Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists from EPFL and the University of Lausanne have used a chip that was originally designed for environmental science to study the properties of biocement formation. This material has the potential to replace traditional cement binders in certain civil engineering applications.

The chip is the size of a credit card and its surface is engraved with a flow channel measuring one meter from end to end that is as thick as a human hair. Researchers can inject a solution into one end of the channel and, with the help of time-lapse microscopy, observe the solution’s behavior over several hours. Medical scientists have used similar chips for health care applications, such as to examine how arteries get clogged or how a drug spreads into the bloodstream, while environmental engineers have applied them to the study of biofilms and contaminants in drinking water.

Now, a team of civil engineers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Soil Mechanics (LMS), together with scientists from the Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), have repurposed the chip to understand complex transport-reaction phenomena involved in the formation of new kinds of biocement.

Researchers at Penn Medicine and Intel Corporation led the largest-to-date global machine learning effort to securely aggregate knowledge from brain scans of 6,314 glioblastoma (GBM) patients at 71 sites around the globe and develop a model that can enhance identification and prediction of boundaries in three tumor sub-compartments, without compromising patient privacy. Their findings were published today in Nature Communications.

“This is the single largest and most diverse dataset of glioblastoma patients ever considered in the literature, and was made possible through federated learning,” said senior author Spyridon Bakas, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and Radiology, at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “The more data we can feed into machine learning models, the more accurate they become, which in turn can improve our ability to understand, treat, and remove glioblastoma in patients with more precision.”

Researchers studying rare conditions, like GBM, an aggressive type of brain tumor, often have patient populations limited to their own institution or geographical location. Due to privacy protection legislation, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) in the United States, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, data sharing collaborations across institutions without compromising patient privacy data is a major obstacle for many healthcare providers.

The key to curing cancer may be hidden within the genetic differences between humans and dogs. According to scientists working with the National Institutes of Health, dogs get the same diseases that we do, and they have many of the same genes that we do, too.

UV tattoos use a fluorescent dye, which means the tattoo only appears under UV light. There is little evidence on whether UV tattoos are safe for human skin.

UV tattoos, also known as black light tattoos, are invisible under regular lighting and only appear under UV light due to the fluorescent compounds within the ink.

There is no regulation over UV tattoos, so there may be some potential health risks, depending on the ink’s chemicals. UV tattoos will also require similar aftercare to regular tattoos.

The field of epidermal electronics, or e-tattoos, covers a wide range of flexible and stretchable monitoring gadgets that are wearable directly on the skin. We have covered this area in multiple Nanowerk Spotlights, for instance stick-on epidermal electronics tattoo to measure UV exposure or tattoo-type biosensors based on graphene; and we also have posted a primer on electronic skin.

Taking the concept of e-tattoos a step further, integrating them with triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), for instance for health monitoring, could lead to next generation wearable nanogenerators and Internet-of-things devices worn directly on and powered by the skin.

In work reported in Advanced Functional Materials (“Triboelectric Nanogenerator Tattoos Enabled by Epidermal Electronic Technologies”), researchers report a tattoo-like TENG (TL-TENG) design with a thickness of tens of micrometers, that can interface with skin without additional adhesive layers, and be used for energy harvesting from daily activities.

According to the CDC, prediabetes is a serious health condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough yet to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes. Approximately 96 million American adults—more than one in three—have prediabetes. Of those with prediabetes, more than 80% don’t know they have it.

Researchers have just caught bacteria sidestepping antibiotic treatment with a never-before-seen trick.

Bacteria’s troublesome talent for developing resistance against antibiotics is a rapidly growing health threat. This ability has ancient origins and allows drug-resistant bacterial infections like MRSA and gonorrhea to kill 1.3 million people globally each year.

Continue reading “Scientists Just Caught Bacteria Using a Never-Before-Seen Trick to Avoid Antibiotics” »

A new study led by UCL researchers has identified patterns in how common health conditions occur together in the same individuals, using data from 4 million patients in England.

With advancing age, millions of people live with multiple conditions—sometimes referred to as multimorbidity—and the proportion of people affected in this way is expected to rise over the next decades. However, medical education and training, health care delivery, clinical guidelines and research have evolved to focus on one disease at a time.

The Academy of Medical Sciences and the UK Chief Medical Officer (CMO) have recognized this problem and set out a challenge of investigating which diseases co-occur in the same individuals and why.

Excess fat triggers immune cells to overeat serotonin in the brain of developing male mice, leading to depression-like behavior. More than half of all women in the United States are overweight or obese when they become pregnant. While being or becoming overweight during pregnancy can have potential health risks for moms, there are also hints that it may tip the scales for their kids to develop psychiatric disorders like autism or depression, which often affects one gender more than the other.

What hasn’t been understood however is how the accumulation of fat tissue in mom might signal through the placenta in a sex-specific way and rearrange the developing offspring’s brain.

To fill this gap, Duke postdoctoral researcher Alexis Ceasrine, Ph.D., and her team in the lab of Duke psychology & neuroscience professor Staci Bilbo, Ph.D., studied pregnant mice on a high-fat diet. In findings appearing November 28 in the journal Nature Metabolism, they found that mom’s high-fat diet triggers immune cells in the developing brains of male but not female mouse pups to overconsume the mood-influencing brain chemical serotonin, leading to depressed-like behavior.