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How a gut virus hijacks mucus production to slip past the body’s protective barrier

Among the various viruses that sicken your gut, some at least leave behind a tiny path of cellular destruction as they replicate, implicating the guilty pathogen. Both rotavirus and norovirus invade the small intestine, multiply there and can break through the organ’s outer lining as one way of proliferating in the body.

Astroviruses, which infect the same organ and cause pediatric diarrhea worldwide, have a slicker strategy that avoids tissue damage. In a recent study published in the PLOS Pathogens, a team of cell biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reports the astrovirus’s exit strategy. In a few words, it can be summed up as “follow the mucus.”

The team discovered that astrovirus relies on mucus secretion from goblet cells as the coordinated path to completing its replication cycle. The finding reveals potentially new targets for strategies to treat pediatric diarrhea, according to the paper’s senior author, Valerie Cortez, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz.

ANO6-mediated trogocytosis of cancer-associated fibroblasts promotes pancreatic cancer cell growth and immune suppression

et al. uncover that cancer-associated fibroblasts fuel pancreatic tumor growth and immune suppression by transferring membrane lipids to cancer cells through anoctamin 6-dependent trogocytosis.

Michael Levin: Memory and intelligence do not require a brain

For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.

Alasdair Craig: Could you give us a brief overview of what you’re aiming to do in regenerative medicine and cancer treatment?

Michael Levin: Imagine that you had a way of communicating goals, anatomical goals, to groups of cells, to ask them to build whatever structure you wanted them to build. Then birth defects, traumatic injury, degenerative disease, aging, cancer, all of these things could be solved. This is the major unsolved problem of regenerative medicine. So this is what we do in my group: we work on ways to communicate anatomical goals to groups of cells.

Scientists trick cancer cells into making the drugs that kill them

Scientists have developed a promising new cancer-fighting strategy that uses carbon monoxide naturally produced by tumor cells to manufacture powerful drugs inside the cancer cells themselves. Early laboratory experiments suggest the technique could selectively attack cancer while sparing healthy cells, potentially paving the way for safer chemotherapy alternatives.

Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active today

Scientists at Columbia University and Imperial College London have found that the largest canyon system in the solar system is still active and shaping Mars today, billions of years after it first formed.

New research presents direct seismic evidence that a marsquake (Mars’s equivalent of an earthquake) detected by NASA’s InSight lander originated beneath the vast Martian canyon system, Valles Marineris, and was caused by rocks slipping along a fault deep within the planet’s crust.

The finding suggests that faults established during the formation and early evolution of Valles Marineris billions of years ago can remain weak enough to rupture under stresses acting on Mars today.

What does a healthy brain look like? It depends on the company you keep

Squishy, wrinkled, weighing about as much as a cantaloupe, the brain may not be much to look at from the outside. Yet with a network of roughly 86 billion neurons, it generates more impulses daily than all the smartphones on the planet combined.

Scientists can track all that activity with scans. But what does a well-balanced brain actually look like?

Spoiler alert: New research says there’s no universal signature of mental health—or illness.

What If Gravity Is Just Information? Brian Greene Explains This Mind-Bending Theory

If gravity isn’t a fundamental force at all—but instead an emergent phenomenon connected to information, entropy, and the structure of reality itself? In this mind-bending exploration, we dive into one of the most fascinating ideas in modern theoretical physics and ask whether gravity could emerge from something deeper than space and time.

Inspired by ideas discussed in modern physics and popularized by scientists such as Brian Greene, this video explores how information might be connected to the fundamental laws of the universe. Could the gravity we experience every day be a consequence of deeper physical principles? And if so, what would that mean for our understanding of reality?

From Einstein’s description of spacetime to quantum mechanics, entropy, black holes, and the mysterious role of information, we’ll explore why physicists continue searching for a deeper explanation of gravity.

00:00 – What If Gravity Is Just Information? 01:24 – Why Gravity Is Still a Mystery 03:18 – Einstein Changed Our Understanding of Gravity 05:42 – Gravity as an Emergent Phenomenon 08:15 – The Strange Connection Between Gravity and Information 10:48 – Entropy and the Structure of Reality 13:22 – What Black Holes Tell Us About Information 16:05 – Quantum Mechanics vs. Gravity 18:44 – Could Spacetime Be Emergent? 21:16 – The Mind-Bending Implications 24:02 – What Physicists Are Still Trying to Discover 26:18 – Final Thoughts on Gravity and Reality.

🧠 The Bigger Question.

If gravity emerges from deeper principles involving information and quantum physics, then our traditional understanding of the universe may only be part of the story. This possibility connects some of the biggest questions in modern science: What is spacetime? Where does gravity come from? Is information more fundamental than matter?

Continue reading “What If Gravity Is Just Information? Brian Greene Explains This Mind-Bending Theory” | >

Stanford Digital Brain Project to model the human brain

The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute is launching the Stanford Digital Brain Project, an ambitious new research effort to develop predictive computational models of the human brain.

Launched with lead support from philanthropists Mark and Mary Stevens, and with additional support from Clara Wu Tsai, ’88, MA ’88, the project reflects a university-wide consortium of researchers leveraging state-of-the-art brain imaging technologies to build a uniquely rich portrait of the human brain in action. The resulting data will be used to train foundation models scientists can query to predict how the brain might respond in a wide range of contexts, resulting in a powerful new tool to accelerate neuroscience research and clinical care, including the detection and treatment of brain disorders.

“This visionary project is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science that Stanford is singularly positioned to undertake,” said Stanford President Jonathan Levin. “By bringing together talent from across multiple disciplines and sharing the results openly, we can ensure our discoveries provide maximum societal benefit. I am profoundly grateful to Mark and Mary for recognizing this potential, and to Clara for her longtime support.”