Brain Discovery holds key to Boosting Body’s Ability to Fight Alzheimer’s, MS

John Lukens, PhD, is investigating how brain injury disrupts drainage of deleterious waste from the brain and how that may contribute to Alzheimer's disease.
John Lukens, PhD, is leading important research that could transform how we approach Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.

UVA Health researchers have discovered a molecule in the brain responsible for orchestrating the immune system’s responses to Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis (MS), potentially allowing doctors to supercharge the body’s ability to fight those and other devastating neurological diseases.

The molecule the researchers identified, called a kinase, is crucial to both removing plaque buildup associated with Alzheimer’s and preventing the debris buildup that causes MS, the researchers found. It does this, the researchers showed, by directing the activity of brain cleaners called microglia...

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Red alert: Massive Stars Sound Warning they are about to go Supernova

This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. Credit: European Southern Observatory/L. Calçada Licence type Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

Astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an ‘early warning’ system to sound the alert when a massive star is about ...

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Flatworm-Inspired Medical Adhesives Stop Blood Loss

Design of LIMB. a Schematic illustration of marine organisms that contain interconnected micropores for adhesiveness and transport of liquid reagents. b Schematic of LIMB adhering on blood-exposed substrates. c Schematics showing that LIMB can uptake interfacial fluid, secrete functional liquids, and coagulate blood, thereby providing adhesion, hemostatic, and sealing function. d Confocal image of rhodamine-labeled LIMB (red) containing micropores, partially filled with a FITC-labeled chitosan functional liquid (green). e Sizes of surface and internal pores in LIMB containing 2 M or 5 M PAAm. f–h Stress-stretch curves (f), fracture energy (g), and fractocohesive lengths (h) of LIMBs with varying PAAm content. Values in egh represent the mean ± s.d. (n = 40 for 2M-LIMB Surfa...
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New Measurements Quantifying Qudits provide Glimpse of Quantum Future

The micro-ring resonator, shown here as a closed loop, generated high-dimensional photon pairs. Researchers examined these photons by manipulating the phases of different frequencies, or colors, of light and mixing frequencies, as shown by the crisscrossed multicolor lines. Credit: Yun-Yi Pai/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
The micro-ring resonator, shown here as a closed loop, generated high-dimensional photon pairs. Researchers examined these photons by manipulating the phases of different frequencies, or colors, of light and mixing frequencies, as shown by the crisscrossed multicolor lines. Credit: Yun-Yi Pai/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Using existing experimental and computational resources, a multi-institutional team has developed an effective method for measuring high-dimensional qudits encoded in quantum frequency combs, which are a type of photon source, on a single optical chip.

Although the word “qudit” might look like a typo, this lesser-known cousin of the qubit, or quantum bit, can carry more information and is more resistant to noise — both of which are key qualities needed to improve the ...

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