Lifeboat Foundation

While companies like Neuralink have recently provided some flashy demos of what could be achieved by hooking brains up to computers, the technology still has serious limitations preventing wider use.

Non-invasive approaches like electroencephalograms (EEGs) provide only coarse readings of neural signals, limiting their functionality. Directly implanting electrodes in the brain can provide a much clearer connection, but such risky medical procedures are hard to justify for all but the most serious conditions.

California-based startup Science Corporation thinks that an implant using living neurons to connect to the brain could better balance safety and precision. In recent non-peer-reviewed research posted on bioarXiv, the group showed a prototype device could connect with the brains of mice and even let them detect simple light signals.

Summary: New research reveals how the body’s circadian clock regulates macrophage activity, influencing immune system inflammation throughout the day. Activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome, a key component in the immune response, peaks during the morning when macrophages are most efficient. This daily rhythm is driven by mitochondrial activity, explaining why inflammatory conditions like arthritis often worsen in the morning.

The findings open doors to time-targeted therapies, potentially improving treatments for diseases driven by overactive inflammasomes. Understanding the immune system’s internal clock could lead to precise interventions for inflammatory disorders.

A team of University of Melbourne researchers from the Caruso Nanoengineering Group has created an innovative drug delivery system with outstanding potential to improve drug development.

The team has pioneered a drug delivery system that is a coordination network composed of only metal ions and biomolecules, known as metal–biomolecule network (MBN). This system eliminates the need for complicated drug “carriers,” making it potentially more useful in a range of applications.

The research has been published in Science Advances and was led by Melbourne Laureate Professor and NHMRC Leadership Fellow Frank Caruso, from the Department of Chemical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, with Research Fellows Dr. Wanjun Xu and Dr. Zhixing Lin joint first authors.

As astronauts venture further into space, their exposure to harmful radiation rises. Researchers from Columbia University are simulating the effects of space radiation here on Earth to determine its impact on human physiology using multi-organ tissue chips. Their work documents the differential effects seen in tissues after acute and prolonged radiation exposure and identifies multiple genes of interest that could help inform the development of future radioprotective agents.

Their study appears in Advanced Science.

“As deep space exploration continues to unfold, it is vital to understand the physiological damage caused by space radiation to better mitigate its effects. By exposing multi-organ models to simulated cosmic radiation, this study has laid the groundwork to aid in this effort,” commented Jermont Chen, Ph.D., a program director in the Division of Discovery Science and Technology at NIBIB.

For nearly his entire life, Dr. Stuart Hameroff has been fascinated with the bedeviling question of consciousness. But instead of studying neurology or another field commonly associated with the inner workings of the brain, it was Hameroff’s familiarity with anesthetics, a family of drugs that famously induces the opposite of consciousness, that fueled his curiosity.

“I thought about neurology, psychology, and neurosurgery, but none of those… eemed to be dealing with the problem of consciousness,” says Hameroff, a now-retired professor of anesthesiology from the University of Arizona. Hameroff recalls a particularly eye-opening moment when he first arrived at the university and met the chairman of the anesthesia department. “He says ‘hey, if you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works because we don’t have a clue.’”

Hameroff’s work in anesthesia showed that unconsciousness occurred due to some effect on microtubules and wondered if perhaps these structures somehow played a role in forming consciousness. So instead of using the neuron, or the brain’s nerve cells, as the “base unit” of consciousness, Hameroff’s ideas delved deeper and looked at the billions of individual tubulins inside microtubules themselves. He quickly became obsessed.

Researchers at University of California San Diego have developed and tested a new software package, called Spatial Modeling Algorithms for Reactions and Transport (SMART), that can realistically simulate cell-signaling networks—the complex systems of molecular interactions that allow cells to respond to diverse cues from their environment.

Cell-signaling networks involve many distinct steps and are also greatly influenced by the complex, three-dimensional shapes of cells and subcellular components, making them difficult to simulate with existing tools. SMART offers a solution to this problem, which could help accelerate research in fields across the life sciences, such as systems biology, pharmacology and biomedical engineering.

The researchers successfully tested the new software in biological systems at several different scales, from cell signaling in response to adhesive cues, to calcium release events in subcellular regions of neurons and cardiac muscle cells, to the production of ATP (the energy currency in cells) within a detailed representation of a single mitochondrion.

The Russian Ministry of Health has announced that it has developed a vaccine against cancer that will be distributed to Russian patients for free from early 2025.

According to TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency, Andrey Kaprin—the General Director of the Radiology Medical Research Center of the Russian Ministry of Health—recently announcement the development on Russian radio.

The vaccine will apparently be used to treat cancer patients, rather than given to the general public to prevent cancer—and it will be personalized to each patient.

Caltech researchers have developed a new method to map the positions of hundreds of DNA-associated proteins within cell nuclei all at the same time. The method, called ChIP–DIP (Chromatin ImmunoPrecipitation Done In Parallel), is a versatile tool for understanding the inner workings of the nucleus during different contexts, such as disease or development.

The research was conducted in the laboratory of Mitchell Guttman, professor of biology, and is described in a paper that appears in the journal Nature Genetics.

Nearly all cells in the human body contain the same DNA, which encodes the blueprint for creating every cell type in the body and directing their activities. Despite having the same genetic material, different cell types express unique sets of proteins, allowing for the various cells to perform their specialized functions and to adapt to conditions within their environments. This is possible because of careful regulation within the nucleus of each cell and involves thousands of regulatory proteins that localize to precise places in the nucleus.

Using dual lasers and an advanced gas injection system, researchers at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center (BELLA) accelerated a high-quality electron beam to 10 billion electronvolts (10 GeV) over a distance of just 30 centimeters.

Laser-plasma accelerators have the potential to dramatically shrink the size and cost of particle accelerators, benefiting fields such as high-energy physics, medicine, and materials science. Key achievements from BELLA’s recent experiment include: