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Month: March 2018

Neutron stars aren’t the twinkle-twinkle kind you typically see in the night sky. They’re stellar corpses, and incredibly dense sources of gravity, with perhaps 1.5 times the mass of the sun packed into an area less than a dozen miles across. Around 9,000 light years away from Earth, one neutron star seems to have befriended a red dwarf. And scientists observed the new relationship beginning in a flash of energy.

An international team of researchers first spotted what looked like the symbiotic relationship of an old red dwarf star waking up a neutron star on August 13, 2017, using an Earth-orbiting telescope called INTEGRAL. While binary stars are common, lots of things about this finding, from capturing the initial blast that signaled the start of the stellar relationship, were a surprise.

“It was a very exciting find,” study author Arash Bahramian from Michigan State University told Gizmodo, “Especially given that it’s rare to see the start of the process.”

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We are making good progress in identifying neural circuits in our brain, small areas responsible for the execution of specific tasks. It is not always the case, actually several tasks are involving many areas in different regions of the brain. Also in this case, however, specific regions host neural circuits whose activity spread around influencing other neural networks. The malfunctioning of these “networks” results in disabilities and the good news is that researchers are starting to find ways to restore (in some cases) the correct working of these neural circuits using drugs.

The problem, however, is that these drugs cannot be delivered through the blood vessels since they would reach “the whole brain” and what is good for a “faulty” circuit may be bad for a “good” circuit. Besides, many drugs cannot flow across the membrane separating the arteries and veins from the brain (the so called blood-brain barrier). This obstacle is exploited by new technologies based on ultrasound beams that can be focussed in a specific place of the brain resulting in the opening of the blood vessels membrane in that area thus letting the drug reach the neurones. This is great but in mot cases it is not enough because the area “flooded” by the drug is still quite large (on a neuronal scale).

Here comes the result from researchers at MIT that have created a way to deliver nanoliter of drugs to areas as small as a cubic millimetre. Again, on the neural scale a cubic millimetre is … well, huge: it contains some 50,000 neurones and 300 million synapses! It is anyhow so much smaller than the area that would be affected by a drug delivered through a blood vessel (even the one that creates a breach into the blood brain barrier), hence it can target much better the faulty circuit without too much effects on other nearby circuits.

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The vast majority of Americans expect artificial intelligence to lead to job losses in the coming decade, but few see it coming for their own position.

The other findings, released in January, show that more than three in four Americans believe that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change how the public works and lives in the coming decade.

A new study reveals how widely Americans use and welcome technologies featuring artificial intelligence.

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What you do on the Internet is nobody’s business but yours. At ProxySite.com, we stand between your web use and anyone who tries to sneak a peek at it. Instead of connecting directly to a website, let us connect to the website and send it back to you, and no one will know where you’ve been. Big Brother (or other, less ominous snoops) won’t be able to look over your shoulder and spy on you to see what you’re reading, watching or saying.

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The International Papillomavirus Society has announced that Australia could become the first country to eliminate cervical cancer entirely.

According to a new study, Australia’s efforts to distribute a human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for free in schools have been a resounding success.

The sexually transmitted infection causes 99.9 percent of cases of cervical cancer.

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Someday we won’t need curtains or blinds on our windows, and we will be able to block out light—or let it in—with just the press of a button. At least that’s what Keith Goossen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, hopes.

Goossen and Daniel Wolfe, who earned a doctoral degree from UD last year, developed panels that can switch between allowing light in and blocking it out. This “” technology could be utilized in eco-friendly windows, windshields, roof panes and building envelopes, absorbing light and heat in the winter and reflecting it away in the summer.

Although Goossen isn’t the first scientist to make smart , his team’s invention is about one-tenth the price of other versions. It is also more transparent in its transparent state and more reflective in its reflective state than competitors, he said.

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Some cancer cells express some of the same genes that senescent cells do, so it makes sense that drugs that destroy senescent cells may also destroy cancer cells. This was what the researchers in this new study set out to test.

However, in this experiment, the researchers discovered that the chosen senolytic drugs were not effective at destroying cancer cells with senescence-associated gene expression. While cancer cells and senescent cells do share some common properties, they are also quite different at an epigenetic level.

The researchers did, however, demonstrate that a so-called “suicide gene therapy” that causes both senescent cells and cancer cells to kill themselves worked by targeting senescence-associated p16Ink4a. This approach is similar to that of SENS spin-off company Oisin Biotechnologies, which is using a suicide gene therapy to eliminate senescent cells.

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