Early intervention with rituximab, a drug used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), can reduce the risk of deterioration in myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that causes loss of muscle control. This is according to a randomized clinical study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and published in the journal JAMA Neurology.

“Patients with new onset myasthenia who received rituximab as a complement to standard of care showed greater improvement compared with patients who were given a placebo,” says Fredrik Piehl, professor at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, and the study’s principal investigator...

The search for extraterrestrial life has just become more interesting as a team of scientists, including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Christopher Glein, has discovered new evidence for a key building block for life in the subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. New modeling indicates that Enceladus’s ocean should be relatively rich in dissolved phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life.

“Enceladus is one of the prime targets in humanity’s search for life in our solar system,” said Glein, a leading expert in extraterrestrial oceanography...

Researchers from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a machine learning algorithm that can create a continuous 3D model of cells from a partial set of 2D images that were taken using the same standard microscopy tools found in many labs today.

Their findings were published Sept. 16 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

“We train the model on the set of digital images to obtain a continuous representation,” said Ulugbek Kamilov, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering and of computer science and engineering. “Now, I can show it any way I want. I can zoom in smoothly and there is no pixelation.”

The key to this work was the use of a neural field network, a particular kind of machine learning system that...