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The COVID tests that have been in use over the last few years should still work to detect new variants, assuming they aren’t expired.

Source: Health

Recent weeks have brought a rise in COVID-19 cases across the city, returning many sniffling, coughing city dwellers to the days of testing, medicating and quarantining. But the infrastructure around getting help for COVID has changed since previous surges. The CDC still “strongly encourages everyone” who takes an at-home COVID test to report the results, whether it is positive or negative, and recommends doing so through MakeMyTestCount.org, a collaboration between the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health and the health-care technology company Care Evolution. Source: West Side Rag

Scientists are working on a new approach to treating kidney failure that could one day free people from needing dialysis or having to take harsh drugs to suppress their immune system after a transplant. Source: UC San Francisco/Science Daily

Two teams of UC San Diego undergraduate bioengineering students won Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) awards from the National Institutes of Health. Source: UC San Diego

Information about a recent variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus including information about the impact on COVID-19 tests. Source: CBS News

A new study has demonstrated the ability for gene therapy to repair neural connections for those with the rare genetic brain disorder known as Hurler syndrome. Source: University of Minnesota Medical School/Science Daily

Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song.

The research produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).”

Before this, researchers had figured out how to use brain activity to reconstruct music with similar features to the song someone was listening to. Now, “you can actually listen to the brain and restore the music that person heard,” said Gerwin Schalk, a neuroscientist who directs a research lab in Shanghai and collected data for this study. Source: New York Times

The guitar chords echo strangely, as if emanating from the bottom of a well. The singer’s voice is also garbled, his lyrics barely intelligible. Nevertheless, if you know what’s coming, the song is recognizable: “All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.” It’s a snippet of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” from the album “The Wall,” which was a smash hit in 1979 for the U.K. rock band Pink Floyd. And it was re-created from brain recordings from people who listened to it. The reconstructed tune provides new insights into where in the brain music is processed. Source: Science

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