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Strobe tweet sparks seizure for Trump critic

Seizure graphic
A flashing graphic can cause people with epilepsy to suffer seizures.

Yes, flashing online images can set off an epileptic seizure – and Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, a frequent critic of President-elect Donald Trump, says he’s planning legal action after just such an attack.

This isn’t the first time Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, has been hit with a griefing GIF. He reported facing a similar threat back in October when someone tagged him in a tweet showing a flashing online image of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been appropriated by extremists.

Strobe lights and rapidly flashing graphics can be epileptogenic – that is, capable of inducing seizures or other health effects for those with photosensitive epilepsy. One infamous case involved a Pokémon TV cartoon that sent hundreds of Japanese children to hospitals in 1997. (Mass hysteria may have played a role.)

In 2008, malicious Internet users posted hundreds of epileptogenic graphics to an online message board run by the Epilepsy Foundation, causing some patients to suffer headaches or seizures.

The causes of photosensitive epilepsy are poorly understood, but the phenomenon appears the primary visual cortex. In vulnerable people, the neural networks that handle rapid changes in imagery may be overly excitable, leading to sensory overload.

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Genes edited to create color-coded stem cells

Stem cell
A cluster of human induced pluripotent stem cells contains dyes that highlight cell membranes (purple) and DNA in the nucleus (blue). Spindles from microtubules, shown in white at the center of the image, aid in cell division. (Allen Institute for Cell Science Photo)

Researchers in Seattle have taken advantage of two of the hottest trends in biotech – cell reprogramming and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing – to create human stem cells that glow as they turn into different tissue types.

The Allen Institute for Cell Science is making the genetically modified cells available to researchers around the world, with the aim of unlocking the secrets behind cell development.

“These are the first five cell lines in a collection of about 20 that we hope to be releasing in the next year,” Susanne Rafelski, the institute’s director of assay development, told GeekWire in advance of today’s unveiling of the Allen Cell Collection.

The institute’s executive director, Rick Horwitz, explained that each of the millions of cells in our body is like a city, with resources that move around from where they’re made to where they’re used.

“With these cell lines, we aim to give the cell science community a kind of live traffic map, to see when and where the parts of the cell are with the clarity and consistency they need to make progress toward understanding human health and tackling disease,” he said in a news release.

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Brain implant gives robotic hand a sense of touch

Robotic hand
Quadriplegic patient Nathan Copeland watches a sensor-equipped robotic hand reach out. (Credit: UPMC / Pitt Health Sciences)

A dozen years ago, an auto accident left Nathan Copeland paralyzed, without any feeling in his fingers. Now that feeling is back, thanks to a robotic hand wired up to a brain implant.

“I can feel just about every finger – it’s a really weird sensation,” the 28-year-old Pennsylvanian told doctors a month after his surgery.

Today the brain-computer interface is taking a share of the spotlight at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, with President Barack Obama and other luminaries in attendance.

The ability to wire sensors into the part of the brain that registers the human sense of touch is just one of many medical marvels being developed on the high-tech frontiers of rehabilitation.

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Microsoft moonshots aim to debug cancer

Cancer moonshot
Microsoft’s “cancer moonshot” effort aims to program cells like computers. (Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft researchers are doing a bug bash on cancer, complete with software code names like “Project Hanover.”

Some of them are actually drilling down into our genetic code, looking for ways to reprogram the immune system to combat cancer cells more effectively.

“If you can do computing with biological systems, then you can transfer what we’ve learned in traditional computing into medical or biotechnology applications,” Microsoft’s Neil Dalchau says in the company’s in-depth report about its cancer moonshots.

Others are enlisting the power of cloud computing to identify which treatment would work best for a particular cancer patient, based on his or her personalized medical profile.

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Cancer center puts the art of science on display

Image: Brain tumor cell
“Sunrise” is a microscopic image of a dividing human brain tumor cell. The red lines are tubulins, which act as guides for the transport of chromosomes along the cell’s mitotic spindle. The bright spots are kinetochores, which promote attachments between the chromosomes and the spindle. Researchers at Patrick Paddison’s Fred Hutch lab have found that kinetochore regulation is altered in brain tumors. (Credit: Paddison Lab / Fred Hutch)

Cancer researchers have to deal with some of nature’s ugliest diseases, but they do find bits of beauty along the way – and that beauty is the focus of an art walk presented by Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on Aug. 25.

The event features scientific images that were captured by researchers at Fred Hutch, and will be put on display from 5:30 to 8 p.m. in the Mundie Courtyard on the research center’s South Lake Union Campus, at 1100 Fairview Ave. N.

One picture focuses in on a single dividing tumor cell from a human brain, glowing red with bright blue spots called kinetochores. Another shows a burst of brain cells in the cerebral cortex of a developing mouse, illuminated in blue, green and fuchsia.

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Are moonshots hazardous to heart health?

Image: Apollo 15
NASA astronaut James Irwin salutes the American flag during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. Irwin experienced irregular heart rhythms while on the lunar surface, and suffered at least two serious heart attacks after returning to Earth. He died in 1991. (Credit: NASA)

Is deep-space radiation hazardous to your cardiovascular system? A newly published study focusing on the Apollo astronauts suggests that it is, but the sample size is too small to firm up the connection.

The suggestion of a link comes out of a study published today in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal affiliated with Nature.

A research team led by Florida State University’s Michael Delp looked at the medical histories of seven Apollo astronauts who took part in lunar missions and have since died. They compared those histories with similar mortality statistics for astronauts who stayed in low Earth orbit, as well as astronauts who never got into orbit.

The aim was to find out whether the increased exposure to radiation that astronauts get when they travel beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field might have added health impacts.

“We know very little about the effects of deep space radiation on human health, particularly on the cardiovascular system,” Delp explained in a news release. “This gives us the first glimpse into its adverse effects on humans.”

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Juno revises, resumes cancer trial after deaths

Image: Juno lab
Inside Juno Therapeutics’ lab, employees work with a patient’s genetically engineered T-cells and prepare them for infusion. (Credit: Juno Therapeutics)

Seattle-based Juno Therapeutics says it’s resuming a clinical trial of its immunotherapy treatment, a week after the Food and Drug Administration ordered a hold due to the deaths of three patients.

The FDA lifted its hold on the Phase II clinical trial for Juno’s first product, known as JCAR015, after the company removed a chemotherapy drug known as fludarabine from the treatment protocol. The deaths resulted from cerebral edema, or brain swelling, which was thought to have been caused by a toxic reaction to a drug combination including fludarabine.

Fludarabine was added to the pre-conditioning treatment regimen only recently. A different drug, known as cytoxan or cyclophosphamide, will continue to be used.

Now that the hold has been lifted, patients can once again be enrolled in the trial.

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Hotline traffic can predict disease outbreaks

Image: Mosquito
Mosquitoes are carries of dengue fever. (Credit: CDC)

Researchers from the University of Washington and elsewhere say they can forecast the rise and fall of dengue fever outbreaks as much as three weeks in advance by analyzing the patterns of phone calls to public-health hotlines.

Dengue fever is spread by a mosquito-borne virus that infects millions of people a year. The infection causes a flu-like illness and can produce potentially lethal complications. There’s no specific cure or vaccine available, but early detection and proper medical care can reduce fatality rates below 1 percent, the World Health Organization says.

The researchers’ experiment, described today in a paper published by the journalScience Advances, focused on cases of the disease reported in Lahore, Pakistan. A telephone hotline was set up in Lahore in the wake of a 2011 dengue epidemic to help the public deal with the disease. Researchers analyzed more than 300,000 calls made to the hotline during 2012 and 2013 to see how many came from which locale, on a block-by-block basis.

They found that call volumes spiked in advance of two outbreaks, in August of 2012 and 2013, and rose at the same time as a dramatic increase in hospital cases in the fall of 2013. “The appeal of our model is its usefulness despite its sheer simplicity,” the authors wrote.

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Immunotherapy venture raises $48 million

Image: T-cells
A visualization shows T-cells communicating via the immune synapse. (Credit: Alpine BioVentures)

Seattle’s Alpine Immune Sciences says it has closed a $48 million Series A financing round, to fund the development of next-generation therapies that tweak the body’s immune system to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Immunotherapy ranks among the hottest topics in cancer research nowadays. The company’s executive chairman and acting CEO, Mitchell Gold, said in a statementthat the new infusion of investment “recognizes the tremendous potential” for the field and for Alpine Immune Sciences.

“AIS is taking a unique approach to modulating the immune system through the directed evolution of naturally occurring ligands – creating the next generation of cancer and autoimmune therapeutics with our vIgD platform,” Gold said.

The company is working on drugs that can activate the immune system to attack cancer cells, or keep the immune system from attacking healthy cells. The stand-down effect could ease such autoimmune disorders as Crohn’s disease, lupus and arthritis.

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How AI doctors can save patients’ lives

Image: Project Emerge
An AI-enabled system called Project Emerge helps health-care providers head off medical errors. (Credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine via YouTube)

Someday soon, your physician may be second-guessed by an artificial intelligence program – and you’ll probably be healthier for it, according to Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz.

Horvitz, a research fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research’s lab in Redmond, Wash., laid out the statistics to support second-opinion software during today’s White House workshop on how AI can bring social benefits.

The workshop in Washington, D.C., was the second in a series of four sessions aimed at helping the Office of Science and Technology Policy formulate future initiatives on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft Research is pursuing projects in more than 60 areas of computer science, including AI, but Horvitz focused on two projects in particular that brought AI tools to bear on health care challenges.

One project targets medical errors, which Horvitz said are thought to cause more than 400,000 deaths annually in the United States.

“It’s kind of like a city the size of Oakland or Miami going away quietly every year, due to avoidable deaths,” Horvitz said. “It’s the third-leading cause of death in the United States.” (Heart disease and cancer are No. 1 and No. 2.)

Microsoft has been working with partners including the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to develop software that scans for potential medical errors. Horvitz said such programs can serve as “safety nets” for health care providers.

“You learn to recognize anomalies,” he said. “You learn to recognize acts of omission and commission and flag them.”

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