The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”
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Premature blood stem cell aging in sickle cell disease may be reversible
Sickle cell disease causes premature aging of blood stem cells, which scientists may be able to address with a special class of drugs, according to a new study from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Patients with sickle cell disease experience higher rates of blood stem cell dysfunction and blood cancers compared with their peers, though the reason has been unclear.
The St. Jude researchers found that blood stem cells from young patients with sickle cell disease have features of aging, likely increasing the risk of other complications. Giving senolytics, which target aging-related processes, improved disease symptoms in model systems, with implications for curative gene therapies. The findings were published in Science Translational Medicine.
“We saw that blood stem cells from even young patients with sickle cell disease have many markers of senescence or aging,” said senior co-corresponding author Shannon McKinney-Freeman, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Hematology.
Traveling waves in rat brains give hints about information transfer in consciousness
How and why we experience consciousness is a question that has long plagued philosophers and scientists alike. We have come to understand that, when awake, our brains organize neural information for perception, yet we completely lose this organization under anesthesia. Why this happens is a longstanding mystery in neuroscience, as simple changes in the activity levels of specific brain regions fail to explain this disappearance of consciousness.
Theories have hypothesized that conscious perception arises from two core pillars: the brain’s ability to encode external features and its ability to transmit information across different cortical regions. While the former has been well supported, direct physical evidence of the latter has remained elusive. A team of researchers at Kyoto University set out to bridge this critical gap between neural signals and information dynamics.
The paper is published in the journal iScience.
Ancient molecule made inside tumors drives immune response, study finds
An ancient molecule that existed long before the circulatory system evolved has been found to support cancer immunotherapy. Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan found that complement C3 protein acts inside tumors to prevent the accumulation of immunosuppressive cells, but only when produced inside the tumor. C3 circulating in the blood did not affect treatment outcomes.
Published in Nature Communications, the findings suggest that artificially recreating this effect can help patients with tumors that do not naturally produce enough of this protein.
Does dark energy really exist? Our work identifies cracks in the foundations of today’s cosmological model
According to our best understanding, the universe is expanding – and is doing so at an accelerating rate. This is believed to be caused by something called the “cosmological constant”, which was first proposed by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity. In recent decades, it has become better known as dark energy, which is believed to make up about 70% of the universe.
Crucial to this realisation were studies of Type Ia supernovae – exploding white dwarf stars. These are thought to emit a specific amount of light, which allows astronomers to determine their distances very accurately and thereby track the expansion of the universe. This work was awarded the 2011 Nobel prize in physics.
The accelerating expansion of the universe is thought to be due to negative pressure, an unusual property of dark energy that allows it to overcome the attractive force of gravity. Yet the exact nature of dark energy remains a puzzle. It cannot be explained by our best theory for the fundamental building blocks of the universe – known as the standard model of particle physics.
Nanopores can activate human T cells without biochemical signals
Immune cells protect and heal the human body. In medicine, they are specifically activated through biochemical reactions to treat certain diseases. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, ETH Zurich, Humboldt University of Berlin, Charité Berlin and Inselspital Bern have now discovered that immune cells also respond to the surface structure of materials —without chemistry.
This finding opens up new possibilities for effective cancer and immunotherapies as well as implantology. The study is published in the journal ACS Nano.
T cells are important defense cells of the human immune system. They travel through the body, constantly scanning their environment like tiny sensors. On their surface, they have tiny protrusions with receptors—called microvilli—that allow them to identify harmful pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, foreign substances or even altered cells of the body’s own tissues.
A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution
From the article:
“In a 2024 Science study, researchers performed a high-resolution EM reconstruction of the ultrastructure of a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex. According to the authors, the reconstruction contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses, comprising 1,400 terabytes of data.”
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New CLARA™ SEM for Nanoscale Materials Characterization
Tescan launches the new CLARA™, an ultra-high-resolution SEM designed for nanoscale materials characterization and advanced imaging.