Category Health/Medical

This is a Brain Music EEG headset. Credit: Osaka University

Music, more than any art, is a beautiful mix of science and emotion. It follows a set of patterns almost mathematically to extract feelings from its audience. Machines that make music focus on these patterns, but give little consideration to the emotional response of their audience. An international research team led by Osaka University together with Tokyo Metropolitan University, imec in Belgium and Crimson Technology has released a new machine-learning device that detects the emotional state of its listeners to produce new songs that elicit new feelings.

“Most machine songs depend on an automatic composition system,” says Masayuki Numao, professor at Osaka University...

Defining RNA–Small Molecule Affinity Landscapes Enables Design of a Small Molecule Inhibitor of an Oncogenic Noncoding RNA

TSRI Scientists have designed 2 new drug candidates to target prostate and triple negative breast cancers. The new research, published recently as 2 separate studies in ACS Central Science and Journal of the American Chemical Society, demonstrates that a new class of drugs, small molecule RNA inhibitors can target and kill specific types of cancer. RNA defects can lead to cancers, ALS, myotonic dystrophy and many other diseases. In their ACS Central Science study, Prof. Disney and his colleagues used DNA sequencing to evaluate thousands of small molecules as potential drug candidates...

As marijuana legalization spreads, better understanding of side effects is needed. Using marijuana raises stroke and heart failure risk even after accounting for demographic factors, other health conditions and lifestyle risk factors such as smoking and alcohol use, according to research scheduled for presentation at the American College of Cardiology’s 66th Annual Scientific Session. While previous marijuana research has focused mostly on pulmonary and psychiatric complications, the new study is one of only a handful to investigate cardiovascular outcomes.

The study drew data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, which includes the health records of patients admitted at more than 1,000 hospitals comprising about 20% of U.S. medical centers...

The illustration shows a minute fraction of a fly brain. The automated analysis partitions a three-dimensional image stack into individual nerve cells, depicted here with arbitrary colors. Twenty of such images side by side approximate the diameter of a human hair. Credit: Thorsten Beier, IWR

Precise knowledge of the connections in the brain – the links between all the nerve cells – is a prerequisite for better understanding this most complex of organs. Researchers from Heidelberg University have now developed a new algorithm that can extract this connectivity pattern with far greater precision than previously possible from microscopic images of the brain. Prof. Dr Fred Hamprecht expects such automated image data analysis to bring about great strides in the neurosciences...