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Computer-designed thermoelectric generator achieves more than 8-fold improvement in efficiency

A thermoelectric generator with a shape that no human designer would likely have imagined has now been created by a computer—and it performs more than eight times better than conventional designs. Rather than relying on intuition or repeated trial and error, the breakthrough was achieved through advanced computational optimization.

A joint research team led by Professor Jae Sung Son of the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology), in collaboration with Professor Hayoung Chung of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), has developed a general design framework that enables computers to autonomously identify the optimal structure of thermoelectric generators, which convert waste heat into electricity.

Their work is published online in Nature Communications.

Not all organs age alike: AI unveils the molecular impact of menopause across the female body

Despite affecting half of the world’s population, menopause has historically been understudied and misunderstood, both in biomedical research and clinical practice. However, with the increase in life expectancy, the number of women in the postmenopausal stage continues to grow and, in 2021, those over 50 already represented 26% of the world’s population, according to the WHO.

Its effects go far beyond the reproductive system and are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular, metabolic, neurodegenerative, and bone diseases. Nevertheless, few studies analyzed in depth how this process affects the female reproductive system as a whole, beyond the ovaries.

In this context, a new study by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center—Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), published in Nature Aging, presents the first large-scale atlas of female reproductive system aging, providing a new vision of how this process impacts health.

Tackling the active antibiotic-resistant bacteria in soils

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria in soils.

Soil antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs) originate from diverse anthropogenic inputs and undergo complex ecological and evolutionary processes that determine their persistence and mobility in terrestrial ecosystems.

Advanced monitoring strategies combining high-throughput DNA-based and single-cell functional techniques enable precise profiling of total and active ARGs in soil matrices.

A tiered risk assessment framework is proposed, integrating ARG mobility, host pathogenicity, and human exposure to support decision-making in One Health contexts.

Multi-barrier mitigation strategies – including source control and ecological bioremediation – offer scalable and synergistic solutions to reduce the risk of dissemination of soil ARGs. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission https://sciencemission.com/antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-in-soils

Soils are critical reservoirs of antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs) and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB), serving as interfaces among human, animal, plant, and environmental microbiomes. While many studies have profiled soil ARGs, most rely on DNA-based methods that cannot distinguish total from metabolically active ARB, limiting risk assessment and mitigation. This review outlines soil ARG sources, their mobility, and potential transmission to plants and the food chain. We highlight advances in community-and single-cell-level approaches for characterizing active ARB and explore emerging mitigation strategies such as advanced waste treatment and bioremediation. This review aims to bridge the gap between ARG pollution and its risk mitigation, contributing to a comprehensive framework for tackling active ARB in soils.

Continue reading “Tackling the active antibiotic-resistant bacteria in soils” | >

The Trajectory of Quality of Life in Newly Diagnosed vs Chronic Refractory Focal EpilepsyA Prospective Multicenter Study

The trajectory of quality of life in newly diagnosed vs chronic refractory focal epilepsy: a prospective multicenter study.

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Mechanical circulatory support for patients with infarct-related cardiogenic shock: a state-of-the-art review

In this episode of the Heart podcast, Digital Media Editor @jhfrudd is joined by Prof. Jacob Eifer Moller from Odense, Denmark. They discuss his review paper on mechanical circulatory support, along with supporting guidelines and papers in this area.

Podcast: https://bit.ly/46fB0vO

Paper: https://bit.ly/4pkR1t5

In this episode of the Heart podcast, Digital Media Editor, Professor James Rudd, is joined by Prof. Jacob Eifer Moller from Odense, Denmark. They discuss his review paper on mechanical circulatory support and some of the supporting guidelines and papers in this area. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a positive review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us to reach more people — thanks! Link to published paper: https://heart.bmj.com/content/early/2025/01/15/heartjnl-2024-324883

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Continue reading “Mechanical circulatory support for patients with infarct-related cardiogenic shock: a state-of-the-art review” | >

Language mapped to a high‐resolution brain atlas for surgical evaluation of epilepsy patients

Interactive language maps translated into the Yale Brain Atlas can help standardize multimodal communication and individualize patient care.

Objective We created composite maps of language function from extraoperative stimulation literature and transformed them to the Yale Brain Atlas (YBA), which offers precise cortical localization with 690 one cm2 parcels, based on the MNI152 template and anatomical landmarks. This allowed comparison to similarly transformed direct cortical stimulation (DCS) maps created from medically intractable epilepsy patients studied intracranially at Yale University and selected fMRI activation data. Our goal was to create anatomically precise boundaries of language function and support individualized planning for intracranial EEG (icEEG) studies and/or surgical resection.

Scientists redesign CAR-T cells to fight more than cancer

This review examines how CAR-T cell therapy is expanding beyond blood cancers into solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, chronic viral infections, and next-generation immune-cell platforms. It highlights promising engineering advances, including universal CAR-T cells, in vivo delivery, CAR-NK cells, and safety switches, while emphasizing unresolved challenges in durability, safety, scalability, and global access.

Rapid Eye Movements Enhance Information Acquisition

A model captures how the retina avoids tuning out during a fixed gaze.

Tiny, small-scale eye movements persist even when a human stares at a fixed point. Physiologists have long speculated about how these fixational eye movements, or “drift,” might help visual processing. Alexander Houston of the University of Glasgow in the UK and his collaborators now present a model that describes how both the stimulus—the visual scene—and the rapid eye movements affect visual performance [1]. They show how seemingly random eye movements serve to couple the spatial structure of a stimulus to a time-dependent visual response, with regimes that can be beneficial, detrimental, or ineffectual to information acquisition.

When you stare at an image, light travels through the lens in your eye before reaching the retina: the neural structure at the back of the eye that contains the photoreceptor array. Although the image appears clearly, if you stare fixedly for long enough, parts of it may fade from view. The retina “adapts” and stops signaling. Because of drift, however, each photoreceptor’s position shifts along a diffusive trajectory. In the model developed by Houston and his collaborators, these retinal movements impart a time dependence to spatial variations in the incoming light, overcoming the retina’s tendency to stop signaling.

FingerEye bridges touch and vision to improve robot handling before and after contact

To reliably complete various manual tasks, robots should be able to handle a variety of objects, ranging from items found in households to tools used in specific professional settings. While many existing robotic systems can now complete basic manual tasks, such as picking up objects and carrying them to a set location, most systems still struggle with tasks that entail the dexterous manipulation of objects.

The term dexterous manipulation describes the ability to skillfully and precisely move objects in nuanced ways, which is central to the completion of many of the tasks that humans tackle daily. Replicating this ability in robots can be very difficult, as it typically requires gathering and interpreting different types of sensory information.

Conventional approaches for robot manipulation rely on visual sensors, such as cameras, and tactile sensors, devices that pick up tactile information. Yet most existing tactile sensors only provide feedback after a robot touches an object, which makes it difficult to plan manipulation strategies in advance.

Superconductivity that shouldn’t exist: Physicists dissect the mind-boggling properties of a strange quantum material

The material UTe2 exhibits multiple forms of zero electrical resistance—a phenomenon known as superconductivity—and displays several puzzling properties. After UTe2 loses its superconductivity at a certain magnetic field, it becomes superconducting again under much higher fields.

Using a new high-field measurement technique, researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have explained this unusual superconducting behavior in a paper in Nature Communications. Their method is now being adopted at high-field laboratories worldwide.

Quantum materials exhibit exotic properties that make them relevant for next-generation technologies. While some scientists researching quantum materials seek to uncover specific properties for targeted applications, such as quantum computing, other researchers are curiosity-driven, searching for knowledge that hasn’t yet appeared in textbooks.

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