Toggle light / dark theme

When dealing with a human brain, preventing perception would require even more care. If a person’s brain inched toward consciousness under such an experiment, the consequences would be thorny, according to Hank Greely, a biomedical legal expert at Stanford University in California. “That’s very tricky ethically, legally and scientifically,” he told New Scientist.

Vrselja told the publication that he and his colleagues “have no intention of plugging anyone at the point of death into their BrainEx machine.” But what they’ve accomplished so far is a significant step toward proving that brain death may not be as final as we once thought, arousing fresh hope that patients who are hovering between life and death can still be saved.

In the meantime, the researchers have had some success in keeping brains “cellularly active for up to 24 hours” so they can test treatments for neurological conditions. They hope to help patients with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Columbia researchers created an AI model that predicts gene activity in any human cell, advancing disease research and treatment. It has already uncovered mechanisms behind pediatric leukemia and may reveal hidden genome functions.

Researchers at Columbia University.

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.

Left and right circularly polarized light, where the electromagnetic waves spiral in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner as they travel, plays a crucial role in a wide range of applications, from enhancing medical imaging techniques to enabling advanced communication technologies. However, generating circularly polarized light often requires complex and bulky optical set-ups, which hinders its use in systems with space constraints.

To address this challenge, a team of researchers from Singapore led by Associate Professor Wu Lin of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has put forth a new type of metasurface—an ultra-thin material with properties not found in nature—that may be able to replace traditional complex and bulky optical set-ups.

They have published their research in the Physical Review Letters paper “Enabling all-to-circular polarization up-conversion by nonlinear chiral metasurfaces with rotational symmetry.”

Scientists from Delft, Vienna, and Lausanne discovered that the protein machines that shape our DNA can switch direction. Until now, researchers believed that these so-called SMC motors that make loops into DNA could move in one direction only. The discovery, which is published in Cell, is key to understanding how these motors shape our genome and regulate our genes.

“Sometimes, a cell needs to be quick in changing which genes should be expressed and which ones should be turned off, for example in response to food, alcohol or heat. To turn genes off and on, cells use Structural Maintenance of Chromosomes (SMC) motors that act like switches to connect different parts of DNA,” first author Roman Barth explains.

“However, SMC machines don’t naturally know which parts to connect. They simply load somewhere on the DNA and start shaping it into a loop until they reach a point where they are forced to stop. That’s why they rely heavily on the ability to explore both sides of the DNA to find the right stop signs.”

Dan dennet real patterns.


As I’m waiting for the tests and results from my oncologist, my employer has decided to put me on a medical leave of absence as they say they can’t accommodate me any longer. As a result, I only get limited pay. Please help me so that I can pay some bills so that I can keep a roof over my head and some food in the fridge. Please reach out if you have any questions.

As an embryo grows, there is a continuous stream of communication between cells to form tissues and organs. Cells need to read numerous cues from their environment, and these may be chemical or mechanical in nature. However, these alone cannot explain collective cell migration, and a large body of evidence suggests that movement may also happen in response to embryonic electrical fields. How and where these fields are established within embryos was unclear until now.

“We have characterized an endogenous bioelectric current pattern, which resembles an during development, and demonstrated that this current can guide migration of a cell population known as the neural crest,” highlights Dr. Elias H. Barriga, the corresponding author who led the study published in Nature Materials.

Initially, Dr. Barriga and his team began research on the neural crest at the former Gulbenkian Institute of Science (IGC) in Oeiras, Portugal before continuing research in Dresden, establishing a group at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life.

Our genes contain all the instructions our body needs to function, but their expression must be finely regulated to guarantee that each cell performs its role optimally. This is where DNA and RNA epigenetics come in: a series of mechanisms that act as “markers” on genes, to control their activity without modifying the DNA or RNA sequence itself.

Until now, DNA and RNA epigenetics were studied as independent systems. These two mechanisms seemed to function separately, each playing its own role in distinct stages of the gene regulation process.

Perhaps that was a mistake.

In the final report of a phase 1 trial evaluating intracerebroventricular B7-H3-targeting CAR T cells in children and young adults with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, repeated intracranial infusions were feasible and well tolerated with a median overall survival of 19.8 months and 3 patients surviving over 40 months from diagnosis.

As the rate of humanity’s data creation increases exponentially with the rise of AI, scientists have been interested in DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing data. It encodes genetic information and determines the blueprint of every living thing on earth.

And DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than solid-state hard drives. To demonstrate just how compact, researchers have previously encoded all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, 52 pages of Mozart’s music, and an episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers” into tiny amounts of DNA.

But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t exactly mainstream yet, but it might be getting closer. Now you can buy what may be the first commercially available book written in DNA. Today, Asimov Press debuted an anthology of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories encoded in strands of DNA. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book plus the nucleic acid version—a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.

What is cell senescence and inflammaging?

Featuring Matt Yousefzadeh, PhD


Join us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/MichaelLustgartenPhD

Discount Links/Affiliates:
Blood testing (where I get the majority of my labs): https://www.ultalabtests.com/partners/michaellustgarten.

At-Home Metabolomics: https://www.iollo.com?ref=michael-lustgarten.