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Transcatheter mitral valve repair in heart failure patients significantly reduces hospitalizations and improves survival

Transcatheter mitral valve repair for heart failure patients with mitral regurgitation can reduce the long-term rate of hospitalizations by almost 50 percent, and death by nearly 30 percent, compared with heart failure patients who don’t undergo the minimally invasive procedure.

These are the breakthrough findings from a new study led by a researcher from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. This multi-center trial is the largest trial to examine the safety and effectiveness of transcatheter in a failure population using Abbott’s MitraClip system. It shows this significantly improves outcomes for patients with heart failure that do not respond to .

The five-year results from the “Cardiovascular Outcomes Assessment of the MitraClip Percutaneous Device” study, or COAPT, were announced Sunday, March 5, in a Late Breaking Clinical Trial presentation at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions Together with World Congress of Cardiology (ACC.23/WCC) in New Orleans, and published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

In a breakthrough experiment, fusion gave off more energy than it used

A new test finally ignited a nuclear fusion reaction that unleashed more energy than it took in. This raises hopes that someday the reaction that powers the sun could also cleanly power activities here on Earth.

The experiment took place at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif. The U.S. Department of Energy announced its achievement on December 13.

“This is a monumental breakthrough,” says Gilbert Collins. This physicist works at the University of Rochester in New York and did not take part in the new research. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away,” Collins says. “With this achievement, the landscape has changed.”

Bowel cancer breakthrough as scientists find chemotherapy response could be predicted by existing NHS test

Researchers hope KRAS test can serve renewed function as soon as possible Scientists have found an existing gene test frequently used on the NHS can also shed light on whether a bowel cancer patient will respond positively or negatively to chemotherapy. Researchers from The Institute of Cancer Research, Imperial College London and the Netherlands Cancer Institute have found the KRAS test can have use beyond its current function of predicting how patients will react to cancer drug cetuximab.

Putting Carbon Dioxide to Good — Scientists Use Electrochemistry To Convert Carbon to Useful Molecules

A joint effort in chemistry has resulted in an innovative method for utilizing carbon dioxide in a positive – even beneficial – manner: through electrosynthesis, it is integrated into a series of organic molecules that play a crucial role in the development of pharmaceuticals.

During the process, the team made an innovative discovery. By altering the type of electrochemical reactor used, they were able to generate two distinct products, both of which are useful in medicinal chemistry.

The team’s paper was recently published in the journal Nature. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral researchers Peng Yu and Wen Zhang, and Guo-Quan Sun of Sichuan University in China.

Unlocking the Mystery of Unconventional Superconductivity: A Breakthrough Experiment

A team of scientists, including physicist Eugene Demler from ETH Zurich, for the first time, closely observed how magnetic correlations play a role in mediating hole pairing.

Superconductivity only occurs in pairs. Therefore, in order for conductance without electrical resistance to take place in specific materials, the charge carriers must pair up. In traditional superconductors, the current is made up of electrons and pairing is facilitated by the collective movements of the crystal lattice, referred to as phonons. This mechanism is well understood. However, in recent decades, a growing number of materials have been found that don’t fit within this conventional theoretical framework.

The leading theories for unconventional superconductors suggest that magnetic fluctuations, not phonons, lead to pairing in these systems, — and surprisingly, magnetic interactions arise from the repulsive Coulomb interaction between electrons. However, verifying these models in experiments is extremely difficult.

Robots now have the sense of touch after electronic skin is created

A team of scientists has developed electronic skin that could pave the way for soft, flexible robotic devices to assist with surgical procedures or aid people’s mobility.

The creation of stretchable e-skin by Edinburgh researchers gives soft robots for the first time a level of physical self-awareness similar to that of people and animals.

The technology could aid breakthroughs in soft robotics by enabling devices to detect precisely their movement in the most sensitive of surroundings, experts say.

Opinion: The King, Student-Loan Forgiveness, and the Supreme Court

A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing. The technology that printed the Gutenberg Bible in 1,455 made abstract human thought communicable generally and rapidly. But new technology today reverses that process. Whereas the printing press caused a profusion of modern human thought, the new technology achieves its distillation and elaboration. In the process, it creates a gap between human knowledge and human understanding. If we are to navigate this transformation successfully, new concepts of human thought and interaction with machines will need to be developed. This is the essential challenge of the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

The new technology is known as generative artificial intelligence; GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. ChatGPT, developed at the OpenAI research laboratory, is now able to converse with humans. As its capacities become broader, they will redefine human knowledge, accelerate changes in the fabric of our reality, and reorganize politics and society.

Nvidia predicts AI models one million times more powerful than ChatGPT within 10 years

A million here, times a million there. Pretty soon you’re talking about big numbers. So Nvidia claims for its AI accelerating hardware in terms of the performance boost it has delivered over the last decade and will deliver again over the next 10 years.

The result, if Nvidia is correct, will be a new industry of AI factories across the world and gigantic breakthroughs in AI processing power. It also means, ostensibly, AI models one million times more powerful than existing examples, including ChatGPT, in AI processing terms at least.