MIT researchers invented a method of shrinking objects to the nanoscale.
The team can generate structures one-thousandth the volume of the original using a variety of materials, including metals, quantum dots, and DNA.
Existing techniques—like etching patterns onto a surface with light—work for 2D nanostructures, but not 3D. And while it’s possible to make 3D nanostructures, the process is slow, challenging, and restrictive.
An Israeli company has announced that it has created a technology that will destroy cancerous tumors.
As The Times Of Israel reports, Alpha Tau Medical has a new treatment called Diffusing Alpha-emitters Radiation Therapy (DaRT). To circumvent the problem of how to prevent alpha particles that kill cancer cells from decaying rapidly, Alpha Tau initiated a method of placing the alpha particles inside a needle containing radium-224, a radioactive isotope. Once the needle is inserted into the tumor, it takes the radium four days to vanish, but during that period the radium transmits “daughter atoms” that spit out alpha particles that rupture the DNA of the cancer cells.
CEO Uzi Sofer told The Times of Israel, “This is the first time in the world that you can treat solid tumors,” with alpha radiation. He asserted that the treatment can be given anywhere; there is no need for a hospital setting, concluding, “It is like going to the dentist.” The whole procedure can take between 30 minutes and two hours.
When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another.
But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those annoying delays.
The key is to sit back and let a virus — the biological kind — handle the assembly work.
Posted in biotech/medical, neuroscience
When it comes to recovering from insult, the adult human brain has very little ability to compensate for nerve-cell loss. Biomedical researchers and clinicians are therefore exploring the possibility of using transplanted nerve cells to replace neurons that have been irreparably damaged as a result of trauma or disease. However, it is not clear whether transplanted neurons can be integrated sufficiently, to result in restored function of the lesioned network. Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, and the Helmholtz Zentrum München have demonstrated that, in mice, transplanted embryonic nerve cells can indeed be incorporated into an existing network and correctly carry out the tasks of damaged cells originally found in that region.
Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, but also stroke or certain injuries lead to a loss of brain cells. The mammalian brain can replace these cells only in very limited areas, making the loss in most cases a permanent one. The transplantation of young nerve cells into an affected network of patients, for example with Parkinson’s disease, allow for the possibility of a medical improvement of clinical symptoms. However, if the nerve cells transplanted in such studies help to overcome existing network gaps or whether they actually replace the lost cells, remained unknown.
In the joint study, researchers of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, and the Helmholtz Zentrum München have specifically asked whether transplanted embryonic nerve cells can functionally integrate into the visual cortex of adult mice. The study was supported by the center grant (SFB) 870 of the German Research Foundation (DFG). “This brain region is ideal for such experiments,” says Magdalena Götz, joint leader of the study together with Mark Hübener, who continues to explain: “By now, we know so much about the functions of the nerve cells in the visual cortex and the connections between them that we can readily assess whether the new nerve cells actually perform the tasks normally carried out by the network.”
People with depression also tend to “visit primary care physicians more often than others,” explains Prof. Lorenzo-Luaces. “They have more medical problems, and their depression sometimes gets in the way of their taking their medication for other medical problems.”
So, for the new review, the team examined 21 existing studies using meta-regression analysis. The analysis concluded that CBT apps were effective for treating mild, moderate, and severe depression.
Some of the trials included in the review compared a CBT app with a sham app. In these studies, the real apps were also significantly more effective at treating depression.
United Therapeutics will license, develop, and commercialize CollPlant Holdings’ recombinant human collagen (rhCollagen) and BioInk technology for 3D bioprinting of solid-organ scaffolds for human transplants, the companies said today, through a collaboration that could generate more than $44 million.
Through its wholly- owned organ manufacturing and transplantation-focused subsidiary Lung Biotechnology PBC, United Therapeutics has been granted what the companies termed an exclusive license “throughout the universe” by CollPlant to its technology for producing and using rhCollagen-based BioInk for 3D bioprinted lung transplants.
Lung Biotechnology PBC is a public benefit corporation formed to address the acute national shortage of transplantable lungs and other organs with a variety of technologies that either delay the need for such organs or expand the supply.
