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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,622

Diamond Quantum Sensor Measures Currents in the Heart at Millimeter Resolution

Many heart problems, including tachycardia and fibrillation, mainly originate from imperfections in the way electric currents propagate through the heart. Unfortunately, it is difficult for doctors to study these imperfections. This is because measuring these currents involves highly invasive procedures and exposure to X-ray radiation.

Luckily, there are other options. For example, magnetocardiography (MCG) is a promising alternative approach to measuring heart currents indirectly. The technique involves sensing minute changes in the magnetic field near the heart caused by cardiac currents. This can be done in a completely contactless manner. To this end, various types of quantum sensors suitable for this purpose have been developed. However, their spatial resolution is limited to centimeter scales, which is not good enough to detect cardiac currents that propagate at millimeter scales. Furthermore, each of these sensors has a fair share of its practical limitations, such as size and operating temperature.

In a new study published today (August 23, 2022) in Communications Physics, a team of scientists developed a novel setup to perform MCG at higher resolutions. Their approach is based on a diamond quantum sensor comprising nitrogen vacancies, which act as special magnetic “centers” that are sensitive to the weak magnetic fields produced by heart currents. The researchers were led by Associate Professor Takayuki Iwasaki of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), Japan.

Aquabots: Ultrasoft liquid robots for biomedical and environmental applications

In recent years, roboticists have developed a wide variety of robotic systems with different body structures and capabilities. Most of these robots are either made of hard materials, such as metals, or soft materials, such as silicon and rubbery materials.

Researchers at Hong Kong University (HKU) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have recently created Aquabots, a new class of soft robots that are predominantly made of liquids. As most are predominantly made up of water or other , the new robots, introduced in a paper published in ACS Nano, could have highly valuable biomedical and environmental applications.

“We have been engaged in the development of adaptive interfacial assemblies of materials at the oil-water and water-water interface using nanoparticles and polyelectrolytes,” Ho Cheung (Anderson) Shum, Thomas P. Russell, and Shipei Zhu told TechXplore via email. “Our idea was to assemble the materials that the interface and the assemblies lock in the shapes of the liquids. The shapes are dictated using external forces to generate arbitrary shapes or to use all-liquid 3D printing to be able to spatially organize the assemblies.”

The Stream of Consciousness and Personal Identity

Lastly, there is the concern that this is all whimsically unimportant, or worse, an obtuse disregard for more prosaic societal concerns. Some people may find debates of this sort to be pedantic and even snobbish, given the justified concern that advanced futuristic technologies are likely to benefit wealthy elites long before they trickle down to the masses. Worse, some people may expect that such technologies are likely impossible and that such metaphysical navelgazing is an ivory tower distraction in a world of real problems and challenges. To that reaction I say the importance is not necessarily in determining the prospects of technological and medical marvels that reside far in the future, if ever. The more relevant issue, and the reason I have committed so much of my life to contemplating and writing about these questions, is that we profoundly desire the most accurate model possible of reality and understanding of the human condition. Ultimately, we want to understand ourselves as conscious beings in the universe and to understand the nature of our existence. That is the real issue here, at least for me.

About the author

Keith Wiley is on the board of Carboncopies.org and is a fellow with The Brain Preservation Foundation. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of New Mexico and works as a data scientist in Seattle, Washington. His book, A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading, is available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692279849?tag=lifeboatfound-20?tag=lifeboatfound-20). His other writings, interviews, and videos about mind uploading are available on his website at http://keithwiley.com and elsewhere on the web.

Researchers unfold elegant equations to explain the enigma of expanding origami

Most materials—from rubber bands to steel beams—thin out as they are stretched, but engineers can use origami’s interlocking ridges and precise folds to reverse this tendency and build devices that grow wider as they are pulled apart.

Researchers increasingly use this kind of technique, drawn from the ancient art of , to design spacecraft components, medical robots and antenna arrays. However, much of the work has progressed via instinct and trial and error. Now, researchers from Princeton Engineering and Georgia Tech have developed a general formula that analyzes how structures can be configured to thin, remain unaffected, or thicken as they are stretched, pushed or bent.

Kon-Well Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research, called the work “elegant and extremely intriguing.”

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS)

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a noninvasive treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of clinical depression. The treatment is also being studied as a potential therapy for Alzheimer’s disease.

How rTMS works

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, affecting millions of mostly elderly people around the world. In these people, the synaptic activity (connections between nerve cells) collapses and brain networks gradually falter, resulting in a decline in memory and the ability to think and learn.

Musk approaches brain chip startup Synchron about deal amid Neuralink delays

Musk seems frustrated with the delays in Neuralink’s progress.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person has reached out to a competitor Synchron Inc. about a potential investment after his own biotech company Neuralink has lagged in developing an implantable brain chip, Reuters reported.

Launched in 2016, Neuralink was co-founded by Musk to develop implantable brain-chip interfaces to connect humans and computers. Like his ambitious projections about his electric vehicles, Musk had ambitiously claimed in 2019 that Neuralink was aiming for its product to receive regulatory approval by the end of 2020.

Later in 2021, when the company had not even begun human trials, Musk claimed at a Wall Street Journal conference that he expected them to begin by 2022, but the company has failed to get the regulatory nod to do so, even at the time of writing this. Contrastingly, a startup, Synchron, received the necessary approvals last year.

Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation

This method could be helpful for elderly people.

Our brain has both short-term and long-term memory. While short-term memory helps us with things like remembering the bus number, long-term memory processes information for a long time. However, as we age, our memory does not work as well as it used to.

Electrical brain stimulation for 20 minutes on four consecutive days can improve two different types of memory in individuals 65 years and older for at least one month, a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience reveals.

According to the study, this method could be beneficial for elderly people to maintain their errands very easily.

Reinhart et al. show that repetitive transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) of unique combinations of rhythmic frequency and stimulation locations produces selective and long-lasting improvements in verbal working memory and long-term memory in older adults.

Pawpaws are America’s hidden edible treasure. Here’s how to pick them

Pawpaw varieties are assessed on their flavor, yield, fruit size, texture, and disease resistance, Crabtree says. She adds that the “best varieties” would be high yield trees that produce a pawpaw with “firmness and/or creaminess that’s not watery, mushy, or gritty” as well as a lower percentage of seeds.

Hunting for pawpaw

Native to 26 states, pawpaw can be found along the East Coast between Ontario, Canada, and northern Florida west to Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, and even Texas.

Chaos synchronization between linearly coupled chaotic systems

Chaos, as a very interesting nonlinear phenomenon, has been intensively studied in the last three decades [10], [13]. It is found to be useful or has great potential in many disciplines such as in collapse prevention of power systems, biomedical engineering applications to the human brain and heart, thorough liquid mixing with low power consumption, secret communication technology, to name just a few [10], [13], [24].

Over the last decade, many new types of synchronization have appeared: chaotic synchronization [3], [4], lag synchronization [9], adaptive synchronization [2], phase synchronization [6], and generalized synchronization [9], to mention only a few. Since the discovery of chaos synchronization [3], there has been tremendous interest in studying the synchronization of chaotic systems [10]. Recently, synchronization of coupled chaotic systems has received considerable attention [1], [2], [5], [7]. Especially, a typical study of synchronization is the coupled identical chaotic systems [1], [6].

In 1963, Lorenz found the first classical chaotic attractor [12]. In 1999, Chen found another similar but topologically not equivalent chaotic attractor [11], [21], [22], as the dual of the Lorenz system, in a sense defined by Vanĕc̆ek and C̆elikovský [23]: The Lorenz system satisfies the condition a12 a21 0 while Chen system satisfies a12 a21 0. Very recently, Lü et al. produced a new chaotic system [14], [15], which satisfies the condition a12 a21 =0, thereby bridging the gap between the Lorenz and Chen attractors [15], [16], [17].

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