Parkinson's disease - New test procedure enables early detection in patients at risk

Up to seven years before the onset of typical motor symptoms

21-Jun-2024 - In an international cooperation project, researchers from the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), the Paracelsus-Elena-Klinik Kassel and University College London (UCL) have developed a test procedure that makes it possible to predict the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease in at-risk ...

Artificial intelligence boosts super-resolution microscopy

New generative model calculates images more efficient than established approaches

03-Apr-2024 - Generative artificial intelligence (AI) might be best known from text or image-creating applications like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion. But its usefulness beyond that is being shown in more and more different scientific fields. In their recent work, to be presented at the upcoming International ...

The predictive power of blood: metabolomic profiling reveals risk of multiple diseases all at once

Striving for early risk identification and preventive action

26-Sep-2022 - To prevent diseases from occurring in the first place, it is important to identify those individuals who are at particularly high risk as early as possible. Yet current screening methods are often costly and focus only on one disease at a time. Scientists from the Berlin Institute of Health at ...

Water distribution in the fuel cell made visible in 4D

The analysis opens new possibilities for more efficient and thus more cost-effective fuel cells

09-Jun-2022 - Teams from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and University College London (UCL) have visualised the water distribution in a fuel cell in three dimensions and in real time for the first time by evaluating neutron data from the Berlin Experimental Reactor shut down in 2019. The analysis opens new ...

Using neutrons and X-rays to analyse the ageing of lithium batteries

11-Feb-2020 - An international team has used neutron and X-ray tomography to investigate the dynamic processes that lead to capacity degradation at the electrodes in lithium batteries. Using a new mathematical method, it was possible to virtually unwind electrodes that had been wound into the form of a compact ...

Using corkscrew lasers to separate mirror molecules

Innovative approach could deepen insight into the mysterious handedness of life

13-Dec-2019 - Many of the molecular building blocks of life have two versions that are mirror images of one another, known as enantiomers. Although seemingly identical, the two enantiomers can have completely different chemical behaviour – a fact that has major implications in our day-to-day lives. For ...

Poxvirus hijacks cell movement to spread infection

13-Nov-2018 - Vaccinia virus, a poxvirus closely related to smallpox and monkeypox, tricks cells it has infected into activating their own cell movement mechanism to rapidly spread the virus in cells and mice, according to a new UCL-led study. The findings explain how the virus mimics infected cells' own ...

What the Smell Can Tell

The degradation status of modern polymeric museum artifacts can be classified by their smell

08-Mar-2018 - Breath analysis in disease diagnostics is a promising research field, and the advances in instrumentation allows the accurate detection of metabolites. But not only the health status of patients, but also the preservation status of museum artifacts could be monitored. Heritage science researchers ...

Probing exotic ices

12-Oct-2017 - Water is everywhere. But it's not the same everywhere. When frozen under extreme pressures and temperatures, ice takes on a range of complex crystalline structures. Many of the properties and behaviors of these exotic ices remain mysterious, but a team of researchers recently provided new ...

Pain sensors specialized for specific sensations

15-Nov-2016 - Many pain-sensing nerves in the body are thought to respond to all types of 'painful events', but new UCL research in mice reveals that in fact most are specialised to respond to specific types such as heat, cold or mechanical pain. The study found that over 85% of pain-sensing neurons in whole ...