Glia, the non-neuronal cells that make up most of the brain, must not be left out of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, says R. Douglas Fields, chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at NIH, in Nature News.
“A major stumbling block is the project’s failure to consider that although the human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons, it… read more
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University researchers have devised a novel nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that delivers about 10 nanometers spatial resolution.
This represents a significant advance in MRI sensitivity. Current MRI techniques commonly used in medical imaging yield spatial resolutions on the millimeter length scale, with the highest-resolution experimental instruments giving spatial resolution of a few micrometers.
“Our approach… read more
A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language to help design chemical-reaction networks (equations that describes how mixtures of chemicals behave).
The objective is to control how DNA molecules build custom-designed molecules in a test tube or cell, which could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level, for example.
“We start from an abstract… read more
Scientists routinely seek to reprogram bacteria to produce proteins for drugs, biofuels and more, but they have struggled to get those bacteria to follow orders.
A hidden feature of the genetic code, it turns out, could achieve that. The feature controls how much of the desired protein bacteria produce, a team from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University reported in… read more
NASA has announced an open competition for the planetary community to submit proposals for the science and exploration technology instruments that would be carried aboard the agency’s next Mars rover, scheduled for launch in July/August of 2020.
The Mars 2020 rover will explore and assess Mars as a potential habitat for life, search for signs of past life, collect carefully selected samples for possible future… read more
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system: a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b.
The planet is marked by high clouds in the west and clear skies in the east. Previous studies from Spitzer have resulted in temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars, but this is the… read more
Army scientists at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) and academic collaborators are conducting research on organoids (small swatches of human tissue) on microchips.
The “human on a chip” research focuses on in vitro human organ constructs (for the heart, liver, lung and the circulatory system) in communication with each other. The goal is to assess effectiveness and toxicity of drugs in a way that is… read more
Ceramics tend to crack under stress. But researchers from MIT and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed a way of making minuscule flexible ceramic objects that also have a “memory” for shape (when bent and then heated, they return to their original shapes).
The surprising discovery is reported this week in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate student Alan Lai, professor… read more
A working prototype of a low-cost electroencephalography device funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made its debut in New York this weekend, the first step in the agency’s effort to jumpstart a do-it-yourself revolution in neuroscience, The Verge reports.
Dr. Bill Casebeer, a DARPA program manager, is hoping to spark a neuroscience fad within the maker movement. His goal is to return to… read more
A new radar-based technology named Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER) can detect a heartbeat of a human buried beneath 30 feet (9 meters) of crushed material
Developed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it can also detect people hidden behind 20 feet (6 meters) of solid concrete, and from a distance of 100… read more
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave Desert produced its first output of energy when the first of three towers was synchronized last week to the power grid for the first time.
Power generated from Ivanpah will first go to Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), followed by Southern California Edison in the coming months.
Ivanpah is the largest solar thermal plant in the… read more
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials, an investigation by The New York Times has revealed.
A top-secret
In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip just .5 millimeters long.
The achievement was reported in the journal Nature by a team including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.… read more
Michigan Technological University researchers have developed a way to use self-assembled titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanotubes to lower the rate of dental-implant failures.
Dental implants are posts, usually made of titanium, that are surgically placed into the jawbone and topped with artificial teeth.
While most dental implants are successful, a small percentage fail and either fall out or must be removed.
“There are two… read more
Google announced new Knowledge-Graph features Thursday in celebration of its fifteenth birthday.
Comparisons and filters
“We keep expanding features of Knowledge Graph so it can answer more questions — even those that don’t have a simple answer,” said Amit Singhal, SVP, Google Search.
“Let’s say you want to get your daughter excited about a visit to the Met. You can pull up your… read more