Exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood altered the balance of mental health in the U.S. population, making generations of Americans more depressed, anxious and inattentive or hyperactive, according to Duke and Florida State researchers. They estimate that 151 million cases of psychiatric disorder over the past 75 years have resulted from American children’s exposure to lead.

Backed by a $2.9 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Barrow Neurological Institute researchers are expanding their efforts to test a hypothesis that exposure to environmental manganese, two orders of magnitude below the typical occupational exposure, is associated with the progression of Parkinson’s symptoms.

Engineers in the USC Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering have now developed an update to the tool that will allow CRISPR technology to be even more powerful with the help of focused ultrasound. The resulting toolkit will allow CRISPR gene editing to be precisely targeted to the specific areas requiring treatment. The research team is already applying this discovery to refine their work in cancer immunotherapy. The researchers are ".... are pushing it one step further to make it controllable. Instead of continuously editing the genome, we can now control it to be activated at a specific location and at a specific time using a non-invasive remote-controlled ultrasound wave. That’s the breakthrough.”