Lifeboat Foundation

Rice University scientists are starting small as they begin to figure out how to build an artificial brain from the bottom up.

Electrical and computer engineer Jacob Robinson of Rice’s Brown School of Engineering and Celina Juliano, an assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Davis, have won a $1 million Keck Foundation grant to advance the team’s synthetic neurobiology effort to define the connections between neurons and muscles that drive programmed behaviors in living animals.

To begin with, Robinson and his colleagues are putting their faith in a very small animal, the freshwater cnidarian Hydra vulgaris, a tiny tentacled creature that has long been a focus of study in the Robinson and Juliano labs. Because they are small, squishy and transparent, they’re easy to manipulate and measure through Robinson’s custom microfluidic platforms.

A neonatal hypoxic-injury animal model revealed that CK2α mediated Daam2 phosphorylation, which plays a protective role in developmental and behavioral recovery after neonatal hypoxia, a form of brain injury seen in cerebral palsy and other conditions. Additionally, it facilitates remyelination after white matter injury in adult animals.

Together, these findings have identified a novel regulatory node connecting CK2α and Daam2 in the Wnt pathway that regulates stage-specific oligodendrocyte development and offers insights into a new biological mechanism to regenerate myelin.

“This study opens exciting therapeutic avenues we could develop in the future to repair and restore myelin, which has the potential to alleviate and treat several neurological issues that are currently untreatable,” Lee said.

Dr. Mark Hyman recommended Costco items including nuts, canned seafood, and fermented goods.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have made a discovery that could change our understanding of the universe. In their study published on August 23 in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

To discover how light interacts with molecules, the first step is to follow electron dynamics, which evolve at the attosecond timescale. The dynamics of this first step have been called charge migration (CM). CM plays a fundamental role in chemical reactions and biological functions associated with light–matter interaction. For years, visualizing CM at the natural timescale of electrons has been a formidable challenge in ultrafast science due to the ultrafine spatial (angstrom) and ultrafast temporal (attosecond) resolution required.

Experimentally, the sensitive dependence of CM on molecular orbitals and orientations has made the CM dynamics complex and difficult to trace. There are still some open questions about molecular CM that remain unclear. One of the most fundamental questions: how fast does the charge migrate in molecules? Although molecular CM has been extensively studied theoretically in the last decade by using time-dependent quantum chemistry packages, a real measurement of the CM speed has remained unattainable, due to the extreme challenge.

As reported in Advanced Photonics, a research team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), in cooperation with theoretical teams from Kansas State University and University of Connecticut, recently proposed a high harmonic spectroscopy (HHS) method for measuring the CM speed in a carbon-chain molecule, butadiyne (C₄H₂).

Future computers could be built smaller than ever before using the tiny biological skeletons that hold our cells together.

That’s according to one team of scientists, who have devised a way to make computer chips using cytoskeletons — protein scaffolds that give cells their shape.

Continue reading “Future computers could be built using proteins that make up cells” »

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Here it is, the bio computer. A new type of parallel computing method that could rival the infamous quantum computer at a much lower price while being more practical to boot.

Continue reading “Nano-Biological Computing — Quantum Computer Alternative!” »

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Ever wonder why the most advanced robots always seem to have hard bodies? Why not more pliable ones, like humans have?

Researchers working on so-called “soft robotics” attempt to incorporate the feel of living organisms into their creations. But the field hasn’t taken off because the softer components haven’t been easy enough to mass-produce and incorporate into the designs—until now.

University of Virginia researchers have invented a manufacturing process for weaving soft materials such as fabrics, rubbers and gels so that they can be compatible with gadgets, which may lead to a soft robotics revolution.