More than 10,000 people are waiting for a lifesaving liver transplant.
The liver is one of the only organs that can be donated from a living person, and now, a new technique is making it easier than ever before to give the gift of life.
Nikko Velazquez, 29, watched helplessly as his girlfriend’s father, Abraham Aviv, 66, experienced end stage liver disease.
Artificial neurons on silicon chips that behave just like the real thing have been invented by scientists—a first-of-its-kind achievement with enormous scope for medical devices to cure chronic diseases, such as heart failure, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases of neuronal degeneration.
Critically the artificial neurons not only behave just like biological neurons but only need one billionth the power of a microprocessor, making them ideally suited for use in medical implants and other bio-electronic devices.
The research team, led by the University of Bath and including researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Zurich and Auckland, describe the artificial neurons in a study published in Nature Communications.
Without hardly noticing, we make countless decisions: to turn left or right on the bus? To wait or to accelerate? To look or to ignore? In the run-up to these decisions the brain evaluates sensory information and only then does it generate a behavior. For the first time, scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology were able to follow such a decision-making process throughout an entire vertebrate brain. Their new approach shows how and where the zebrafish brain transforms the movement of the environment into a decision that causes the fish to swim in a specific direction.
Young zebrafish are tiny. Their brain is not much bigger than that of a fly and almost transparent. “We can therefore look into the entire brain and see what happens, for example, when a decision is made,” explains Elena Dragomir, who has done exactly this. “The first step was to find a behavioral paradigm that we could use to study decision making,” says Elena Dragomir. Other animal species, for example, are shown dots that move more or less in one direction. The animals can be trained to indicate their decision on the direction of the dots’ movement, and if it is correct, they receive a reward. The neurobiologists from Ruben Portugues’ group have now adapted this experimental setup for zebrafish. “The trick is that we use a reliable behavior called the optomotor response as a readout of the fish’s decision”.
If a fish drifts in a current, an image of the environment moves past its eyes. Fish will swim in the direction of the perceived optic flow to prevent drifting. Moving dots can trigger this optomotor response in the lab, and fish will turn either to the left or to right, depending on the direction of the moving dots. “We can also vary the difficulty of the decision, by changing the strength of the visual stimulus,” explains Ruben Portugues. “If a higher percentage of dots move in one direction, the fish will turn faster and more reliably to the correct direction.”
For the first time, physicists have calculated exactly what kind of singularity lies at the center of a realistic black hole.
The flaw can allow hackers to take over typical device functions like sending messages and taking photos because users think malicious activity is a mobile app they use regularly.
O.o.
Andy Pero, a survivor of the mind control tactics used in the Montauk Project experimentsinsights and repressed memories about his experience at secret military bases. Andy Pero underwent a program which used traumatic mind control and psychic power tactics similar to those used in the Montauk Project.
In an interview (read the full interview below) with Eve Frances Lorgen, Andy Pero shared his experience with trauma-based control of the mind and the Montauk explorations in consciousness. He recalled sessions where he was tortured and put through shock treatments. This is done to have the ability to reprogram participants to do things they were not able to previous to the programming.
The universe is filled with billions of galaxies and trillions of stars, along with nearly uncountable numbers of planets, moons, asteroids, comets and clouds of dust and gas – all swirling in the vastness of space.
But if we zoom in, what are the building blocks of these celestial bodies, and where did they come from?
Hydrogen is the most common element found in the universe, followed by helium; together, they make up nearly all ordinary matter. But this accounts for only a tiny slice of the universe — about 5%. All the rest is made of stuff that can’t be seen and can only be detected indirectly. [From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time].
