All bets are off: a new AI beats professional players at poker
Artificial intelligence can now best professionals at poker, adding a random, multiplayer game to the ever-expanding list of games conquered by AI. Continue reading All bets are off: a new AI beats professional players at poker
Dirtiness is perceived by all, cleanliness is pursued by women
Housekeeping is an arena that houses gendered behavior even today, despite the increasing trend where both the man and the woman of the household work and ‘bring home the bread’. The common myth that men just cannot see the dirt has been busted by a study published in Sociological Methods and Research. This new study attempts to understand the interplay between individual preferences and gender … Continue reading Dirtiness is perceived by all, cleanliness is pursued by women
Largest Seaweed Bloom on Record Discovered in the Atlantic Ocean
Seaweed are usually beneficial to ocean life, but now scientists have observed enormous masses of algae in the Atlantic Ocean that can harm the environment. Read Ben Andreone’s article to learn more! Continue reading Largest Seaweed Bloom on Record Discovered in the Atlantic Ocean
Slow and Steady Drug Delivery Keeps Biomedical Devices Kicking
Researchers from MIT have developed a novel method to locally deliver drugs and prevent immune activity around implanted biomedical devices over several months. The method is based on the formation of crystals of immunosuppressive drugs, which can be included in devices and slowly dissolve over the course of months. While this method substantially increases the length of time tested devices can function, difficulty of crystallizing certain drugs or introducing them into specific devices may prove to be a challenge in adapting this method to other systems. Even so, for many cases, this method will likely substantially reduce the difficulty of maintaining device stability for extended periods of time. Continue reading Slow and Steady Drug Delivery Keeps Biomedical Devices Kicking
Hey, those bacteria are stealing our drugs!
Bacteria in the human gut can modify the ingested drugs rendering them useless. Scientists discovered how the gut bacteria degrade a Parkinson’s disease medicine and found a way to stop them from stealing our drugs. Continue reading Hey, those bacteria are stealing our drugs!
The New Trojan Horse: Using tumor cells to kill tumors
Cancer immunotherapy exploits our immune system to kill cancerous cells. Recently, researchers have discovered a novel way to do this. They engineered cells that are programmed to die and injected them into tumor. They have successfully shown that the dying cells is able to kill tumor cells via recruitment of the immune system. This strategy might be a potential new method to improve the efficacy of current cancer immunotherapy methods. Continue reading The New Trojan Horse: Using tumor cells to kill tumors
Genetic tools create new opportunities for decoding protein structures
Proteins are made up of linear sequences of amino acids but understanding how these amino acids fold to form a three-dimensional structure is notoriously difficult. Knowing what a protein looks like in 3D is often necessary for understanding how it functions and how it can be manipulated. For instance, understanding how proteins such as antibodies bind to viruses like the flu would enable scientists to … Continue reading Genetic tools create new opportunities for decoding protein structures
Human endurance is not limitless
Imagine you’re running a race. But this is no normal race—this is a 140-day trek from Huntington Beach, CA to Washington, D.C. Welcome to Race Across the USA, a seemingly-superhuman feat that provides the perfect laboratory to study human endurance. After all, extreme athletes push their bodies to the proverbial “limit”—but what, exactly, is this limit? That’s what a new study published in Science Advances … Continue reading Human endurance is not limitless
Can converting methane into CO2 help reduce climate change?
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, contribute to global warming by slowing the rate at which heat energy escapes into space. Although methane is less abundant than CO2, it is several times more potent, absorbing up to 36 times more energy than CO2 over a century. Last year marked the first time that global methane concentrations reached levels 2.5 times greater than … Continue reading Can converting methane into CO2 help reduce climate change?
Augmented Medicine: the power of augmented reality in the operating room
by Nivanthika K. Wimalasena figures by Rebecca Clements Imagine going in for a surgery where the surgeon, instead of looking down and seeing only your swollen leg, can see the exact location of your fracture before making a single incision. Now imagine that this doesn’t require x-ray vision or the stuff of science fiction, but is possible through augmented reality (AR), used to overlay an image … Continue reading Augmented Medicine: the power of augmented reality in the operating room