Thursday 20 June 2019

Scientists discover new method for developing tracers used for medical imaging

In an advance for medical imaging, scientists from University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center have discovered a method for creating radioactive tracers to better track pharmaceuticals in the body as well as image diseases, such as cancer, and other medical conditions.

* This article was originally published here

Renault and Nissan end standoff over post-Ghosn governance

Renault announced Thursday that it had reached an agreement with its partner Nissan on the Japanese carmaker's governance overhaul, paving the way for the French company to back changes decided in the wake of the Carlos Ghosn scandal.

* This article was originally published here

Animals may have more than one means of surviving hypoxia

A tidepool crustacean's ability to survive oxygen deprivation though it lacks a key set of genes raises the possibility that animals might have more ways of dealing with hypoxic environments than had been thought.

* This article was originally published here

Compact, low-cost fingerprint reader could reduce infant mortality around the world

A team of Michigan State University researchers have created Infant-Prints—a low-cost, high-resolution and portable solution to accurately identify infants in an effort to help reduce infant mortality around the world.

* This article was originally published here

SPFCNN-Miner: A new classifier to tackle class-unbalanced data

Researchers at Chongqing University in China have recently developed a cost-sensitive meta-learning classifier that can be used when the training data available is high-dimensional or limited. Their classifier, called SPFCNN-Miner, was presented in a paper published in Elsevier's Future Generation Computer Systems.

* This article was originally published here

God doesn't play dice, does cancer?

The saying "God doesn't play dice" is meant to suggest that nothing happens by chance. On the other hand, cancer seems like the ultimate happenstance: Don't we all have a 43-year-old, vegan, triathlete friend fighting cancer? Does this mean that cancer plays dice? According to the traditional model of how cancer develops, yes: Every time a cell divides, you roll a die, and the more years you roll, the greater your chance of rolling an unfortunate mutation that causes cancer. Some young people get very unlucky and some older people get very lucky, but overall, the longer you live, the more times you roll the die, the greater your risk of developing cancer. It makes perfect sense.

* This article was originally published here

Engineers 3-D print flexible mesh for ankle and knee braces

Hearing aids, dental crowns, and limb prosthetics are some of the medical devices that can now be digitally designed and customized for individual patients, thanks to 3-D printing. However, these devices are typically designed to replace or support bones and other rigid parts of the body, and are often printed from solid, relatively inflexible material.

* This article was originally published here

Imaging results, health data combine in AI model to predict breast cancer

Women know the drill: Breast cancer is too commonly a cancer diagnosis to be ignored, as early detection could make a difference. While false positives may cause an enormous amount of undue stress, false negatives have an impact on how early a cancer is detected and subsequently treated.

* This article was originally published here

Biomedical bleeding may impact horseshoe crabs' spawning behavior and movement

Horseshoe crabs that have undergone biomedical bleeding tend to reside in deeper water and approach mating beaches less often, according to a new study published in The Biological Bulletin. In "Effects of the Biomedical Bleeding Process on the Behavior of the American Horseshoe Crab, Limulus polyphemus in Its Natural Habitat," Meghan Owings and her colleagues report the results of an investigation of the behavioral and physiological effects that the bleeding process has on horseshoe crabs that are released back into their natural environment. The findings suggest biomedical bleeding may impact the reproductive output of female horseshoe crabs during the season in which they were bled.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers see around corners to detect object shapes

Computer vision researchers have demonstrated they can use special light sources and sensors to see around corners or through gauzy filters, enabling them to reconstruct the shapes of unseen objects.

* This article was originally published here

Endangered rhinos ready to be sent from Europe to Rwanda

Five critically endangered eastern black rhinos from wildlife parks in three European countries are ready to be transported back to their natural habitat in Rwanda, where the entire rhino population was wiped out during the genocide in the 1990s.

* This article was originally published here

Robot circulatory system powers possibilities

Untethered robots suffer from a stamina problem. A possible solution: a circulating liquid—"robot blood"—to store energy and power its applications for sophisticated, long-duration tasks.

* This article was originally published here

From one brain scan, more information for medical artificial intelligence

MIT researchers have devised a novel method to glean more information from images used to train machine-learning models, including those that can analyze medical scans to help diagnose and treat brain conditions.

* This article was originally published here

German cabin crew union threatens Lufthansa strikes in July

German cabin crew union UFO called Thursday for a strike against airline giant Lufthansa in July, threatening travel chaos during the busy summer holiday season over a wage dispute.

* This article was originally published here

Spintronic memory cells for neural networks

In recent years, researchers have proposed a wide variety of hardware implementations for feed-forward artificial neural networks. These implementations include three key components: a dot-product engine that can compute convolution and fully-connected layer operations, memory elements to store intermediate inter and intra-layer results, and other components that can compute non-linear activation functions.

* This article was originally published here

A miniature robot that could check colons for early signs of disease

Engineers have shown it is technically possible to guide a tiny robotic capsule inside the colon to take micro-ultrasound images.

* This article was originally published here

Tech firm Slack to make market debut, at $26 reference price

Cloud-based software firm Slack Technologies makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday with a reference price of $26, adding to this year's parade of new Wall Street entrants.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers learn dangerous brain parasite 'orders in' for dinner

Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have discovered how a dangerous parasite maintains a steady supply of nutrients while replicating inside of its host cell: it calls for delivery.

* This article was originally published here

Even people with well-controlled epilepsy may be at risk for sudden death

People with epilepsy have a rare risk of sudden death. A new study shows that risk may apply even to people whose epilepsy is well-controlled, which is contrary to previous, smaller studies that showed the risk was highest among those with severe, difficult-to-treat epilepsy. The new study is published in the June 19, 2019, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

* This article was originally published here