Neat News - Neat things do happen

A brain implant allows to translate thoughts into speech allowing people who have lost their voice to speak.

A woman awoke after 27 years in a persistent vegetative state. She suffered a brain injury in a traffic accident in 1991 while protecting her four year old son. As has been made public now, she regained consciousness last year.

In Africa die more than 250,000 children of malaria every year. Now a big trial of vaccination against malaria has started in Malawi. In early trials the vaccination proved 40 percent effective. That is, the trial has the potential of a 40 percent reduction of cases and in consequence of deaths.

Scientists managed to use oscillations in temperature to use a passive Peltier element to cool a piece of copper from over 100C to below room temperature without the usage of energy. The transition looks like magic since it seems to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. It has potentially significant applications.

Solar energy can be used in many ways beyond producing electricity. For instance, it can directly be used to produce steam at an industrial scale and reduce the carbon footprint of heat intensive industries such as desalination or cement production.

Regular infusions of an anti-body called UB-421 can suppress HIV for up to four months and give patients a pause in their antiretroviral therapy.

Eight young children with a very weak immune system have successfully been treated with gene therapy and have now a functioning immune system. This allows them to have a normal life.

Lasers are everywhere and play an important role in modern life. They are based on light waves. Now an analogous invention has been made for sound waves. The new approach allows it to be applied for levitation of a range of objects, from a single electron to small organisms.

Radiotherapy may trigger an immune response that targets cells all over the body, but it may also not. There is better understanding why this happens, related to T-regulatory cells. In the long run this may lead to a better understanding how to help the immune system to attack cancer cells.

Using material from a human, a scaled-down version of a human heart has been printed using a 3D-printer. This is an important step on the long way to such a heart beating in the chest of a human. Such a printed heart would not cause an immune reaction since it would be built from the patient's own genetic material.

Right whales off the US coast have a small baby boom. This is very good news since there are only around 450 of the species left.

The president of the Seychelles has pledged to protect 30 percent of the ocean space of the Seychelles by next year.

Smiling makes people feel happier, even if only to a small degree. This has been found in a new psychological meta-study evaluating data from 138 studies involving 11000 people.

Hydrogen promises solutions to many energy problems, from heating to traffic, since its only emission is water. A major problem is that it is explosive when mixed with air. For this reason it is important to have good sensors. Such a sensor has been developed now.

By combining many observatories a picture of a black hole has been made for the first time. The black hole has a mass of 7 billion times our sun's.

According to new research nearby exo-planets could have conditions that allow them to develop life. This could be the case, for instance, for Proxima-b, on a cosmical scale a close neighbour with only 4.24 light years away.

Charged particles can kill airborne viruses to a large degree. There is work to use this for cleansing the air around infected patients by combining it with filtration and ultraviolet light.

By targeted electric stimulation of the brain it is possible to give people in their sixties and seventies a memory that is comparable to that of twenty year olds. In the experiments, the effect lasted for 50 minutes after the stimulation ended.

There is new evidence that Alzheimer's disease is linked to gum bacteria that can move from the gum to the brain. This gives potentially a handle to prevent the disease.

A new study with 17000 teenagers casts doubt on the idea that spending a lot of time in front of a screen - internet, computer games and the like - damages the mental health of young people.

In a Borneo rain forest the tallest known tropical tree with a height of more than 100 metres has been discovered.

The programme introduced in Scotland 10 years ago to vaccinate girls at the age of 12 or 13 against the human papiloma virus has led to a 90 percent fall in the cases of cervical pre-cancer in young women.

By studying the activation levels of different regions of the brain it has been found that a metaphor leads to the activation of the region related to the concrete meaning of an expression.

Using information about the structure of the moon, a model has been built on the temperature in the inner of the moon. It is supposed to be between 1300 and 1470 degrees Celsius, much warmer than the surface temperature of -10 degrees Celsius.

Archaeologists have discovered ancient farms of the Mayas in Mexican wetlands. The find shows that the Mayas were cultivating cotton which they were trading.