Lifeboat Foundation

The first human recipient of a Neuralink brain implant has shared new details on his recovery and experience of living with the experimental assistive tech, which has allowed him a greater level of freedom and autonomy, including the ability to pull an all-nighter playing Sid Meier’s Civilization 6.

Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk took to X/Twitter in January to reveal that the company had implanted its first brain-computer interface in the head of a human patient, who was “recovering well” following the surgery. The billionaire also hinted at the time that the implant was functioning well and had detected a “promising neuron spike”. In a subsequent February update, Musk commented that the unnamed patient had seemingly made a full recovery, and was even able to use the implant to manipulate a computer cursor with thought alone.

Finally, on March 20, Neuralink posted its own update to X in the form of a nine-minute livestream in which 29-year-old implant recipient Noland Arbaugh used the technology to play a digital version of chess, while discussing how living with the experimental aide had changed his life.

Artificial intelligence is poised to transform the practice of medicine through the design and deployment of AI models that can detect, diagnose, and render prognosis for a disease more rapidly than most human physicians can, and with similar or superior accuracy.

So-called foundation models — trained on vast amounts of unlabeled data and usable in multiple clinical contexts for different purposes with minimal tweaking — offer a particularly tantalizing promise to reshape diagnosis and treatment.

Get more HMS news here.

To what extent are exceptional human achievements influenced by genetic factors? This question, dating back to the early days of human genetics, seems to be easier to address today as modern molecular methods make it possible to analyze DNA of individuals throughout history. But how reliable are the answers in this day and age?

Plasma cell neoplasms occur when abnormal plasma cells form cancerous tumors in bone or soft tissue.

When there is only one tumor, the disease is called a plasmacytoma. When there are multiple tumors, it is called multiple

Learn more about multiple treatment, statistics, research, and clinical trials.

Previously undescribed human gut bacteria that aid in the digestion of plant cellulose are scarce in urban societies but abundant in ancient and hunter-gatherer microbiomes, according to a new Science study.

There are trillions of microbes in the human gastrointestinal tract, each of which expresses its own genome, and carries out a variety of biochemical processes. Gut microbes can generate a variety of molecules that can have a significant impact on human health, such as vitamins, specially modified bile acids, and short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs).

SCFAs have fewer than six carbon atoms, and are found in a few major forms, including acetate, propionate, and butyrate. When we eat fibers that are tough to digest, gut microbes metabolize them instead, and generate SCFAs. Many links have been found between butyrate and human health; it is thought to have roles in the maintainence of epithelial barriers, prevention of gut inflammation in the gut and colorectal cancer, and oxidative stress relief.

What non-invasive methods can be developed to kill viruses on site? This is what a recent study published in ACS Nano hopes to address as a team of international researchers have developed a silicon surface containing nanospikes capable of preventing viruses from replicating or killing them entirely. This study holds the potential to help develop a passive way of mitigating the spread of viruses within a myriad of environments, including scientific laboratories and healthcare facilities.

“Our virus-killing surface looks like a flat black mirror to the naked eye but actually has tiny spikes designed specifically to kill viruses,” said Dr. Natalie Borg, who is a senior lecturer in the STEM | Health and Biomedical Sciences at RIMT University and a co-author on the study. “This material can be incorporated into commonly touched devices and surfaces to prevent viral spread and reduce the use of disinfectants.”

For the study, researchers at the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication took inspiration from insects, some of which possess their own version of nanospikes on their wings that can damage fungi and bacteria. To produce the nanospikes, the team blasted smooth silicon wafers with ions, resulting in nanospikes measuring 290 nanometers in height and 2 nanometers thick, the latter of which is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. They then tested their new material on the hPIV-3 virus, which is responsible for causing pneumonia and bronchitis, finding their nanospikes exhibited a 96 percent success rate in either preventing the virus from replicating or shredding them to pieces completely.

A global collaborative research group comprising 131 researchers from 105 laboratories across seven countries has published a paper in eLife. The study identifies brain energy metabolism dysfunction leading to altered pH and lactate levels as common hallmarks in numerous animal models of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, such as intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depressive disorders, and Alzheimer’s disease.

PHILADELPHIA — Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have developed a new method to create human artificial chromosomes (HACs) that could revolutionize gene therapy and other biotechnology applications. The study, published in Science, describes an approach that efficiently forms single-copy HACs, bypassing a common hurdle that has hindered progress in this field for decades.

Artificial chromosomes are lab-made structures designed to mimic the function of natural chromosomes, the packaged bundles of DNA found in the cells of humans and other organisms. These synthetic constructs have the potential to serve as vehicles for delivering therapeutic genes or as tools for studying chromosome biology. However, previous attempts to create HACs have been plagued by a major issue: the DNA segments used to build them often link together in unpredictable ways, forming long, tangled chains with rearranged sequences.

The Penn Medicine team, led by Dr. Ben Black, sought to overcome this challenge by completely overhauling the approach to HAC design and delivery. “The HAC we built is very attractive for eventual deployment in biotechnology applications, for instance, where large-scale genetic engineering of cells is desired,” Dr. Black explains in a media release. “A bonus is that they exist alongside natural chromosomes without having to alter the natural chromosomes in the cell.”