Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed an automated model that assesses dense breast tissue in mammograms — which is an independent risk factor for breast cancer — as reliably as expert radiologists.

This marks the first time a deep-learning model of its kind has successfully been used in a clinic on real patients, according to the researchers. With broad implementation, the researchers hope the model can help bring greater reliability to breast density assessments across the nation.

The grains we eat, the flowers we cherish, fruits that we use as supplements, all came from plants that have been extensively modified from their original forms in a process called domestication.  Domestication of plants and animals has been the subject of fascinating studies over the last many decades.  Domestication encompasses a broad spectrum of evolutionary changes called as “domestication syndrome” that distinguish most crops from their progenitors.  These changes may increase fitness of these plants under ideal man-made conditions, but likely decrease their fitness in the wild.  Complete dependence on humans for survival of domesticated crops can be considered as the fulfilment of domestication.  Maize and brassicas such as cauliflower are examples of such highly modified forms.

Researchers commonly study brain function by monitoring two types of electromagnetism — electric fields and light. However, most methods for measuring these phenomena in the brain are very invasive.

MIT engineers have now devised a new technique to detect either electrical activity or optical signals in the brain using a minimally invasive sensor for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

MRI is often used to measure changes in blood flow that indirectly represent brain activity, but the MIT team has devised a new type of MRI sensor that can detect tiny electrical currents, as well as light produced by luminescent proteins. (Electrical impulses arise from the brain’s internal communications, and optical signals can be produced by a variety of molecules developed by chemists and bioengineers.)

If you've ever trained for a track event, you know there are two ways to run. Training for a long distance running event means you have to run economically – wasted movement costs valuable energy. Sprinting, on the other hand, focuses on powerful movements made with intense effort.

Top runners should ideally be good at both. For example, at the end of a long distance event, runners typically become more concerned about crossing the finish line as soon as possible – sprint-like movements would help here. But long distance runners typically do not change their form – they lengthen their stride as they near the finish line. They cannot run like trained sprinters because they have invested heavily in making energetically economic movements.

The genome editing system CRISPR has become a hugely important tool in medical research, and could ultimately have a significant impact in fields such as agriculture, bioenergy, and food security.

The targeting system can travel to different points on the genome, guided by a short sequence of RNA, where a DNA-cutting enzyme known as Cas9 then makes the desired edits.

However, despite the gene-editing tool’s considerable success, CRISPR-Cas9 remains limited in the number of locations it can visit on the genome.

That is because CRISPR needs a specific sequence flanking the target location on the genome, known as a protospacer adjacent motif, or PAM, to allow it to recognize the site

A class of cells that defends the body against invaders also triggers obsessive-compulsive behaviour that appears in autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS), a new study from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has found.

Autoimmune disorders, where the body’s immune system goes rogue and attacks healthy cells, are difficult to treat. MS, for example, is a debilitating autoimmune disorder that affects over 2 million people worldwide and has no known cure. Patients with these disorders are also known to suffer from illnesses such as depression, anxiety or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). However, the relationship between such illnesses and the immune system has not been clear.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have engineered an antiviral peptide that exploits the Zika virus at its Achilles’ heel - the viral membrane - hence stopping the virus from causing severe infections.

This new method of attacking the viral membrane focuses on directly stopping Zika virus particles rather than preventing the replication of new virus particles, and can potentially work against a wide range of membrane-enveloped viruses

Three patients with chronic paraplegia were able to walk over ground thanks to precise electrical stimulation of their spinal cords via a wireless implant. In a double study published in Nature and Nature Neuroscience, Swiss scientists Grégoire Courtine (EPFL and CHUV/Unil) and Jocelyne Bloch (CHUV/Unil) show that, after a few months of training, the patients were able to control previously paralyzed leg muscles even in the absence of electrical stimulation

Following the 2018 Nobel Prize for Medicine, global attention is now more than ever turned toward the promise of immunotherapy in oncology. An international team’s work has shed new light on a molecule called TIM-3 that might play a key role in the regulation of the immune response. Scientists and physicians from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), the Montreal Children's Hospital of the MUHC (MCH-MUHC) and McGill University, in collaboration with French teams from AP-HP, Inserm, Université Paris-Descartes, Université Paris-Diderot, and the Imagine Institute at the Necker-Enfants Malades hospital, have singled out this protein as the next potential target for immunotherapy treatments in patients with cancer and other diseases.

Delivering functional genes into cells to replace mutated genes, an approach known as gene therapy, holds potential for treating many types of diseases. The earliest efforts to deliver genes to diseased cells focused on DNA, but many scientists are now exploring the possibility of using RNA instead, which could offer improved safety and easier delivery.

MIT biological engineers have now devised a way to regulate the expression of RNA once it gets into cells, giving them precise control over the dose of protein that a patient receives. This technology could allow doctors to more accurately tailor treatment for individual patients, and it also offers a way to quickly turn the genes off, if necessary.

Geckos and many other animals have heads that are too small to triangulate the location of noises the way we do, with widely spaced ears. Instead, they have a tiny tunnel through their heads that measures the way incoming sound waves bounce around to figure out which direction they came from.

Facing their own problem of minuscule size and triangulation, researchers from Stanford University have come up with a similar system for detecting the angle of in-coming light. Such a system could let tiny cameras detect where light is coming from, but without the bulk of a large lens.

Researchers from IIT Bombay find evidence of high potential geothermal systems existing on the west coast of Maharashtra

During my visit to my grandma’s place near Aravali in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, a trip to the closest hot spring was a routine. The spring acted as the source of hot water to the locals, and the water was said to have medicinal properties. Thermal springs, such as this, are a part of the geothermal fluids that occur below the surface of the earth to depths of about a kilometre. In a recent study, Dr Trupti Chandrashekhar from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), and her collaborators from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology, Amethi, and other institutes from Italy, have explored the origins of the hot springs along the Western Ghats. They have found that these springs evolved from rocks millions of years old, and marine sediments played a crucial role in their evolution. 

Researchers from IIT Bombay develop a mobile application for better positioning using data from neighbouring mobiles

Imagine you book a cab using smartphone app, and it shows your cab is five minutes away. Five minutes are gone, and the app still says the same thing! Sounds familiar? While you could easily blame the rush hour traffic, did you know the culprit could also be the Global Positioning System (GPS) of your or your cab driver's phone? Yes, often phones fail to receive the GPS signal because of the interference from tall buildings. In a recent study, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have designed a solution to improve the accuracy of the location in absence of GPS by making your phone communicate with other phones around.

The key to making such tiny devices in large quantities lies in a method the team developed for controlling the natural fracturing process of atomically-thin, brittle materials, directing the fracture lines so that they produce miniscule pockets of a predictable size and shape. Embedded inside these pockets are electronic circuits and materials that can collect, record, and output data.

The novel process, called “autoperforation,” is described in a paper published in the journal Nature Materials, by MIT Professor Michael Strano, postdoc Pingwei Liu, graduate student Albert Liu, and eight others at MIT.

Hacker attacks on everything from social media accounts to government files could be largely prevented by the advent of quantum communication, which would use particles of light called "photons" to secure information rather than a crackable code.

The problem is that quantum communication is currently limited by how much information single photons can help send securely, called a "secret bit rate." Purdue University researchers created a new technique that would increase the secret bit rate 100-fold, to over 35 million photons per second.

"Increasing the bit rate allows us to use single photons for sending not just a sentence a second, but rather a relatively large piece of information with extreme security, like a megabyte-sized file," said Simeon Bogdanov, a Purdue postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering.

Fuel cells have not been particularly known for their practicality and affordability, but that may have just changed. There’s a new cell that runs on cheap fuel at temperatures comparable to automobile engines and which slashes materials costs.

Though the cell is in the lab, it has high potential to someday electrically power homes and perhaps cars, say the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology who led its development. In a new study in the journal Nature Energy the researchers detailed how they reimagined the entire fuel cell with the help of a newly invented fuel catalyst.

Fuel cells have long been viewed as a promising power source. These devices, invented in the 1830s, generate electricity directly from chemicals, such as hydrogen and oxygen, and produce only water vapor as emissions. But most fuel cells are too expensive, inefficient, or both.

In a new approach, inspired by biology and published today (Oct. 3, 2018) in the journal Joule, a University of Wisconsin–Madison team has designed a fuel cell using cheaper materials and an organic compound that shuttles electrons and protons.