Light Therapy Could Stop Seizures in the Brain

WASHINGTON — Epilepsy affects about 2 million people in the United States, and current treatments for the chronic neurological disorder are ineffective for more than a third of cases. But a new technique that uses light to activate brain cells could stop seizures in their tracks, new research suggests.

A team of scientists injected light-sensitive proteins into the neurons of epileptic mice, then shone light on those cells to stop the animals from having seizures.

The new study, presented here Monday (Nov. 17) at the 44th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, hints at a more specific way of targeting these brain storms.

Shedding light on seizures

Known as optogenetics, this method of stimulating the brain using light was developed relatively recently, but it is already being widely used to tinker with brain activity for a variety of applications in mice and other laboratory animals. The technique involves injecting neurons with a virus that contains a gene for a light-sensitive protein found in jellyfish, which makes the neurons fire in response to light.

The main advantage of using optogenetics is its specificity, said Esther Krook-Magnuson, the neuroscientist who led the research while working at the University of California, Irvine. The technique allows scientists to stimulate or suppress neural activity in specific cells and in specific brain areas.

Previous studies have successfully used optogenetic stimulation to stop seizures in animals bred to have different types of seizures. Krook-Magnuson and her colleagues aimed to explore which targeted brain regions may be most effective at stopping seizures in mice.

In this study, the researchers shone light on optogenetically modified neurons while the mice were having seizures. Specifically, the scientists activated cells in the cerebellum, an area at the lower rear of the brain that is involved in controlling body movement. The researchers discovered that the animals' seizures stopped in response to the light therapy.

If activating these cerebellum neurons stopped seizures, the researchers wondered, could suppressing these brain cells actually make seizures worse?

Starting a brain storm

To find out, the scientists shone light on cells that inhibited activity in the cerebellum of seizing mice. Surprisingly, the treatment did not make the seizures worse, but instead stopped them.

The findings suggest that it doesn't matter whether you excite or suppress the activity of these cerebellum neurons to stop a seizure, as long as you disrupt the existing brain activity, Krook-Magnuson said.

The light stimulation has no effect on the average amount of time between seizures, so "it's not just pausing them," Krook-Magnuson said.

Also, stopping a seizure generally didn't have a long-lasting effect on suppressing future seizures, except when the researchers stimulated a region of the brain called the midline cerebellum.

The researchers also did another experiment in which they used light to stimulate part of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped brain area known to be involved in memory and spatial navigation and where epileptic seizures often take place.

Cells known as granule cells, found in a structure called the dentate gyrus, are believed to prevent seizure activity in the hippocampus, but scientists don't have a lot of evidence that this happens in live animals.

Krook-Magnuson and her team used light to block the activity of these granule cells in mice that were having seizures, and the seizures stopped. Next, the researchers used light to activate the same cells, and this time, they found it made the seizures much worse. The scientists were even able to induce seizures in healthy (nonepileptic) mice.

The findings of this experiment suggest that granule cells in the hippocampus may be another good target for controlling seizures using optogenetic methods, Krook-Magnuson said.

3D-Printed Hearts Help Surgeons Save Babies' Lives

Replicas of the human heart that are made on 3D printers could help save babies' lives, new research suggests.

The heart replicas are designed to match every tiny detail of a baby's heart, so they can help surgeons plan where to cut tissue, reroute piping and patch holes in children with congenital heart defects, researchers said. The new findings were presented today (Nov. 19) at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.

Though just a handful of such hearts have been used so far, the replicas have already revealed hidden Swiss cheese-like holes in one child's heart, and in another case, inspired a repair strategy that dramatically extended the baby's projected life span.

"From the first two cases straight out of the gate, we've had this dramatic impact," said study co-author Dr. Matthew Bramlet, a pediatric cardiologist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and the Children's Hospital of Illinois, both in Peoria.

The early results suggest 3D printing hearts could dramatically improve surgeons' understanding of defects before they go into the operating room, the researchers said.

Tiny hearts

Children who have certain congenital heart defects — such as holes in one of the four chambers of the heart or misrouted arteries and vessels — often face years of complex, risky surgeries. When these fragile babies are born, doctors typically do a very quick surgery that improves blood flow just enough for them to grow. Once the little ones have doubled in size (usually when they are 6 to 9 months old), surgeons often perform more complicated repair surgery, Bramlet said.

But even the hearts of bigger babies are tiny, and the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that are currently done to guide surgical decisions are difficult to interpret. Although researchers have 3D-printed an artificial heart sleeve, an artificial wind pipe and replicas of kidneys and livers to guide surgeries, 3D replicas of the heart were slower to come along, Bramlet said.

Holding the heart

So Bramlet and his colleagues began using detailed MRIs to design anatomically accurate replicas of the heart that were then printed at the Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center, also in Peoria.

Almost immediately, the printed hearts helped guide surgical decisions. In the very first case, doctors  believed that a baby had a single hole in the wall of one of the heart's ventricles, based on the MRI images. This kind of defect, called a ventricular septal defect, is usually patched up with a fairly straightforward technique. But the 3D-printed heart clearly revealed several Swiss-cheese-like holes in the heart that also had to be closed.

The realization helped the surgeon rethink his strategy, which reduced how long the heart had to be stopped during the surgery, Bramlet said.

In the second case, a baby had problems with the major arteries emerging from the heart's right ventricle, as well as several holes in the heart. Normally, with the procedure used to fix these defects, doctors destroy so much heart tissue and reroute blood flow so dramatically that they essentially reduce the heart to two functional chambers. But in this case, by looking at the anatomy in 3D, the team was able to find a better work-around and spare all four of the heart's chambers, which increased the baby's life expectancy from 20 to 30 years  to near-normal, Bramlet said.

"Holding [the heart] in her hand, the surgeon could much, much more easily determine how to appropriately perform that surgery," Bramlet told Live Science.

Since the first repair, the team has gone on to create eight or nine heart replicas, and all of them have improved the surgeon's understanding of the heart anatomy prior to the surgery, he said.

But the total number of hearts they've studied so far is small, so it's too soon to know whether the heart replicas improve surgical outcomes, Bramlet said. Because these complicated heart defects are rare, researchers would need to set up a clinical trial at multiple sites to get enough cases, Bramlet said.

Coming Soon: An Atomic Clock That Can Fit in Your Pocket

Knowing what time it is down to the very last sliver of a second is easy — but only if you happen to have an atomic clock in your pocket. Unfortunately, most such devices wouldn't fit. In fact, there probably wouldn't even be room in the average studio apartment. But all that may be about to change.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing what they say is a highly accurate atomic clock the size of a Rubik's cube, measuring about 2 inches (5 centimeters) in each dimension. The clock could one day be used to keep time in places where conventional clocks, like the ones on a cell phone, don't work — like underwater or in war zones, where signal jamming limits connectivity to satellite networks — the researchers said.

Like other atomic clocks, the MIT prototype keeps time by measuring the natural vibration, or oscillation, of cesium atoms in a vacuum. All atoms oscillate at a particular frequency when they move between two energy levels, but since the 1960s, cesium's frequency has been used to define the length of one second. Essentially, one second equals 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom.

To keep track of cesium's oscillations, scientists typically use what's known as a fountain clock: a huge tabletop covered in wires and high-tech equipment that looks nothing at all like the clock on your kitchen wall. Resembling a fountain spewing water at the sky, the clock tosses small clouds of cesium atoms several feet (more than 1 meter) into the air and then keeps track of how many times they oscillate, or move up and down, through a microwave beam.

It takes a big clock to keep track of more than 9 billion oscillations. So, to shrink one of these oversized instruments, the researchers decided to measure fewer oscillations at a time — 10-milliseconds' worth, to be exact. By multiplying the number of oscillations that occur in 10 milliseconds by 100, the researchers can estimate how many oscillations would occur in a full second. They also changed the beam that the atoms are moving through from a microwave beam to a laser beam, which is easier to control in a small space.

With these modifications, the MIT team was able to make its fountain clock much more compact than, say, the NIST-F2 — the cesium fountain atomic clock that serves as America's master clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. However, MIT's miniaturized atomic clock isn't nearly as accurate as the NIST-F2, which can keep time without losing or gaining a single second for 300 million years.

"That's fine, because we're not trying to make the world's standard — we're trying to make something that would fit in, say, a Rubik's cube, and be stable over a day or a week," Krish Kotru, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and co-author of a new paper outlining the clock project, said in a statement.

If the researchers can shrink their clock down to a portable size, it can be used in places where cell phones, which also run on atomic time, won't work. Submarine crews or deep-sea divers may even be able to use these highly accurate clocks underwater. Furthermore, soldiers on the battlefield could use the devices even if satellite signals are jammed, the researchers said.

There are other miniaturized versions of these clocks, known as chip-size atomic clocks (CSACs), already on the market. CSACs, which are about the size of a matchbox, solve the portability problem, but they sacrifice a lot of the preciseness of conventional atomic clocks, according to the researchers.

"We have a path toward making a compact, robust clock that's better than CSACs by a couple of orders of magnitude, and more stable over longer periods of time," Kotru said. "Additional miniaturization could ultimately result in a handheld device with stability [that is] orders of magnitude better than compact atomic clocks available today."

To test the alleged robustness of their new clock, the team simulated carrying the device over rugged terrain by moving the clock's laser beam from side to side as it probed the cloud of cesium atoms. But even with its laser beam shaking around, the clock still kept time accurately, according to the researchers.  

“Let’s say one day we got it small enough so you could put it in your backpack, or in your vehicle,” said Kotru. “Having it be able to operate while you’re moving across the ground is important.”

Such a device, he added, could take on more high-tech applications, such as synchronizing telecommunications networks.

Solar-Paneled Path Paves Way to Green Homes

To capture more energy from the sun, one company is putting solar panels where they've never gone before: in the street.

This week, the Dutch company SolaRoad officially opened the world's first solar roadway in a suburb outside of Amsterdam. The 230-foot (70 meters) stretch of energy-absorbing concrete and glass will be used as a bicycle path for commuters, according to the company.

The concrete that makes up the bike path is embedded with crystalline silicon, the same material found in conventional solar cells. Two layers of safety glass surround the cells, allowing sunlight to shine on the silicon while keeping the material from getting trampled. Electricity created by the solar cells — reportedly enough to power two to three homes for a full year — will be filtered into the local power grid, according to SolaRoad.

But the bike path wasn't installed just to provide a few local residents with electricity. It's part of a wider effort by SolaRoad, as well as local government agencies in the Netherlands, to find new ways to incorporate green energy into the country's existing infrastructure.

For the next three years, SolaRoad's bike path will serve as a test bed, an opportunity for the company to improve its product before moving into the next stage of development. SolaRoad will collect data from the road itself, as well as feedback from those who cycle over it, to determine if solar-paneled concrete could one day cover municipal roads or highways, according to SolaRoad.

In the future, such roads may power more than just a few homes. Such "green" roadways could create electricity to power the streetlights that run alongside the road, as well as traffic signals and even electric cars,company officials said in a statement.

But there are a few problems with the idea of roads embedded with solar panels. For one, the recently installed bike path is prone to being covered with dirt and debris. This type of "pollution" affects the amount of light that shines through to the solar panels. But just how much this dirt and grime will affect energy production is one of many questions the company is hoping to answer during the test phase.

Other countries are also embracing the idea of incorporating solar power into existing infrastructure. While no other solar roadways have popped up yet, the city of London installed 4,400 solar panels along the roof of an existing bridge over the River Thames in January 2014. And in the United States, a company called Solar Roadways collected more than $2 million from a recent crowdfunding campaign supporting a project to develop solar panel-covered paving stones. These are similar to the materials used by SolaRoad in the Netherlands.

Seeing-Eye Vest? Vibrating Clothing Helps Blind Navigate

NEW YORK — Imagine if instead of swinging a white cane, a visually impaired person could wear clothing that senses things in the environment and relays that information through touch.

That's the dream of a team of scientists and engineers at a company called Tactile Navigation Tools, which is developing a vest embedded with sensors that can detect objects or people nearby and convert the signals into vibrations felt by the body

The device, known as Eyeronman, was on display last weekend (Nov. 6-8) at the New York Festival of Light, an event that featured lighting art installations in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood

"I want to build a tool that can actually get [visually impaired] people to walk around crowded environments" without assistance, said Dr. J.R. Rizzo, a rehabilitation doctor at NYU Langone Medical Center and the founder and chief medical adviser of Tactile Navigation Tools.

Eyeronman demo

At the event, I got to try on a prototype of the vibrating vest, which was sprouting wires and electronics and looked a bit like something out of a mad science lab. They also had a T-shirt equipped with sensors that would light up LEDs on the front of the vest (as a stand-in for the vibrating devices) when a person or object moved in front of them. Ultimately, the sensors and the vibrating devices will be combined in a single piece of clothing, the team said.

I also got to try on a pair of vibrating glasses, called iGlasses, made by the Canadian company AmbuTech. The eyewear contains an ultrasound sensor that causes the frames to vibrate when objects are detected in the wearer's path.

The Eyeronman vest is built on the same concept as the iGlasses, but will provide much more detailed information because it has many more sensors and vibrators, Rizzo told Live Science.

Rizzo himself is legally blind due to a condition known as choroideremia, a rare retinal degenerative disease that causes progressive vision loss. The device could be used not only by the blind, but also by law enforcement, rescue workers and others who work in visually obscured environments.

3D sensing

The vest will have different types of sensors, including lidar, a laser-based system used in driverless cars; ultrasound, a type of high-pitched sound used by bats and other animals for echolocation; and infrared, a type of electromagnetic radiation used by some animals to detect body heat from their prey.

When the sensors detect an object, their signals will be converted into vibrations in a corresponding part of the vest. For example, when the vest senses a dog in the wearer's lower left field of view, vibrators on the lower left part of the vest (as viewed by the wearer) will activate. The device will represent a third dimension (depth) using the frequency of vibration. In the same example, if the dog were running toward the person in the vest, the garment would buzz faster and faster.

The device is designed to be intuitive, but the brain still needs to be trained to interpret the vibrations, Rizzo said. However, he said he suspects that "as someone gets used to the vibrations and what they mean, it's going to become hardwired [in the brain], until the person doesn't have to consciously think about it."

Tactile Navigation Tools is developing two different versions of the vest. One version could be worn over a thin shirt in summer; the other splits into two parts, with the sensors worn on the outside of a jacket, and the vibrators worn on the inside.

The company aims to have a commercially available product by the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016, Rizzo said.

Germ-Zapping Robot Could Fight Ebola and Other Deadly Viruses

A new germ-zapping robot could help stop the spread of deadly viruses, like Ebola, in hospitals and other health care facilities in the United States.

Standing a little more than 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, the robot  — nicknamed "Saul" — uses pulses of high-intensity, high-energy ultraviolet rays to split open bacterial cell walls and kill dangerous pathogens, said Geri Genant, a health care services implementation manager with Xenex, the company that developed the robot.

A surgical team at the U.S. Air Force Hospital Langley in Hampton, Virginia, was recently trained to use the virus-destroying robot, which can kill a single strand of ribonucleic acid (RNA) — similar to that of the Ebola virus— in less than 5 minutes, Genant said.

"Hospitals that have used this have been able to bring infection rates down, in many cases [by] 60 percent," Genant said in a statement. The hospitals Genant was referring to were presumably not those affected by the Ebola epidemic.

The robot's latest pit stop, Langley Air Force Base, is home to the U.S. military's 633rd Medical Group, a group of service members who recently returned from an assignment in West Africa. There, they were charged with setting up a medical support facility in one of the West African countries hardest hit by the Ebola outbreak, according to the Air Force. The team also trained international health care workers on how to use the facility's equipment.

Although the 633rd Medical Group allegedly had no exposure to the Ebola virus or to Ebola victims during its time in Africa, the U.S. military is still taking every precaution to prevent Ebola from spreading in the U.S., should one or more of the military's recently returned service members fall ill with the virus. Everyone involved with the mission is being monitored twice daily for three weeks after their return to the U.S., and so far, no symptoms of the virus have been reported.

The new virus-killing robot at Langley Air Force Base is an added precaution that provides patients, as well as medical staff, with an additional measure of safety, said Marlene Kerchenski, the 633rd MDG surgeon general chief of nursing services.

Staff members wearing proper protection equipment traditionally clean hospital rooms at Langley using chemicals that are known to kill harmful viruses, bacteria and fungi. However, these pathogens can still linger in some areas, according to Air Force officials. The Ebola virus, for example, can survive on dry surfaces — like doorknobs and countertops — for several hours if those areas are not properly disinfected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Saul the robot's ultraviolet rays, which are 25,000 times brighter than florescent lights, can kill the pathogens that human hands miss, according to officials at Xenex.

"Xenex has tested its full spectrum disinfection system on 22 microorganisms, studying nearly 2,000 samples in several independent labs all over the world," Genant said. The bot can destroy viruses similar to Ebola with an efficiency rate of 99.9 percent, she added.

Hospital staff at Langley will continue to receive training on the proper use of the disinfecting robot, which will soon be used to help eradicate and control viruses throughout the hospital.

Brain-to-Brain Link Makes 'Mind Control' Possible

Humans could be much more efficient communicators if they could bypass language altogether and directly transmit thoughts, ideas and instructions from one brain to another. Scientists have demonstrated that instant brain-to-brain communication could become a reality with the help of computers.

In recent experiments, researchers from the University of Washington showed that they could send one person's thoughts through a computer to control the hand motion of a person sitting half a mile (0.8 kilometers) away.

The team first demonstrated this brain-to-brain connection was possible back in August 2013. But now the researchers have put the technology through more rigorous testing and are close to making it usable in real-world scenarios, they said.

To make the mind-meld possible, one person is hooked up to an electroencephalography cap, which is covered in sensors that pick up brain signals and send them to a computer. The computer decodes the signals and sends them as electric pulses to the second person, who is wearing a cloth swim cap with a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil on top. The coil is placed near the area of the brain that controls hand motion. The first person thinks about moving his or her hand, and that brain signal is transferred to the second person, triggering a twitchy hand movement.

The researchers tested the technology using three pairs of volunteers. Each sender and receiver sat in a separate building on the University of Washington campus, about half a mile apart. The sender sat in front of a simple computer game wearing the electroencephalography cap. The game featured a city under siege by a pirate ship, and the senders were instructed to defend the city by firing a canon. However, they were not allowed to touch any of the game's controls and could only defend the city by thinking about firing the canon.

In a separate building, the receiver sat in a room with his or her right hand poised over the touchpad that controlled the canon. If the brain-to-brain technology was successful, then the receiver's hand would twitch and tap the touchpad.

Not every sender and receiver pair was equally successful. The researchers found that the accuracy varied from 25 percent to 83 percent.

Total mind control, in which a sender controls the receiver like a marionette puppet, will not be possible anytime soon, the researchers said. But the team does plan to start working on a more sophisticated interface that can decode and send more complex brain signals. They hope to eventually transmit concepts and thoughts, which could someday facilitate instant transfer of knowledge from teacher to student.

"Imagine someone who's a brilliant scientist but not a brilliant teacher. Complex knowledge is hard to explain — we're limited by language," Chantel Prat, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and co-author of the new study, said in a statement.

Prat and her colleagues also hope to adapt the technology to help people stay awake and alert. For example, the brain waves of a sleepy pilot could stimulate his or her copilot to become more alert.