Brain implants are used to treat neurological dysfunction, and their use for enhancing cognitive abilities is a promising field of research. Implants can be used to monitor brain activity or stimulate parts of the brain using electrical pulses. In epilepsy, for example, brain implants can determine where in the brain seizures are happening. Over time, implants trigger a foreign body response, creating inflammation and scar tissue around the implant that reduces their effectiveness. The problem is that traditional implants are much more rigid than brain tissue, which has a softness comparable to pudding. Stress between the implant and ...

A new auroral phenomenon discovered by Finnish researchers a year ago is probably caused by areas of increased oxygen atom density occurring in an atmospheric wave channel. The speculative explanation offered by the researchers gained support from a new study. Observations made by University of Helsinki researchers increased the validity of a speculative mechanism according to which a type of aurora borealis named 'dunes' is born. In the new study, photographs of the phenomenon taken by an international group of hobbyists in Finland, Norway and Scotland were compared to concurrent satellite data. The rare type of aurora borealis was seen in the sky on 20 January 2016 and recorded in photos taken by ...

This overlay shows radio (orange) and infrared images of a giant molecular cloud called W49A, where new stars are being formed. A team of astronomers led by Chris DePree of Agnes Scott College used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to make new, high-resolution radio images of this cluster of still-forming, massive stars. W49A, 36,000 light-years from Earth, has been studied for many decades, and the new radio images revealed some tantalizing changes that have occurred since an earlier set of VLA observations in 1994 and 1995. The ...

Scientists have developed a new "key-hole surgery" technique to extract metals from the earth - which could revolutionise the future of metal mining A team of international researchers, including Dr Rich Crane from the Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter, have developed a new method to extract metals, such as copper, from their parent ore body. The research team have provided a proof of concept for the application of an electric field to control the movement of an acid within a low permeability copper-bearing ore deposit to selectively dissolve and recover the metal in situ. This is in contrast to the conventional approach for the mining of such deposits ...

Swansea University scientists have uncovered potentially dangerous chemical pollutants that are released from disposable face masks when submerged in water. The research reveals high levels of pollutants, including lead, antimony, and copper, within the silicon-based and plastic fibres of common disposable face masks. The work is supported by the Institute for Innovative Materials, Processing and Numerical Technologies (IMPACT) and the SPECIFIC Innovation & Knowledge Centre Project lead Dr Sarper Sarp of Swansea University College of Engineering said: "All of us need to keep wearing masks as they are essential in ending the pandemic. But we also urgently need more research and regulation on mask production, so we can reduce any risks to the environment and ...

Pyrosomes, named after the Greek words for 'fire bodies' due their bright bioluminescence, are pelagic tunicates that spend their entire lives swimming in the open ocean. They are made up of many smaller animals, known as zooids, that sit together in a tubular matrix, known as tunic (hence the name pelagic tunicates). Because they live in the open ocean, they generally go unnoticed. In spite of this, increasing research points to their importance in marine environments, as they can form dense blooms that impact food web dynamics and contribute to the movement and transformation of organic carbon. The study conducted with GEOMAR research vessel POSEIDON in 2018 and 2019 in the vicinity of the Cabo Verde Islands, of which the results have now been published ...

Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research demonstrated that biomarkers associated with traumatic brain injury were elevated among law enforcement and military personnel, particularly in active duty participants with longer duration of service. Most notably, these elevated biomarker levels were observed in individuals without a diagnosed brain injury or concussion. Some law enforcement and military personnel are regularly exposed to low levels of blast, particularly during training, due to the use of explosive charges and high caliber weapons. Understanding effects from these occupational exposures is a military health care priority to improve ...

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A new map including rover paths of the Schrodinger basin, a geologically important area of the moon, could guide future exploration missions.The map was created by a team of interns at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, including Ellen Czaplinski, a University of Arkansas graduate student researcher at the Arkansas Center for Planetary Sciences and first author of a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal. The researchers identified significant geologic features of the Schrödinger basin, located near the lunar south ...

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed a breakthrough in energy-efficient phototransistors. Such devices could eventually help computers process visual information more like the human brain and be used as sensors in things like self-driving vehicles. The structures rely on a new type of semiconductor--metal-halide perovskites--which have proven to be highly efficient at converting sunlight into electrical energy and shown tremendous promise in a range of other technologies. "In general, these perovskite semiconductors are a really unique ...

Hypertension is a common medical condition and a primary cause of cardiovascular diseases and stroke worldwide. Unfortunately, as Professor Wei-Li Zhang of the Chinese National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases notes, "the unaffordability of drugs is a major barrier to medication adherence among patients living in low- and middle-income areas." One of the countries where hypertension is becoming a major problem is China where, researchers estimate, between 244 million and 300 million adults are living with hypertension. But true to Prof. Zhang's words, most cases of hypertension in China are not adequately ...

With the explosion in digital entertainment options over the past several decades and the more recent restrictions on outdoor and in-person social activities, parents may worry that excessive engagement with digital technology could have long-term effects on their children's mental health. A new study published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, however, found little evidence for an increased association between adolescents' technology engagement and mental health problems over the past 30 years. The data did not consistently support the suggestion that the technologies we worry about most (e.g., smartphones) are becoming more ...

DURHAM, N.C. - When patients complain of coughing, runny nose, sneezing and fever, doctors are often stumped because they have no fundamental tool to identify the source of the respiratory symptoms and guide appropriate treatments. That tool might finally be on its way. In a study proving feasibility, researchers at Duke Health showed that their testing technology can accurately distinguish between a viral and a bacterial infection for respiratory illness - a critical difference that determines whether antibiotics are warranted. And, importantly, the test provided results in under an hour. "This is exciting progress," said study lead Ephraim Tsalik, associate professor in the departments of Medicine ...

A new study published in Medical Care Research and Review found that the Affordable Care Act, which expanded Medicaid programs to cover people previously uninsured, provided a financial boost to hospitals. The study conducted by faculty at the Colorado School of Public Health on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is the first to investigate the effects of Medicaid expansion by comparing estimates using data from both the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). "The IRS and CMS data sources serve as primary resources for assessing the impact of Medicaid expansion on hospitals' financial status. The comparison of the two is timely and can inform ...

BOSTON - Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have identified the protein "signature" of severe COVID-19, which they describe in a new study published in Cell Reports Medicine. "We were interested in asking whether we could identify mechanisms that might be contributing to death in COVID-19," says MGH infectious disease expert Marcia Goldberg, MD, who studies interactions between microbial pathogens and their hosts, and is senior author of the study. "In other words, why do some patients die from this disease, while others--who appear to be just as ill--survive?" In March 2020, when the first patients with symptoms of COVID-19 ...

Wherever scientists look, they can spot them: whether in remote mountain lakes, in Arctic sea ice, in the deep-ocean floor or in air samples, even in edible fish - thousands upon thousands of microscopic plastic particles in the micro to millimeter range. This microplastic is now even considered one of the defining features of the Anthropocene, the age of the Earth shaped by modern humans. Microplastics are formed by weathering and physicochemical or biological degradation processes from macroscopic plastic products, such as the tons of plastic waste in the oceans. It is unlikely that these degradation processes will stop at the micrometer ...

On September 28, 2018, an inexplicably large tsunami devastated the Indonesian coastal city of Palu and several others nearby. Between the tsunami and the magnitude 7.5 earthquake that caused it, some 4,340 people were killed, making it the deadliest earthquake that year. The tsunami's waves reached around six meters high, which was a shock to geophysicists who had believed that earthquakes along a strike-slip fault could only trigger far smaller tsunamis for that particular region. Now, new research describes a mechanism for these large tsunamis to form, and suggests that other coastal cities that were thought to be safe from massive tsunamis may need to reevaluate their level of ...

Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) scientists in Korea have developed algorithms that more efficiently measure how difficult it would be for an attacker to guess secret keys for cryptographic systems. The approach they used was described in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security and could reduce the computational complexity needed to validate encryption security. "Random numbers are essential for generating cryptographic information," explains DGIST computer scientist Yongjune Kim, who co-authored the study with Cyril Guyot and Young-Sik Kim. "This randomness is crucial for the security of cryptographic systems." Cryptography is ...

University of South Australia researchers have identified an enzyme that may help to curb chronic kidney disease, which affects approximately 700 million people worldwide. This enzyme, NEDD4-2, is critical for kidney health, says UniSA Centre for Cancer Biology scientist Dr Jantina Manning in a new paper published this month in Cell Death & Disease. The early career researcher and her colleagues, including 2020 SA Scientist of the Year Professor Sharad Kumar, have shown in an animal study the correlation between a high salt diet, low levels of NEDD4-2 and advanced kidney disease. While a high salt diet can exacerbate some forms of kidney disease, until now, researchers did not realise ...

Pioneering neural recordings in patients with Parkinson's disease by UC San Francisco scientists lays the groundwork for personalized brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's and other neurological disorders. In a study published May 3rd in Nature Biotechnology, UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences researchers implanted novel neurostimulation devices that monitor brain activity for many months, with and without deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy. Pairing the brain recordings with wearable monitors of movement, they identified patterns of brain activity corresponding to specific movement abnormalities associated with Parkinson's. Their research provides the first ...

HOUSTON - Researchers have found the right formula for mixing a cement that does double duty as a structural material and a passive photocatalytic water purifier with a built-in means of replenishment: simply sand down the material's surface to refresh the photocatalytic quality. They found this recipe using a few very precise physical laboratory experiments whose data were then greatly amplified using a computational method called combinatorics that tested thousands of combinations of cement composites and their photocatalytic qualities. The results, say the researchers from C-Crete Technologies and Rice University, indicate ...

Blood may seem like a simple fluid, but its chemistry is complex. When too much potassium, for instance, accumulates in the bloodstream, patients may experience deadly irregular heart rhythms. Cardiovascular scientists at Virginia Tech's Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC are studying why. In a new study, published in Pflügers Archiv European Journal of Physiology, the research team led by Steven Poelzing, associate professor at the institute, describes how subtle changes in potassium, calcium, and sodium levels regulate heartbeats. Poelzing ...

DALLAS (May 3, 2021) - Researchers from the Center for BrainHealth® at The University of Texas at Dallas are investigating a potential new early indicator of the decline toward Alzheimer's disease: measuring the energy metabolism of the living human brain using cutting-edge imaging techniques. The scientists devised a unique way to illustrate energy consumption and reserves in the brain with phosphorus magnetic resonance spectroscopy using an ultra-high-field 7 Tesla MRI scanner. Their results suggest that neurological energy metabolism might be compromised in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the stage of decline between healthy ...

A study published today in Nature Communications shows that the drug rucaparib has been effective in treating certain types of ovarian cancers if used early in treatment, after a diagnosis, and before the cancer cells build up a resistance to chemotherapy. Rucaparib is in a relatively new class of drugs - Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase or PARP inhibitors - which have been approved for therapy in ovarian cancers. This study provides insights into both how the cancers resist treatments, and which patients may respond favorably to the drug, said lead author Dr. Elizabeth Swisher, a UW Medicine ...

Durham, NC - A study released today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine offers hope for those suffering from a chronic, difficult to treat condition called non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) lung infection. The study describes how researchers at Case Western University developed a new model of NTM lung infection and then used it to show how effective human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) are in treating this condition - and even which donor cells might be best for doing so. "The potential to use human mesenchymal stem cells to treat difficult lung infections is promising," said Anthony Atala, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of STEM ...

PULLMAN, Wash. -- Professor Arda Gozen looks to a future someday in which doctors can hit a button to print out a scaffold on their 3-D printers and create custom-made replacement skin, cartilage, or other tissue for their patients. Gozen, George and Joan Berry associate professor in the Washington State University School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and a team of researchers have developed a unique scaffolding material for engineered tissues that can be fine-tuned for the tricky business of growing natural tissue. They report on their research in the journal, Bioprinting. The team also includes researchers from WSU's ...