The probability of recovering from brain damage can be predicted by a new computer program developed in Israel.
Israeli hospitals have started to use virtual reality therapy for stroke patients, for example by assessing a patient’s hand responses to virtual tennis balls being “thrown”.
Dr Larry Manevitz of Haifa University, neuroscientist Dr Uri Feintuch from the Hebrew University and graduate student Eugene Mednikov, combined this virtual reality therapy with their new program. The computer then “learned” to differentiate between different types of brain injuries, and could diagnose with 90-98 per cent accuracy whether a patient was healthy or had suffered a stroke or brain injury.
“Our next step is to find similarities in the behaviour of people in sub-groups of brain injuries,” said Dr Manevitz.
Israeli and American scientists have succeeded in designing artificial enzymes that can “evolve”.
Doctors Orly Dym and Shira Albeck of the Weizmann Institute’s structural biology department and Professor David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle, succeeded in creating an enzyme (biological catalyst ) that could remove a proton from carbon.
Then Professor Dan Tawfik and research student Olga Khersonsky of the Institute’s biological chemistry department drastically improved the synthetic enzyme’s efficiency. They mimicked natural evolution by repeating rounds of random mutations, scanning the mutant enzymes to see which were most improved in efficiency.
The findings were published in the journal Nature.
Premature menopause caused by chemotherapy could be halted by a new treatment found by Israeli scientists.
A team led by Professor Ze’ev Blumenfeld from the Rambam Medical Centre and the Technion Faculty of Medicine in Haifa has found that a monthly injection of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), before and during chemotherapy, could reduce the risk of premature menopause from 50 per cent to less than eight.
Fertility and Sterility Journal reported that 3.1 per cent of women in a group receiving chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma developed premature ovarian failure when taking the GnRH. The figure was 37 per cent in the control group.
One more thing to keep you awake at night. At any moment, we could all get swallowed up by an alternative “bubble” universe. Eduardo Guendelman at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva and Nobuyuki Sakai of Yamagata University in Japan discovered the possibility as they investigated how patches of space-time expand, as reported in the New Scientist.
Our universe is believed to have undergone rapid expansion, known as inflation, just before the big bang. In theory, inflation could still be happening to pockets of space-time, blowing them up to create new universes distinct from ours. We might even be the ones eating up others. Sweet dreams.