Scientists have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to restore the ability to communicate in people with spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This system has the potential to work more quickly than previous BCIs, and it does so by tapping into one of the oldest means of communications we have--handwriting. The study, published in Nature, was funded by the National Institutes of Health's Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative as well as the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), both part of the NIH. Researchers focused on the part of the brain ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (May 12, 2021) -- Low-to-mid latitude land surfaces at low elevation cooled on average by 5.8 ± 0.6 degrees C during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), based on an analysis of noble gases dissolved in groundwater, according to a new study published in Nature. Temperature estimates in the study are substantially lower than indicated by some notable marine and low-elevation terrestrial studies that have relied on various proxies to reconstruct past temperatures during the LGM, a period about 20,000 years ago that represents the most recent extended period ...

Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) affects between one and two of every 10,000 new-born babies. This genetic disease leads to the formation of benign tumours which can massively impair the proper functioning of vital organs such as the kidneys, the liver and the brain. The disease affects different patients to varying degrees and is triggered by mutations in one of two genes, the TSC1 or TSC2 gene. An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by biochemists Prof. Daniel Kümmel and Dr. Andrea Oeckinghaus from the University of Münster (Germany) examined the "tumour suppressor protein TSC1" and, for the first time, gained insights into its hitherto unclear functions. The team identified a new mechanism, in a central cellular process, which regulates ...

University of Cincinnati researchers studied the teeth of prehistoric horses and bison in the Arctic to learn more about their diets compared to modern species. What they found suggests the Arctic 40,000 years ago maintained a broader diversity of plants that, in turn, supported both more -- and more diverse -- big animals. The Arctic today is spartan compared to the wildlife-rich landscape during the ice ages of the Pleistocene epoch between 12,000 and 2.6 million years ago when wild horses, mammoths, bison and other big animals roamed the steppes and grasslands of what is now northern Canada, northern Europe, Alaska and Siberia. Short-faced bears, ground sloths and even cave lions called the 49th State home. The Arctic supported greater populations ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have made what is believed to be the smallest state-of-the-art RFID chip, which should drive down the cost of RFID tags. In addition, the chip's design makes it possible to embed RFID tags into high value chips, such as computer chips, boosting supply chain security for high-end technologies. "As far as we can tell, it's the world's smallest Gen2-compatible RFID chip," says Paul Franzon, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Cirrus Logic Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State. Gen2 RFID chips are state of the art and are already in widespread use. One of the things that sets ...

Meat that is certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is less likely to be contaminated with bacteria that can sicken people, including dangerous, multidrug-resistant organisms, compared to conventionally produced meat, according to a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings highlight the risk for consumers to contract foodborne illness--contaminated animal products and produce sicken tens of millions of people in the U.S. each year--and the prevalence of multidrug-resistant organisms that, when they lead to illness, can complicate treatment. The researchers found that, compared to conventionally processed meats, organic-certified meats were 56 percent less likely to be contaminated with ...

Loss of smell, or anosmia, is one of the earliest and most commonly reported symptoms of COVID-19. But the mechanisms involved had yet to be clarified. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur, the CNRS, Inserm, Université de Paris and the Paris Public Hospital Network (AP-HP) determined the mechanisms involved in the loss of smell in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 at different stages of the disease. They discovered that SARS-CoV-2 infects sensory neurons and causes persistent epithelial and olfactory nervous system inflammation. Furthermore, ...

Many people live with chronic pain, and in some cases, cannabis can provide relief. But the drug also can significantly impact memory and other cognitive functions. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Medicinal Chemistry have developed a peptide that, in mice, allowed Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main component of Cannabis sativa, to fight pain without the side effects. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 20% of adults in the U.S. experienced chronic pain in 2019. Opioids, the mainstay for ...

Alexandria, Va., USA -- COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020 and given an incomplete understanding of the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at that time, the American Dental Association recommended that dental offices refrain from providing non-emergency services. As a result, 198,000 dentists in the United States closed their doors to patients. The study "Sources of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Microorganisms in Dental Aerosols," published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), sought to inform infection-control science by identifying the source of bacteria and viruses in aerosol generating dental procedures. Researchers at The Ohio State University College of Dentistry, Division of Periodontology, Columbus, USA, tracked the origins of microbiota in aerosols generated during treatment ...

Are you empathic, generous and altruistic? In short, do you possess that specific personality trait defined as agreeableness in the language of psychologists? New research from SISSA recently published in the journal NeuroImage sheds light on brain mechanisms underlying this trait. The study showed that detached and individualistic subjects seem to process information associated with social and non-social contexts in similar ways, as demonstrated by similar activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex, whereas in more agreeable subjects the activation patterns ...

Peri-implantitis, a condition where tissue and bone around dental implants becomes infected, besets roughly one-quarter of dental implant patients, and currently there's no reliable way to assess how patients will respond to treatment of this condition. To that end, a team led by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry developed a machine learning algorithm, a form of artificial intelligence, to assess an individual patient's risk of regenerative outcomes after surgical treatments of peri-implantitis. The algorithm is called FARDEEP, which stands for Fast and Robust Deconvolution of Expression ...

When Museums closed their doors in March 2020 for the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK a majority moved their activities online to keep their audiences interested. Researchers from WMG, University of Warwick have worked with OUMNH, to analyse the success of the exhibitions, and say the way Museums operate will change forever.Caption: Compton Verney's homepage for the Cranach exhibition which opened in March 2020 Credit: Compton Verney The cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been analysed by researchers from WMG, University of Warwick in collaboration with OUMNH (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) who in the paper, 'Digital Responses ...

An international research team led by the University of Cologne has succeeded for the first time in connecting several atomically precise nanoribbons made of graphene, a modification of carbon, to form complex structures. The scientists have synthesized and spectroscopically characterized nanoribbon heterojunctions. They then were able to integrate the heterojunctions into an electronic component. In this way, they have created a novel sensor that is highly sensitive to atoms and molecules. The results of their research have been published under the title 'Tunneling current modulation in atomically precise graphene nanoribbon heterojunctions' in Nature Communications. The work was carried out in close cooperation between the Institute for ...

BOSTON - (May 12, 2021) - Scientists are rapidly gathering evidence that variants of gut microbiomes, the collections of bacteria and other microbes in our digestive systems, may play harmful roles in diabetes and other diseases. Now Joslin Diabetes Center scientists have found dramatic differences between gut microbiomes from ancient North American peoples and modern microbiomes, offering new evidence on how these microbes may evolve with different diets. The scientists analyzed microbial DNA found in indigenous human paleofeces (desiccated excrement) from unusually dry caves in Utah and northern Mexico with extremely ...

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are highly localized surface waves on the interface between metal and dielectric in the optical frequency band. SSPs do not naturally exist in the microwave and terahertz frequencies, so "spoof" surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) are necessary for operations in those lower frequency bands. Like optical SPPs, microwave SSPPs exhibit highly localized electromagnetic fields, subwavelength resolution, and extraordinary field confinement. Therefore, SSPP transmission lines (TLs) have been proposed as novel types of microwaveguides that offer new solutions for miniaturization, ...

BOSTON - During the development and progression of Alzheimer's disease, a protein called tau accumulates and spreads in the brain. Understanding the mechanisms behind tau spread--and its consequences--may point to new prevention and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. New insights now come from research that was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and involves an anesthetic known to affect cognitive function. The findings are published in Communications Biology. The scientists note that inflammation plays an important role in Alzheimer's disease, and microglia--immune cells that reside in the brain--are thought to be involved in this process by producing an ...

Since the discovery of Alzheimer's disease over a century ago, two hallmarks of the devastating illness have taken center stage. The first, known as amyloid plaques, are dense accumulations of misfolded amyloid protein, occurring in the spaces between nerve cells. Most efforts to halt the advance of Alzheimer's disease have targeted amyloid protein plaques. To date, all have met dispiriting failure. The second classic trait has, until recently, received less scrutiny. It consists of string-like formations within the bodies of neurons, produced by another crucial protein-- tau. These are known as neurofibrillary tangles. In a new study, researchers with the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Center at the Biodesign ...

PHILADELPHIA--A low-cost, rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19 developed by Penn Medicine provides COVID-19 results within four minutes with 90 percent accuracy. A paper published this week in Matter details the fast and inexpensive diagnostic test, called RAPID 1.0 (Real-time Accurate Portable Impedimetric Detection prototype 1.0). Compared to existing methods for COVID-19 detection, RAPID is inexpensive and highly scalable, allowing the production of millions of units per week. Despite the urgency of the pandemic, most available methods for COVID-19 testing use RT-PCR--reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction--to detect ...

Central to any technological progress is the enrichment of human life. The internet and wireless connectivity have done that by allowing not only virtually anyone anywhere to connect real time, but by making possible connections between humans and a range of intelligent devices both indoors and outdoors, putting smart cities on the horizon. One key aspect of realizing smart cities is "smart vehicles", the latest development in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which involve the integration of communication, mapping, positioning, network, and sensor technologies to ensure cooperative, efficient, intelligent, safe, and economical transportation. For decades, research on bringing to the streets smart vehicles that operate ...

The field of magnonics offers a new type of low-power information processing, in which magnons, the quanta of spin waves, carry and process data instead of electrons. The end goal of this field is to create magnonic circuits, which would be smaller and more energy-efficient than current electronic ones. Until recently, the development of a functional magnonic device could take years of trial-and-error. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the TU Kaiserslautern have developed a new computational method to design new devices in a considerably shorter time. Moreover, the efficiency added through this novel inverse design method helps overcome a traditional problem with such devices: they were just suitable for one function only. Now, thanks to the proposed ...

The inhibition of pathological protein-protein interactions is a promising approach for treating a large number of diseases, including many forms of cancer. A team of researchers has now developed a bicyclic peptide that binds to beta-catenin--a protein associated with certain types of tumor. The secret of their success is the cyclic nature and the hairpin shape of the peptide, which mimics a natural protein structure, they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Because of the extensive protein regions involved in protein-protein interactions, therapeutic approaches involving small molecules are often unsuccessful. Protein mimetics are alternatives that imitate the spatial structure of binding segments of natural protein binding partners. ...

In a new study from Lund University and the University of Gothenburg, patients were interviewed about their experiences ten years after undergoing obesity surgery. The results show that the effect on eating and weight regulation persisted, whereas other problems, such as feelings of guilt about still not being healthy enough, remained. "This is one of few follow-ups from a patients perspective so long after surgery", says My Engström, researcher in nursing at the University of Gothenburg. 18 patients were interviewed in the study. All of them experienced that their eating habits and appetite were still affected after the operation: their bodies still objected, preventing ...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is incredible in that it can survive for decades within its human host. It does this by varying its diet to successfully steal nutrients from the human host including immune cells; it is known to acquire and absorb multiple carbon sources from the body during infection. In a paper published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, Surrey scientists detail how they measure the flow of metabolites or "fluxes" through metabolic pathways when Mycobacterium tuberculosis is consuming some of its favourite nutrients. Measuring these 'fluxes' could help scientists advance new tuberculosis drugs as well as understand why the bacterium survives so long in humans and why current antibiotics are often ineffective. By growing Mycobacterium ...

The multiplexing capability of fluorescence microscopy is severely limited by the broad fluorescence spectral width. Spectral imaging offers potential solutions, yet typical approaches to disperse the local emission spectra notably impede the attainable throughput and place substantial constraints on temporal resolution. Tunable bandpass filters provide a possibility to scan through the emission wavelength in the wide field. However, applying narrow bandpasses to the fluorescence emission results in inefficient use of the scarce signal. In a new paper published in Light: Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Ke Xu ...

The DNA sequences produced are also called oligonucleotides. These are widely used for disease identification, for the manufacture of oligonucleotide-based drugs, and for several other medical and biotechnological applications.  The high demand for oligonucleotides therefore requires an efficient automated method for their chemical production.This process relies on phosphoramidites, which are chemical compounds that have the disadvantage of being unstable unless stored at the ideal -20 degrees Celsius. Instruments used for DNA synthesis are not able to cool down the phosphoramidites, and consequently it is unavoidable that some of them degrade after being added ...