06 Mar Medical mind-reading brain scanners to ask patients who cannot speak

Doctors are using brain scanners to ask patients who cannot speak about their treatment wishes

When a person sustains a severe brain injury that leaves them unable to communicate, their families and doctors often have to make life-or-death decisions about their care for them. Now brain scanners are being tested in intensive care to see if mind-reading can enable some patients to have their say, New Scientist can exclusively reveal.

At the moment, doctors ask the families of people who have a poor prognosis and cannot communicate if they think their relatives would want to continue life-sustaining treatments such as being on a ventilator. “Life would be so much easier if you could just ask the person,” says Adrian Owen at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Owen’s team previously developed a brain-scanning approach for a much smaller group of people – those in states between consciousness and being in a coma, for example, those in a vegetative state. Such people show few signs of awareness and have to be fed through a tube.

Owen found that some of these people can direct their thoughts in response to instructions, which can be picked up on brain scans. If someone is asked to imagine playing tennis, for instance, the part of their brain involved in movement lights up in the scan. This has let him and other teams ask those who are able to respond in this way yes/no questions, which can give people a say over their living conditions. About a fifth of people the technique is tried on can respond.

Owen is now using the same technique on people who are in intensive care in the first few days after sustaining a severe brain injury. In such circumstances, just over a quarter of people end up having their treatment withdrawn due to a poor prognosis. For example, in some cases, doctors may predict that if the person survives, they would be paralyzed and unable to speak. “A decision will typically be made in the first 10 days about whether to go on or pull the plug,” says Owen.

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06 Mar Coronavirus: Study shows that half of patients have no fever during hospital admission

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06 Mar IN-VIVO: CRISPR Used To Edit Genes Inside A Patient With A Rare Form Of Blindness

Doctors used CRISPR to edit genes of cells inside a patient’s eye, hoping to restore vision to a person blinded by a rare genetic disorder. A similar strategy might work for some brain diseases.

For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to edit a gene while the DNA is still inside a person’s body. The groundbreaking procedure involved injecting the microscopic gene-editing tool into the eye of a patient blinded by a rare genetic disorder, in hopes of enabling the volunteer to see. They hope to know within weeks whether the approach is working and, if so, to know within two or three months how much vision will be restored.

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06 Mar Coronavirus: South Korea’s aggressive testing gives clues about true fatality rate, which is much lower than reported

Coronavirus can kill, but experts are still puzzling over how deadly the disease it causes truly is. Seoul’s aggressive screening regime might hold the answer.

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28 Feb Planet Finder Validates Its First Habitable-Zone Exoplanet, a Mini Neptune

Astronomers have validated their first exoplanet with the Habitable Zone Planet Finder instrument on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, one of the world’s largest telescopes, located at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory.

About twice the size of Earth and possibly 12 times as massive, the planet could be similar to Neptune, but in miniature. Called G 9-40b, it orbits a small star called a red dwarf about 100 light-years from Earth. It completes a full orbit every six Earth days.

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28 Feb Boom! Scientists spot the biggest explosion in the history of the universe | Space

Boom! Scientists spot the biggest known explosion in the history of the universe

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28 Feb Researchers develop a silicon anode that can increase battery capacity four-fold in comparison to graphite and enables rapid charging

Dr. Hun-Gi Jung and his research team at the Center for Energy Storage Research of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Lee Byung Gwon) have announced the development of silicon anode materials that can increase battery capacity four-fold in comparison to graphite anode materials and enable rapid charging to more than 80% capacity in only five minutes. When applied to batteries for electric vehicles, the new materials are expected to more than double their driving range.

The batteries currently installed in mass-produced electric vehicles use graphite anode materials, but their low capacity contributes to electric vehicles’ having a shorter driving range than vehicles with internal combustion engines. Consequently, silicon, with an energy storage capacity 10-times greater than graphite, has drawn attention as a next-generation anode material for the development of long-range electric vehicles. However, silicon materials have not yet been commercialized because their volume expands rapidly and storage capacity decreases significantly during charge and discharge cycles, which limits commercialization. A number of methods have been suggested for enhancing the stability of silicon as an anode material, but the cost and complexity of these methods have prevented silicon from replacing graphite.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: eurekalert.org

21 Feb 50 Ideas to Change Our World [FT]

The FT has enlisted the help of readers, researchers and entrepreneurs to find 50 new ideas that will shape the world in the future.

• Holograms are changing the way we interact with computers
• Wearable scanners will read our minds
• Quantum Computers will be valuable
• DNA could store all the world’s data
• Data-heavy AI networks
• Personalized Learning
• Neural networks for face recognition
• Robots in the classroom

Read all 50 ideas

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21 Feb ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has launched to study the sun

ESA’s Solar Orbiter is now on its way to the sun, beginning a nearly two-year journey.

A new sungazing spacecraft has launched on a mission to chart the sun’s unexplored polar regions and to understand how our star creates and controls the vast bubble of plasma that envelops the solar system.

At 11:03 pm ET on February 9, 2020, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter rocketed away from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The spacecraft now begins a nearly two-year convoluted journey — getting two gravity assists from Venus and one from Earth — to an orbit that will repeatedly take it a bit closer to the sun than Mercury gets.

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21 Feb World Health Organisation division tackling coronavirus is underfunded and facing internal corruption allegations, audits reveal – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The division leading the global response to the coronavirus outbreak is so chronically underfunded it poses a severe level of hazard to the World Health Organisation, audits reveal.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.abc.net.au