Brain Implant Helps Man Feel Through Robotic Fingers

A paralyzed man is regaining a sense of touch while using a mind controlled robotic hand, feeling subtle pressure in his own fingers when the artificial ones are touched. The experiment reported on 13 October is an early step in the quest to create prosthetics that can feel. How it works: Tiny chips implanted in patient’s brain are bypassing his broken spinal cord, relaying electrical signals that govern movement and sensation to and from the robotic arm. When University of Pittsburgh researchers blindfolded patient, he could correctly identify which robotic finger they touched 84% of the time. Harnessing brain waves to power prosthetics is a hot field, with a goal of giving the disabled more independence and improving artificial limbs for amputees as well. Headlines in recent years have reported experiments that let paralyzed people move a robotic arm to touch a loved one or take a drink simply by imaging the motion. Their thoughts activate brain implants that relay electrical signals needed to command movement. The signals are transmitted through a computer to the robotic limb.

New Therapy 'Cures' Monkey Of HIV

A new drug could be a breakthrough in the project to cure HIV, according to researchers. The combination of drugs helped stave off a monkey version of HIV for nearly two years after the animals stopped receiving treatments. Now they hope that the same solution could work for humans. Four weeks after the rhesus macaques were given the therapy, almost no simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) could be found in their blood or gastro-intestinal tissues. And two years later they appeared to be entirely healthy. The treatment takes standard HIV drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy or ART, and combines them with an experimental antibody that grows for the same target as an existing drug used to treat inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Tweaked slightly, it was used on SIV. A pilot trial of the effect of that drug, named vedolizumab, on HIV infected patients has already begun in the US. Scientist’s hope that will show that the therapy works in the same way it did on the monkeys in the study. Researchers have good reasons to believe that the therapy will work similarly in humans.

Zika Virus Unlikely To Infect Same Person Twice

People infected with Zika may not be susceptible to the virus again, according to new research which found that the infection provides excellent protection against re-infection. This means people infected during this current epidemic will likely not be susceptible again. When a large proportion of the population is protected known as herd immunity – the risk of future epidemics may be low. The research shows that infection provides excellent protection against re-infection. The findings also show that Zika virus is present in the blood very early during infection add remains in some tissues for a long time but is only briefly present in other tissues. The researchers produced Zika virus at the Bio-security Research Institute and provided it to collaborators to support studies performed at several other laboratories. The collaboration helped them to better understand the dynamics of Zika viral infection, replication and shedding. Zika RNA was detected in blood plasma as early as one day after the infection. It also was detected in saliva, urine, cerebrospinal fluid and semen, and in vaginal secretions.

Distant Ringed Object That Could Be 'Saturn On Steroids'

About 400 light years from our solar system, there is a celestial body that looks like Saturn on steroids. Its rings are about 200 times larger than its counterpart here, measuring about 75 million miles in diameter. The ring system is so large, in fact, that scientists aren’t sure why it doesn’t get ripped apart by the gravity of the star it orbits. One reason the rings might stay intact has to do with the direction in which they spin around the object at their centre, called J1407b. Scientists are not sure whether J1407b is a gigantic planet that measures many times larger than Saturn, or a failed star called a brown dwarf. There is a point in J1407b’s lopsided orbit when it comes close to its sun like star, which should disrupt the rings. But the rings remain unscathed for the most part because they spin around J1407b in the opposite direction that the object orbits around its star. Researchers run a lot of simulations of possible orbits for the planet to see if they could survive or not. If the planet moves clockwise and the rings moving counterclockwise, that is much more stable than if they move in the same direction, clockwise. The team realized that if the object and its rings spin out of syncs with each other the ice and debris that make up the ring system are never too close to the sun for too long, which makes them more stable. That means they can stay together in a ring formation in the face of the star’s intense gravity. Researchers prevailing theory for the retrograde spinning is that either the ring system or the celestial body was involved in some sort of catastrophic collision that altered how it spins, rather than forming naturally.