Could it be that human existence depends on gravitational waves? Some key elements in our biological makeup may come from astrophysical events that occur because gravitational waves exist, a research team headed by John R. Ellis of Kings College London suggests.
“Trillions of cells in our body divide every single day, and this requires accurate replication of our genomes. Our work describes a new mechanism that regulates protein stability in replicating DNA. We now know a bit more about an important step in this complex biological process.”
An enduring mystery of ‘lagging strand’ DNA replication
The DNA replication process is carried out by multiple protein complexes with highly specialized functions, including the unwinding of DNA and the copying of the two unwound DNA strands. The process is akin to a factory assembly line where balls made up of massive, crumpled strings of data are unraveled, allowing specific pieces to be trimmed and copied. Biologists know a good deal about how this process starts and proceeds, but know less about how it is stopped or paused.
Black-capped chickadees have extraordinary memories that can recall the locations of thousands of morsels of food to help them survive the winter. Now scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute have discovered how the chickadees can remember so many details: they memorize each food location using brain cell activity akin to a barcode. These new findings may shed light on how the brain creates memories for the events that make up our lives.
Ever since its discovery, dark matter has remained invisible to scientists despite the launch of multiple ultra-sensitive particle detector experiments around the world over several decades.
Now, physicists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are proposing a new way to look for dark matter using quantum devices, which might be naturally tuned to detect what researchers call thermalized dark matter.
Most dark matter experiments hunt for galactic dark matter, which rockets into Earth directly from space, but another kind might have been hanging around Earth for years, said SLAC physicist Rebecca Leane, who was an author of the new study.
Entanglement is a widely studied quantum physics phenomenon, in which two particles become linked in such a way that the state of one affects the state of another, irrespective of the distance between them. When studying systems comprised of several strongly interacting particles (i.e., many body systems) in two or more dimensions, numerically predicting the amount of information shared between these particles, a measure known as entanglement entropy (EE), becomes highly challenging.
Every day, our cells are hard at work multiplying. Cell division is a precise process, but sometimes this process is impaired and diseases like cancer occur. Mitosis is one of the most important phases in the cell cycle. During this phase, a cell’s DNA is split into two equal sets of chromosomes and it divides into two genetically identical daughter cells.
Scientists have long pondered the beginnings of life on Earth. One theory is that RNA, which is ubiquitous across all domains of life, played a central role in early life. Similar to DNA, RNA possesses the ability to store genetic information. However, to initiate life’s processes, early RNA must have also possessed the capability to self-replicate and catalyze biochemical reactions independently, without the assistance of specialized enzymes.
A study led by Professor Shimpei Gotoh (Department of Clinical Application), introduces a new culturing method to generate alveolar organoids suitable for medium-and high-throughput screening and identified several chemicals with synergistic effects on AT1 cell differentiation. The work is published in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
Some molecules respond to external light pulses by changing their structure and holding certain states that can be switched from one to another. These are commonly referred to as photoswitches and usually have two possible states. Recently, however, scientists from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague) have developed a molecule that takes the possibilities of photoswitches a step further.
New research supported by the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute’s Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Scholars program zeroes in on the surprising observation that many genes found in brain cells and synapses—the points of communication between neurons—are among the largest in the animal kingdom.
