Lifeboat Foundation

Our brains have a remarkable knack for picking out individual voices in a noisy environment, like a crowded coffee shop or a busy city street. This is something that even the most advanced hearing aids struggle to do. But now Columbia engineers are announcing an experimental technology that mimics the brain’s natural aptitude for detecting and amplifying any one voice from many. Powered by artificial intelligence, this brain-controlled hearing aid acts as an automatic filter, monitoring wearers’ brain waves and boosting the voice they want to focus on.

Though still in early stages of development, the technology is a significant step toward better hearing aids that would enable wearers to converse with the people around them seamlessly and efficiently. This achievement is described today in Science Advances.

“The brain area that processes sound is extraordinarily sensitive and powerful; it can amplify one voice over others, seemingly effortlessly, while today’s hearings aids still pale in comparison,” said Nima Mesgarani, Ph.D., a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper’s senior author. “By creating a device that harnesses the power of the brain itself, we hope our work will lead to technological improvements that enable the hundreds of millions of hearing-impaired people worldwide to communicate just as easily as their friends and family do.”

Continue reading “Experimental brain-controlled hearing aid decodes, identifies who you want to hear” »

A new way to cleanly separate out cancer cells from a blood sample enables comprehensive genetic profiling of the cancer cells, which could help doctors target tumors and monitor treatments more effectively.

It is a dramatic improvement over current approaches because it also encompasses the variation among cancer cells within a single patient.

“This could be a whole different ball game,” said Max Wicha, the Madeline and Sidney Forbes Professor of Oncology at the University of Michigan and senior physician on the study in Nature Communications.

Continue reading “Blood biopsy: New technique enables detailed genetic analysis of cancer cells” »

Imperial medical students have helped to devise a new type of ‘decoy’ drug to tackle infections that are resistant to antibiotics.

In lab tests on bacterial cultures, the new drug successfully killed a strain of drug-resistant bacteria. It works by delivering two antibiotics, one of which is effectively hidden. When the bacteria fight against the first ‘decoy’ antibiotic, this action opens up the drug, triggering the second antibiotic into action.

This enables the second antibiotic to be delivered in a targeted way, only being released where it encounters drug-resistant bacteria. The findings could help prolong the life of existing antibiotics by slowing the rate at which bacteria become resistant to them.

Continue reading “Decoy antibiotics could get around bacteria’s defences” »

These days, scientists can collect a few skin or blood cells, wipe out their identities, and reprogram them to become virtually any other kind of cell in the human body, from neurons to heart cells.

The journey from skin cell to another type of functional cell involves converting them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are similar to the developmentally immature stem cells found in embryos, and then coaxing them to mature into something different.

But the process runs on an invisible clock, one in which scientists are interested in speeding up so adult-like cells are available when needed, whether for testing drugs for precision medicine, transplanting to repair injury or defect, or better understanding basic biology. It involves an FDA-approved compound called polyinosine-polycytidylic acid, or pIC, a double-stranded RNA molecule that activates a cell’s innate defense system. The compound is commonly used to boost vaccines and chemotherapy. The researchers found that when added to induced pluripotent stem cells undergoing the process of transitioning into cardiac muscle cells, pIC accelerated cellular maturation.

Continue reading “A new way to wind the development clock of cardiac muscle cells” »

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a hydrogel that can stop bleeding from a punctured artery. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how the hydrogel was made and how well it worked on test animals.

Uncontrolled bleeding is a very serious situation, both during surgical procedures and as a result of trauma. In most cases, it is the result of damage to a major artery or an organ like the liver. In all cases, immediate action must be taken or the victim will die. Currently, treatment for such wounds involves clamping the artery and then using sutures to close the wound. In the past, researchers have attempted to create a type of glue to stem such wounds, but thus far, none of them has worked as hoped—they were either made of toxic materials or were not strong enough to stand up to the high liquid pressure in the bloodstream. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a new type of hydrogel that solves both problems.

Continue reading “A hydrogel that can stop bleeding from an artery” »

American researchers have recently published a study in the scientific journal Nature, showing promising results using steroid eye drops for shrinking down and dissolving cataracts.

At the moment cataracts is the leading cause of blindness, and can only be removed through surgery. The surgical procedure, while simple and safe, is unpleasant for the patient and often prohibitively expensive.

A ccording to the Fred Hollows Foundation, approximately 32.4 million people around the world are blind, with more than half of the cases being caused by cataracts. In the United States alone, nearly 22 million Americans who are over age 40 have cataracts, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Continue reading “Goodbye Surgery – Scientists Made Eye Drops That Dissolve Cataracts” »

Substantially earlier than indicated by most DNA-based estimates, according to new research by a UCL academic.

The research, published in Science Advances, analysed dental evolutionary rates across different hominin species, focusing on early Neanderthals. It shows that the teeth of hominins from Sima de los Huesos, Spain—ancestors of the Neanderthals—diverged from the modern human lineage earlier than previously assumed.

Sima de los Huesos is a cave site in Atapuerca Mountains, Spain, where archaeologists have recovered fossils of almost 30 people. Previous studies date the site to around 430,000 years ago (Middle Pleistocene), making it one of the oldest and largest collections of human remains discovered to date.

Continue reading “Neanderthals and modern humans diverged at least 800,000 years ago” »

The world recently acknowledged the power of alternative cancer treatments by awarding the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine to Dr. James P. Allison and Dr. Tasuku Honjo for their work in immunotherapy. More specifically on checkpoint inhibitor therapies.

Until recently many in the scientific community had dismissed immunotherapy as a viable cancer treatment. Nevertheless, Allison and Honjo persevered and their breakthrough has allowed for the classification of new drugs and treatments that may help patients have run out of options.

Ironically, while many in the mainstream are barely learning of immunotherapy, a hospital in Mexico, CHIPSA Hospital, has been working with these treatments for over 38 year and often under fire from public ridicule that their treatments are strange and ineffective.

Continue reading “Alternative Cancer Treatments Brought to Legitimacy at Scientific Forum in San Diego” »

Researchers create altered synthetic genome, in move with potential medical benefits.