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Category: biological – Page 258

Newly discovered microbe does something textbooks say is impossible: it lives without mitochondria

According to established scientific knowledge, complex cells (called eukaryotic cells) can’t survive without mitochondria — tiny organelles that control respiration and power movement and growth. You can think of them as tiny batteries converting energy so that cells can go about their business, but they perform other key jobs, too. They are, as the common adage goes, the powerhouse of the cell.

Now, scientists working in Canada and the Czech Republic have made a surprising discovery: a eukaryotic cell without these mitochondrial batteries. It’s an unprecedented find that’s likely to change our thinking about how some types of cells can exist and grow. In other words, life is more flexible than we thought.

“[Mitochondria] were considered to be absolutely indispensable components of the eukaryotic cell and the hallmark of the eukaryotic cell,” team leader, Anna Karnkowska from the University of British Columbia told Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR.

Bringing The Dead Back To Life — Reanima Project / Bioquark Inc. Media Coverage

Fox 29 — Good Day Philadelphia

http://www.fox29.com/140735577-video

NBC TV 10

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Zombies-from-Phill…65101.html

fmri5

CNN en Espanol

http://cnnespanol.cnn.com/video/cnnee-encuentro-intvw-joel-o…-cerebral/

Researcher-test

Can plants grow on the moon? NASA plans test in 2015

We knew this was going to happen. Just still neat to read about it.

(Phys.org) —NASA is planning to launch a milestone experiment involving growing plants on the moon. The target date is 2015, when the agency will deposit plants on the moon’s surface. The initiative is being driven by the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team. They intend to use coffee-can sized containers designed to protect the plants against harsh elements of the climate, and will also provide cameras, sensors, and electronics in order to relay information about how the plants fare back to earth. NASA’s plan is “to develop a very simple sealed growth chamber that can support germination over a five to-ten day period in a spacecraft on the Moon.”

What will NASA try to grow? The containers will attempt to grow turnip, basil and Arabidopsis The latter is used often in plant research; Simon Gilroy, University of Wisconsin-Madison botany professor, has referred to the Arabidopsis as “the lab rat of plant biology.” Will the life forms survive the lunar surface? NASA’s plan is to find some answers when this “self-contained habitat,” which will have a mass of about 1 kg and would be a payload on a commercial lunar lander, is on the , How it gets there is another interesting side of the story, because NASA is taking advantage of a parallel event to save costs significantly.

“How can we send plants to the Moon soon? Hitchhiking. Thanks to Google, there are many potential rides to the moon in the near future, with commercial spacecraft companies competing to collect the Google Lunar X-Prize in 2015,” according to NASA. (The prize is in reference to what is called the Google Lunar XPRIZE, an incentive to safely land on the surface of the Moon. In order to win the , a private company must land safely on the surface of the Moon, travel 500 meters above, below, or on the , and send back two mooncasts to Earth, said Google. Teams may also compete for bonus prizes such as exploring lunar artifacts or surviving the lunar night, and can be awarded prize money earlier by completing terrestrial or in-space milestones. Everything needs to be completed, though, by December 31, 2015.)

A New Device Stimulates The Brain To Boost Athletic Performance — By Christina Farr | Fast Company

“Daniel Chao, a Stanford-trained neuroscientist, and Brett Wingeier, a biomedical engineer, founded Halo Neuroscience in 2013. … Halo Sport uses electrodes to stimulate the brain’s motor cortex, which controls planning and voluntary movements. Energized motor neurons send stronger signals to athletes’ muscles, which Chao says allows them to reap greater rewards from every rep.”

Read more

Gene cascade specifies two distinct neuron sets expressing Nplp1

A study of the embryonic nervous system of the fruit fly throws light on how two neuronal cell lineages that develop at different times and in different places in the ventral nerve cord of the embryo can ultimately result in very similar neuronal subtypes. The study, publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on 5th May, is a collaboration between research teams in Madrid (Spain) and Linköping (Sweden).

In the paper, Hugo Gabilondo, Johannes Stratmann and their colleagues report that a crucial terminal selector gene, col, is activated by different sets of spatio-temporal selector genes in the two different neuronal cell lineages. In dAp neurons, which are present throughout the thorax and abdominal segments, col is activated directly by the action of the early temporal genes Kruppel (Kr) and pdm, and the GATA transcription factor gene grain (grn). By contrast, in Tv1 neurons, which are specific to the thoracic segments, col is activated by the late temporal gene cas, together with several other genes that feed forward onto the terminal selector gene cascade downstream of col. The result is expression of the neuropeptide Nplp1 in both dAp and Tv1 neurons.

The developing generates many different neuronal cell types; understanding this process of cell fate specification remains a major challenge for biologists. Complex cascades of regulatory genes are known to be involved, starting with spatial and temporal selector genes and finishing with terminal selector genes, all of which act in various combinations to dictate the ultimate neuronal cell type. A particular type often arises in several parts of the nervous system and at different stages of development, however, suggesting that different spatio-temporal cues can converge on the same terminal selectors to generate a similar cell fate. This study reports evidence of this phenomenon in an example from the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Artificial Wombs Just Got One Step Closer to Reality

Scientists have sustained human embryos in a petri dish for 13 days, shattering the previous record of nine days. The breakthrough will allow researchers to study early fetal development in unprecedented detail, and brings us one step closer to viable “artificial wombs.” But it’s adding fuel to an already heated ethical debate.

Two separate papers published this week, one in Nature and one in Nature Cell Biology, have reported culturing human embryos for nearly two weeks, going well beyond previous efforts. There’s no reason to believe that the embryos couldn’t have survived beyond the two-week mark, but the experiment had to be halted to adhere to the internationally agreed 14-day limit on human embryo research.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-build-an-artificial-womb-476464703

“Liberation technologies” and the ones who will gain

How could global economic inequality survive the onslaught of synthetic organisms, micromanufacturing devices, additive manufacturing machines, nano-factories?
(http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2016/04/obsessed-…L36KMDo.99)

Narrated by Harry J. Bentham, author of Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013), using the introduction from that book as a taster of the audio version of the book in production. (http://www.clubof.info/2016/04/liberation-technologies-to-come.html)

Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-Techno-Liberation-Harry-J-Ben…atfound-20

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-Techno-Liberation-Harry-J-Ben…atfound-20

Audio: coming soon!

DARPA Exhibit to Open at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry

Now, that’s an exhibit!

May 5, 2016, will mark the opening of a new and exciting exhibit at Chicago’s famed Museum of Science and Industry: an in-depth and interactive look behind the curtain at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

DARPA was created in 1958 at the peak of the Cold War in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first manmade satellite, which passed menacingly over the United States every 96 minutes. Tasked with preventing such strategic surprises in the future, the agency has achieved its mission over the years in part by creating a series of technological surprises of its own, many of which are highlighted in the Chicago exhibit, “Redefining Possible.”

“We are grateful to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry for inviting us to tell the DARPA story of ambitious problem solving and technological innovation,” said DARPA Deputy Director Steve Walker, who will be on hand for the exhibit’s opening day. “Learning how DARPA has tackled some of the most daunting scientific and engineering challenges—and how it has tolerated the risk of failure in order to have major impact when it succeeds—can be enormously inspiring to students. And for adults, we hope the exhibit will serve as a reminder that some of the most exciting work going on today in fields as diverse as chemistry, engineering, cyber defense and synthetic biology are happening with federal support, in furtherance of pressing national priorities.”

Biology May Hold Key to Better Computer Memory

Of course bio technology holds the key for better memory.

Newswise — A group of Boise State researchers, led by associate professor of materials science and engineering and associate dean of the College of Innovation and Design Will Hughes, is working toward a better way to store digital information using nucleic acid memory (NAM).

It’s no secret that as a society we generate vast amounts of data each year. So much so that the 30 billion watts of electricity used annually by server farms today is roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.

And the demand keeps growing. The global flash memory market is predicted to reach $30.2 billion this year, potentially growing to $80.3 billion by 2025. Experts estimate that by 2040, the demand for global memory will exceed the projected supply of silicon (the raw material used to store flash memory). Furthermore, electronic memory is rapidly approaching its fundamental size limits because of the difficulty in storing electrons in small dimensions.

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