Lifeboat Foundation

Intracerebral hemorrhage, and bleeding into the brain tissue, is a devastating neurological condition affecting millions of people annually. It has a high mortality rate, while survivors are affected by long-term neurological deficits. No medication has been found to support brain recovery following hemorrhage.

In an international collaboration, researchers from the Brain Repair laboratory, University of Helsinki, together with their Taiwanese colleagues investigated whether a protein called cerebral dopamine neurotrophic factor (CDNF) has potential as a treatment for brain hemorrhage.

Researchers suggest that cerebral dopamine neurotrophic factor, a protein being currently tested for Parkinson’s disease treatment, also has therapeutic effects and enhances immune cell’s response after brain hemorrhage.

HUMANS in the next 100 years could be part-machine, part-flesh creatures with brain chips and bionic limbs and organs in a vision of “cyborgs” once described by Elon Musk.

Men and women born around 2100 could live in a world very different to ours as humans may be totally connected to the internet and meshed together with artificial intelligence.

Mobile phones would no longer be needed — as everything you now do with your smartphone will now be done with a chip in your brain.

In a recent review published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, researchers in Canada investigate the impact of intestinal microbiota dysbiosis on atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) incidence.

Study: Role of the Gut Microbiome in the Development of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease. Image Credit: ART-ur / Shutterstock.com

Summary: Text-to-image generation deep learning models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can be a promising new tool for image augmentation, generation, and manipulation in a healthcare setting.

Source: JMIR Publications

A new paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research describes how generative models such as DALL-E 2, a novel deep learning model for text-to-image generation, could represent a promising future tool for image generation, augmentation, and manipulation in health care.

“It’s poor for that particular cell, but it protects the whole colony of bacteria so that virus doesn’t spread through it,” said Jackson.

CRISPR vs. cancer: The newly published papers detail the structure and function of Cas12a2, but more research is needed to determine how we might be able to harness this system for our benefit.

Continue reading “New killer CRISPR system is unlike any scientists have seen” »

A small nucleus in the brainstem called locus coeruleus (literally the “blue spot,”) is the primary source of a major neuromodulator, norepinephrine (NE), an important mediator of the ‘fight or flight’ response in animals. However, very little is known about the local connections of this small albeit critically important group of neurons. A recent pioneering study published in eLife from the laboratory of Dr. Xiaolong Jiang, investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, now reveals the cellular composition and circuit organization of the locus coeruleus in adult mice.

“In this study, we undertook the arduous task of mapping local connections of NE-producing neurons in the locus coeruleus,” Dr. Jiang said. “This is the first study of such an unprecedented magnitude and detail to be performed on the locus coeruleus, and in fact, on any monoamine neurotransmitter system. Our study has revealed that the neurons in the locus coeruleus have an unexpectedly rich cellular heterogeneity and local wiring logic.”

Locus coeruleus (LC) is known to house the vast majority of norepinephrine-releasing neurons in the brain and regulates many fundamental brain functions including the fight and flight response, sleep/wake cycles, and attention control. Present in the pontine region of the brainstem, LC neurons sense any existential dangers or threats in our external environment and send signals to alert other brain regions of the impending danger.

Breakthroughs don’t often happen in neuroscience, but we just had one. In a tour-de-force, an international team released the full brain connectivity map of the young fruit fly, described in a paper published last week in Science. Containing 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, the map—called a connectome—is the most complex whole-brain wiring diagram to date.

“It’s a ‘wow,’” said Dr. Shinya Yamamoto at Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved in the work.

Continue reading “The First Complete Brain Map of an Insect May Reveal Secrets for Better AI” »

A study of the electron excitation response of DNA to proton radiation has elucidated mechanisms of damage incurred during proton radiotherapy.

Radiobiology studies on the effects of ionizing radiation on human health focus on the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule as the primary target for deleterious outcomes. The interaction of ionizing radiation with tissue and organs can lead to localized energy deposition large enough to instigate double strand breaks in DNA, which can lead to mutations, chromosomal aberrations, and changes in gene expression. Understanding the mechanisms behind these interactions is critical for developing radiation therapies and improving radiation protection strategies. Christopher Shepard of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his colleagues now use powerful computer simulations to show exactly what part of the DNA molecule receives damaging levels of energy when exposed to charged-particle radiation (Fig. 1) [1]. Their findings could eventually help to minimize the long-term radiation effects from cancer treatments and human spaceflight.

The interaction of radiation with DNA’s electronic structure is a complex process [2, 3]. The numerical models currently used in radiobiology and clinical radiotherapy do not capture the detailed dynamics of these interactions at the atomic level. Rather, these models use geometric cross-sections to predict whether a particle of radiation, such as a photon or an ion, crossing the cell volume will transfer sufficient energy to cause a break in one or both of the DNA strands [4– 6]. The models do not describe the atomic-level interactions but simply provide the probability that some dose of radiation will cause a population of cells to lose their ability to reproduce.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are promising machine learning architectures designed to analyze data that can be represented as graphs. These architectures achieved very promising results on a variety of real-world applications, including drug discovery, social network design, and recommender systems.

As graph-structured data can be highly complex, graph-based machine learning architectures should be designed carefully and effectively. In addition, these architectures should ideally be run on efficient hardware that support their computational demands without consuming too much power.

Continue reading “A system integrating echo state graph neural networks and analogue random resistive memory arrays” »