quantum Heron at its Quantum Summit in New York. The latter is the first in the series of utility-scale quantum processors that IBM took four years to build, the company said in a press release.

Continue reading “IBM finally unveils quantum powerhouse, a 1,000+ qubit processor” »

Jellagen and NPL’s groundbreaking research unveils jellyfish collagen’s potential for medical applications, from tissue regeneration to lab-grown organs.

As if space travel didn’t present enough challenges — from bone thinning and an elevated risk of cancer to the sheer tedium of spending months confined to a small capsule — scientists have now warned that prolonged exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation could lead to erectile dysfunction.

For a NASA-funded study, published in The Faseb Journal, researchers exposed rats to doses of radiation equivalent to that found in deep space, and suspended them in harnesses to simulate weightlessness for four weeks. A year later the blood supply to the rats’ erectile tissue was found to be impaired, apparently mainly as a result of the radiation. The scientists described it as “a new health risk to consider with deep space exploration”, but said that there were signs it could be treatable. When astronauts are in orbit, such as on the International Space Station, they are protected from cosmic radiation by Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects the rays. Further out, they’re fully exposed, and transporting the material needed to shield them is difficult and expensive.

A team of engineers at Duke University have developed a method to broaden the reach of CRISPR technologies. While the original CRISPR system could only target 12.5% of the human genome, the new method expands access to nearly every gene to potentially target and treat a broader range of diseases through genome engineering.

The research involved collaborators at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Zurich and McMaster University.

This work was published on October 4 in the journal Nature Communications.

A new technique using deep brain stimulation tailored to each patient exceeded researchers’ expectations in treating the cognitive impairments from moderate to severe traumatic brain injury.

In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.

“I couldn’t remember anything,” said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. “My left foot dropped, so I’d trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter — I’d get pissed off really easily.”

So our experiences or how we handle those experiences may have an effect on the expression of genes in our body.

A surprising thing happened when researchers began exploring whether early-life stress compounds the effects of a childhood head injury on health and behavior later in life: In an animal study, stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head.

It’s already known that head injuries are common in young kids, especially from falling, and can be linked to mood disorders and social difficulties that emerge later in life. Adverse childhood experiences are also very common, and can raise risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood.

Continue reading “Stress Changes More Genes in the Mouse Brain Than a Head Injury” »

Using lasers rather than scalpels and saws has many benefits in surgery. Yet they are only used in isolated cases. But that could be about to change: laser systems are getting smarter and better all the time, as a research team from the University of Basel demonstrates.

Even back in 1957, when Gordon Gould coined the term “laser” (short for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”), he was already imagining the possibilities for its use in medicine. Surgeons would be able to make precise incisions without even touching the patient.

Before that could happen, however, there were—and still are—many hurdles to overcome. Manually controlled light sources have been superseded by mechanical and computer-controlled systems to reduce injuries caused by clumsy handling. Switching from continuous beams to pulsed lasers, which turn themselves rapidly on and off, has reduced the heat they produce. Technical advances allowed lasers to enter the world of ophthalmology in the early 1990s. Since then, the technology has moved on in other areas of medicine, too, but only in relatively few applications has it replaced the scalpel and the bone saw.

Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a portable, self-powered ultraviolet-C device called the Tribo-sanitizer that can inactivate two of the bacteria responsible for many foodborne illnesses and deaths.

The Tribo-sanitizer’s UVC lamp is powered using the triboelectric effect —electricity that is generated when two dissimilar materials come into contact. In tests, the Tribo-sanitizer successfully inactivated two potentially deadly foodborne bacteria, Escherichia coli O157:H7, and Listeria monocytogenes, mainly by damaging their DNA, according to findings published in the journal Nano Energy.

The bacteria selected as testing targets are two of the most common causes of serious foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S. Escherichia coli produces toxins that can cause severe abdominal cramps, fever, bloody diarrhea, and kidney failure, and Listeria monocytogenes can cause listeriosis, which has the highest rates of hospitalization and mortality of any foodborne illness.