Lifeboat Foundation

The gang, which calls itself RansomHub, published several files on its dark web leak site containing personal information about patients across an array of documents, some of which included internal files related to Change Healthcare. RansomHub said it would sell the stolen data unless Change Healthcare paid a ransom.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, UnitedHealth spokesperson Tyler Mason confirmed the company paid the cybercriminals. “A ransom was paid as part of the company’s commitment to do all it could to protect patient data from disclosure.” The company would not confirm the amount it paid.

RansomHub is the second gang to demand a ransom from Change Healthcare. The health tech giant reportedly paid $22 million to a Russia-based criminal gang called ALPHV in March, which then disappeared, stiffing the affiliate that carried out the data theft out of their portion of the ransom.

Research shows that some types of stressors—and the way we react to them—can actually be beneficial to our overall health and well-being. Here’s how.

Cognitive decline and dementia already affect more than 55 million people worldwide. This number is projected to skyrocket over the next few decades as the global population ages.

There are certain risk factors of cognitive decline and dementia that we cannot change – such as having a genetic predisposition to these conditions. But other risk factors we may have more power over – with research showing certain modifiable lifestyle habits, such as smoking, obesity and lack of exercise, are all linked to higher risk of dementia.

What role nutrition plays in preventing cognitive decline and dementia has also been the focus of scientific research for quite some time.

MIT researchers have unveiled a new chip designed to protect sensitive data in health-monitoring apps and AI-powered devices.

Human history was forever changed with the discovery of antibiotics in 1928. Infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and sepsis were widespread and lethal until penicillin made them treatable.

Surgical procedures that once came with a high risk of infection became safer and more routine. Antibiotics marked a triumphant moment in science that transformed medical practice and saved countless lives.

But antibiotics have an inherent caveat: When overused, bacteria can evolve resistance to these drugs. The World Health Organization estimated that these superbugs caused 1.27 million deaths around the world in 2019 and will likely become an increasing threat to global public health in the coming years.

Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you’re up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe.

Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security.

As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community’s research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden’s senior adviser on technology and national security issues. And then, in July of last year, he became CEO and president of Rand, the oldest nonprofit think tank in the US, which has shaped government policy on nuclear strategy, the Vietnam War, and the development of the internet.

National clinical guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19 vary significantly around the world, with under-resourced countries the most likely to diverge from gold standard (World Health Organization; WHO) treatment recommendations, finds a comparative analysis published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health.

And nearly every national guideline recommends at least one treatment proven not to work, the analysis shows.

Significant variations in national COVID-19 treatment recommendations have been suspected since the advent of the pandemic, but these haven’t been formally quantified or studied in depth, note the researchers.

Rice University engineers have developed the smallest implantable brain stimulator demonstrated in a human patient. Thanks to pioneering magnetoelectric power transfer technology, the pea-sized device developed in the Rice lab of Jacob Robinson in collaboration with Motif Neurotech and clinicians Dr. Sameer Sheth and Dr. Sunil Sheth can be powered wirelessly via an external transmitter and used to stimulate the brain through the dura ⎯ the protective membrane attached to the bottom of the skull.

The device, known as the Digitally programmable Over-brain Therapeutic (DOT), could revolutionize treatment for drug-resistant depression and other psychiatric or neurological disorders by providing a therapeutic alternative that offers greater patient autonomy and accessibility than current neurostimulation-based therapies and is less invasive than other brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

Advances in gene sequencing technology and computing power have significantly increased the availability of bioinformatic data and processing capabilities. This convergence provides an ideal opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) to develop methods to control cellular behavior.

In a new study, Northwestern University researchers have reaped fruit from this nexus by developing an AI-powered transfer learning approach that repurposes publicly available data to predict combinations of gene perturbations that can transform cell type or restore diseased cells to health.

The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.