Can a Brain-Computer Interface Convert your Thoughts to Text?
Ever wonder what it would be like if a device could decode your thoughts into actual speech or written words? While this might enhance the capabilities of already existing speech interfaces with devices, it could be a potential game-changer for those with speech pathologies, and even more so for "locked-in" patients who lack any speech or motor function.
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After Blindness, the Adult Brain Can Learn to See Again
More than 40 million people worldwide are blind, and many of them reach this condition after many years of slow and progressive retinal degeneration. The development of sophisticated prostheses or new light-responsive elements, aiming to replace the disrupted retinal function and to feed restored visual signals to the brain, has provided new hope. However, very little is known about whether the brain of blind people retains residual capacity to process restored or artificial visual inputs.
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Smartphones Alone Not the Smart Choice for Teen Weight Control
Teens use smartphones successfully to do almost anything: learn new skills, communicate with friends, do research and catch Pokémon. But a new study finds smartphones aren't as useful for helping teens maintain weight loss. In a 24-week behavioral study that combined traditional weight control intervention with smartphone-assisted helps, researchers found that teens lost weight initially, but couldn't maintain it when smartphones were the only tool helping them stay on track.
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Engineers, Mathematicians and Doctors Unite to Develop New Breast Cancer-Detection Option
An international team comprising engineers, mathematicians and doctors has applied a technique used for detecting damage in underwater marine structures to identify cancerous cells in breast cancer histopathology images. Their multidisciplinary breakthrough, which has the potential to automate the screening of images and improve the detection rate, has been published in leading journal, PLOS ONE.
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A Step Forward in Building Functional Human Tissues
Toward the ultimate goal of engineering human tissues and organs that can mimic native function for use in drug screening, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine, a Wyss Institute team led by Core Faculty member Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., has made another foundational advance using three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting. This work builds upon their demonstrated ability to bioprint tissue constructs composed of multiple types of living cells patterned alongside a vascular network in an extracellular matrix.
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Mapping the 'Dark Matter' of Human DNA
Researchers from ERIBA, Radboud UMC, XJTU, Saarland University, CWI and UMC Utrecht have made a big step towards a better understanding of the human genome. By identifying large DNA variants in 250 Dutch families, the researchers have clarified part of the "dark matter", the great unknown, of the human genome. These new data enable researchers from all over the world to study the DNA variants and use the results to better understand genetic diseases.
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Imaging Stroke Risk in 4D
Affecting 33.5 million patients worldwide, atrial fibrillation is the most common form of cardiac arrhythmia. As if having an irregular heart beat wasn't troubling enough, patients with atrial fibrillation are also much more likely to have a stroke. "Atrial fibrillation is thought to be responsible for 20 to 30 percent of all strokes in the United States," said Northwestern University's Michael Markl, the Lester B. and Frances T. Knight Professor of Cardiac Imaging. "While atrial fibrillation is easy to detect and diagnose, it's not easy to predict who will suffer a stroke because of it."
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