STIMO study participant David Mzee is now able to take a few steps of his own. He was totally paraplegic after a sports accident.
Credit: EPFL / Jean-Baptiste Mignardot

Targeted neurotechnology restores walking in humans with spinal cord injury. Three paraplegics who sustained cervical spinal cord injuries many years ago are now able to walk with the aid of crutches or a walker thanks to new rehabilitation protocols that combine targeted electrical stimulation of the lumbar spinal cord and weight-assisted therapy.

This latest study, called STIMO (STImulation Movement Overground), establishes a new therapeutic framework to improve recovery from spinal cord injury. All patients involved in the study recovered voluntary control of leg muscles that had been paralyzed for many years...

This is a mosaic image of Mars created from over 100 images taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s.
Credit: NASA

A similar process could occur anywhere that igneous rocks are surrounded by brines, including the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Mars’ organic carbon may have originated from a series of electrochemical reactions between briny liquids and volcanic minerals, according to new analyses of three Martian meteorites from a team led by Carnegie’s Andrew Steele published in Science Advances.

The group’s analysis of a trio of Martian meteorites that fell to Earth – Tissint, Nakhla, and NWA 1950 – showed that they contain an inventory of organic carbon that is remarkably consistent with the organic carbon compounds detected by the Mars Science Labora...

Aggregated alpha-synuclein in the neurons of the appendix.
Credit: Courtesy of Viviane Labrie | Van Andel Research Institute

Appendix acts as a reservoir for disease-associated proteins; appendectomy lowers the risk of developing Parkinson’s. Removing the appendix early in life reduces the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease by 19 to 25%, according to the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind, published today in Science Translational Medicine.

The findings also solidify the role of the gut and immune system in the genesis of the disease, and reveal that the appendix acts as a major reservoir for abnormally folded alpha-synuclein proteins, which are closely linked to Parkinson’s onset and progression.

“Our results point to the appendix as a site of origin for Parkinson’s and pr...

Payload of the sounding rocket and all those involved in the undertaking, among them scientists of the MAIUS-1 project, employees of the German Aerospace Center, and employees of the Esrange rocket launch site.
Credit: Copyright Thomas Schleuss, DLR

Physicists put in place groundwork for accurately testing Einstein’s equivalence principle. A team of scientists from Germany has succeeded in creating a Bose-Einstein condensate for the first time in space on board a research rocket. On January 23, 2017 at 3:30 a.m. Central European Time, the MAIUS-1 mission was launched into space from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. After a detailed analysis, the results have been published recently in the journal Nature...