Paralysis from spinal injury has long remained untreatable. Could scientific developments get people affected on their feet again sooner than imagined? In a worldwide first, Tel Aviv University researchers have engineered 3D human spinal cord tissues and implanted them in a lab model with long-term chronic paralysis, demonstrating high rates of success in restoring walking abilities. Now, the researchers are preparing for the next stage of the study, clinical trials in human patients.
LOS ANGELES — A new drug-releasing system, TAR-200, eliminated tumors in 82% of patients in a phase 2 clinical trial for individuals with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer whose cancer had previously resisted treatment.
In the majority of cases, the cancer disappeared after only three months of treatment, and almost half the patients were cancer-free a year later.
“Traditionally, these patients have had very limited treatment options. This new therapy is the most effective one reported to date for the most common form of bladder cancer,” said Sia Daneshmand, MD, director of urologic oncology with Keck Medicine of USC and lead author of a study detailing the clinical trial results published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. “The findings of the clinical trial are a breakthrough in how certain types of bladder cancer might be treated, leading to improved outcomes and saved lives.”#
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) serve as essential components in large generative models for extracting latent representations and have gained widespread application in biological domains. Developing VAEs specifically tailored to the unique characteristics of biological data is crucial for advancing future large-scale biological models.
Through systematic monitoring of VAE training processes across 31 public single-cell datasets spanning oncological and normal conditions, we discovered that reducing the β β value which corresponds to lower disentanglement of VAE significantly improves unsupervised clustering metrics in single-cell data analysis. Based on this finding, we innovatively developed iVAE with an irecon module that, when benchmarked against 8 established dimensionality reduction methods across 5 clustering performance metrics, exhibited superior capabilities in representing single-cell transcriptomic data.
In this video, I’m counting down 5 Weird Alien Tech Sci-Fi You Need to Read—plus a few honourable mentions—for fans of mind-bending, physics-breaking, utterly baffling extraterrestrial inventions.
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When we are out in cold weather, we wear warm clothes to stay comfortable. But there is a snag. Regular warm clothing can’t adjust to changes in our body temperature. If we start to sweat, we get too hot and sticky, which makes us want to remove layers. This defeats the purpose of wearing them, since we still need to stay warm.
But what if our clothes could adapt? That’s the question Xiuqiang Li at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China and his colleagues set out to answer. They have developed a jacket with a filling made from a bacterial cellulose membrane that responds to human sweating.
The innovative membrane automatically adjusts its thickness based on humidity. It’s 13 millimeters thick in cool, dry conditions and shrinks to just 2 millimeters when humidity levels are high, such as when you sweat. This allows the jacket to be thick when you need to stay warm and then get thinner when you want to cool down a little.
Metamaterials are artificial materials engineered to exhibit unique properties not found in naturally occurring materials, including negative refractive index, perfect absorption of electromagnetic radiation, and tunable optical properties. Researchers have been exploring the use of metamaterials in various applications, including optics, electromagnetism, and acoustics. One area where metamaterials are being explored is in sensing and imaging applications, such as creating ultra-compact optical devices like beam splitters and lenses.
The first practical demonstration of a metamaterial was achieved in 2000 by David Smith and his team at the University of California, San Diego. They created a composite material consisting of copper strips and dielectric materials, which exhibited a negative refractive index at microwave frequencies. This breakthrough sparked widespread interest in the field, and soon researchers began exploring various applications of metamaterials.
One of the key areas of research has been in the development of optical metamaterials. In 2005, a team led by Xiang Zhang at the University of California, Berkeley demonstrated the creation of an optical metamaterial with negative refractive index. They achieved this by using a fishnet-like structure composed of silver and dielectric materials. This work paved the way for further research into optical metamaterials and their potential applications in fields such as optics and photonics.
Metamaterials have also been explored for their potential use in electromagnetic cloaking devices. In 2006, a team led by David Smith demonstrated the creation of a metamaterial cloak that could bend light around an object, effectively making it invisible. This work was based on earlier theoretical proposals by John Pendry and his colleagues.