Lifeboat Foundation

Toronto, Ontario —A new ultra-high-performance brain PET system allows for the direct measurement of brain nuclei as never before seen or quantified. With its ultra-high sensitivity and resolution, the NeuroEXPLORER provides exceptional brain PET images and has the potential to spur advances in the treatment of many brain diseases. This research was presented at the 2024 Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) Annual Meeting, and the grouping of images highlighting targeted tracer uptake in specific brain nuclei has been selected as the 2024 SNMMI Henry N. Wagner, Jr., Image of the Year.

Each year, SNMMI chooses an image that best exemplifies the most promising advances in the field of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging. The state-of-the-art technologies captured in these images demonstrate the capacity to improve patient care by detecting disease, aiding diagnosis, improving clinical confidence, and providing a means of selecting appropriate treatments. This year, the SNMMI Image of the Year was chosen from more than 1,500 abstracts submitted for the meeting.

The image quality of PET systems has improved in recent years, mostly by increases in sensitivity, including enhanced time-of-flight capabilities. However, these systems have shown only minimal improvement in intrinsic resolution. To address these issues, researchers designed the NeuroEXPLORER PET scanner with a focus on ultra-high sensitivity and resolution, as well as continuous head motion correction.

“We want to build tools that can make biology programmable,” says Alex Rives, the company’s chief scientist, who was part of Meta’s efforts to apply AI to biological data.

EvolutionaryScale’s AI tool, called ESM3, is what’s known as a protein language model. It was trained on more than 2.7 billion protein sequences and structures, as well as information about these proteins’ functions. The model can be used to create proteins to specifications provided by users, akin to the text spit out by chatbots such as ChatGPT.

“It’s going to be one of the AI models in biology that everybody’s paying attention to,” says Anthony Gitter, a computational biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 1968, deep underground in the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota, Ray Davis Jr.

At the same time, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were carrying out major construction work on what would become the Standard Model of particle physics, building the Higgs mechanism into Sheldon Glashow’s unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions. The Standard Model is still bulletproof today, with one proven exception: the nonzero neutrino masses for which Davis’s observations were in hindsight the first experimental evidence.

Today, neutrinos are still one of the most promising windows into physics beyond the Standard Model, with the potential to impact many open questions in fundamental science ( CERN Courier May/June 2024 p29). One of the most ambitious experiments to study them is currently taking shape in the same gold mine as Davis’s experiment more than half a century before.

Continue reading “A gold mine for neutrino physics” »

Engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have unveiled a major advancement in optical computing technology that promises to enhance data processing and encryption. The work is published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.

This innovative work, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan and his team, showcases a reconfigurable diffractive optical network capable of executing high-dimensional permutation operations, offering a significant leap forward in telecommunications and data security applications.

Permutation operations, essential for various applications, including telecommunications and encryption, have traditionally relied on electronic hardware. However, the UCLA team’s advancement uses all-optical diffractive computing to perform these operations in a multiplexed manner, significantly improving efficiency and scalability.

The largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains—with humans bucking this trend—a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Reading and Durham University collected an enormous dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500 species to clarify centuries of controversy surrounding brain size evolution.

Bigger brains relative to body size are linked to intelligence, sociality, and behavioral complexity—with humans having evolved exceptionally large brains. The new research reveals the largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains, challenging long-held beliefs about brain evolution.

July 8 (UPI) — SpaceX is targeting a Monday afternoon launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying aloft Turkey’s first home-grown communications satellite.

The launch at 5:21 p.m. EDT can be viewed online.

Turkey has had satellites launched before but this is the first one to be entirely built in the Middle East nation. Turkey is just the 11th country capable of manufacturing its own communications satellites.

Forget a pinch of salt, this guy’s predictions need the full shaker.

Restraining or slowing ageing hallmarks at the cellular level have been proposed as a route to increased organismal lifespan and healthspan. Consequently, there is great interest in anti-ageing drug discovery. However, this currently requires laborious and lengthy longevity analysis. Here, we present a novel screening readout for the expedited discovery of compounds that restrain ageing of cell populations in vitro and enable extension of in vivo lifespan.

Using Illumina methylation arrays, we monitored DNA methylation changes accompanying long-term passaging of adult primary human cells in culture. This enabled us to develop, test, and validate the CellPopAge Clock, an epigenetic clock with underlying algorithm, unique among existing epigenetic clocks for its design to detect anti-ageing compounds in vitro. Additionally, we measured markers of senescence and performed longevity experiments in vivo in Drosophila, to further validate our approach to discover novel anti-ageing compounds. Finally, we bench mark our epigenetic clock with other available epigenetic clocks to consolidate its usefulness and specialisation for primary cells in culture.

We developed a novel epigenetic clock, the CellPopAge Clock, to accurately monitor the age of a population of adult human primary cells. We find that the CellPopAge Clock can detect decelerated passage-based ageing of human primary cells treated with rapamycin or trametinib, well-established longevity drugs. We then utilise the CellPopAge Clock as a screening tool for the identification of compounds which decelerate ageing of cell populations, uncovering novel anti-ageing drugs, torin2 and dactolisib (BEZ-235). We demonstrate that delayed epigenetic ageing in human primary cells treated with anti-ageing compounds is accompanied by a reduction in senescence and ageing biomarkers. Finally, we extend our screening platform in vivo by taking advantage of a specially formulated holidic medium for increased drug bioavailability in Drosophila. We show that the novel anti-ageing drugs, torin2 and dactolisib (BEZ-235), increase longevity in vivo.

Mind-blowing experiments are bringing ancient cosmic conditions into modern labs.