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Category: biotech/medical – Page 197

The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack

By way of an answer, I’ll offer one of the physicist Richard Feynman’s most famous dictums: What I cannot create, I do not understand. For much of its history, biology has been a reductionist science, driven by the principle that the best way to understand the mind-boggling complexity of living things is to dissect them into their constituent parts—organs, cells, proteins, molecules. But life isn’t a clockwork; it’s a dynamic system, and unexpected things emerge from the interactions between all those little parts. To truly understand life, you can’t just break it down. You have to be able to put it back together, too.

The C. elegans nematode is a tiny worm, barely as long as a hair is wide, with less than a thousand cells in its body. Of those, only 302 are neurons—about as small as a brain can get. “I remember, when my first child was born, how proud I was when they reached the age they could count to 302,” said Netta Cohen, a computational neuroscientist who runs a worm lab at the University of Leeds. But there’s no shame in smallness, Cohen emphasized: C. elegans does a lot with a little. Unlike its more unpleasant cousins, it’s not a parasite, outsourcing its survival needs to bigger organisms. Instead, it’s what biologists call a “free-living” animal. “It can reproduce, it can eat, it can forage, it can escape,” Cohen said. “It’s born and it develops, and it ages and it dies—all in a millimeter.”

Worm people like Cohen are quick to tell you that no fewer than four Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on C. elegans, which was the first animal to have both its genome sequenced and its neurons mapped. But there’s a difference between schematics and an operating manual. “We know the wiring; we don’t know the dynamics,” Cohen said. “You would think that’s an ideal problem for a physicist or a computer scientist or a mathematician to solve.”

Glucose’s double life: Study reveals its surprising role as a master regulator of tissue regeneration

The sugar glucose, which is the main source of energy in almost every living cell, has been revealed in a Stanford Medicine study to also be a master regulator of tissue differentiation—the process by which stem cells give rise to specialized cells that make up all the body’s tissues.

It does so not by being catabolized, or broken down, to release the energy sequestered in its chemical bonds, but instead by binding in its intact form to proteins that control which genes in the genome are made into proteins and when.

The discovery of glucose’s undercover double life was so surprising the researchers spent several years confirming their findings before publishing their results.

Bill Gates: Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’

They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing.

A new era of “free intelligence” powered by AI will change the way humans work, says billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Evidence of a new phenomenon: Quantum tornadoes in momentum space

To detect the quantum tornado in momentum space, the Würzburg team enhanced a well-known technique called ARPES (angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy). “ARPES is a fundamental tool in experimental solid-state physics. It involves shining light on a material sample, extracting electrons, and measuring their energy and exit angle. This gives us a direct look at a material’s electronic structure in momentum space,” explains Ünzelmann. “By cleverly adapting this method, we were able to measure orbital angular momentum. I’ve been working with this approach since my dissertation.”

ARPES is rooted in the photoelectric effect, first described by Albert Einstein and taught in high school physics. Ünzelmann had already refined the method in 2021, gaining international recognition for detecting orbital monopoles in tantalum arsenide. Now, by integrating a form of quantum tomography, the team has taken the technique a step further to detect the quantum tornado — another major milestone. “We analyzed the sample layer by layer, similar to how medical tomography works. By stitching together individual images, we were able to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of the orbital angular momentum and confirm that electrons form vortices in momentum space,” Ünzelmann explains.

DNA-loaded lipid nanoparticles are poised to bring gene therapy to common chronic diseases

A breakthrough in safely delivering therapeutic DNA to cells could transform treatment for millions suffering from common chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

A new process that transports DNA into cells using tiny fat-based carriers called lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) developed by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania improved the process of turning on the DNA’s instructions in mice to make proteins inside cells, which is crucial in fighting disease. Signs also point to an improvement in reducing treatment risks, such as immune reactions, as compared to older DNA transfer techniques.

The team’s findings were recently published in Nature Biotechnology.

How necrotic cells contribute to the body’s regeneration process

Researchers have shed new light on how tissues in the body are repaired following the damage and premature death of tissue cells.

Their study in fruit flies, which first appeared in eLife as a Reviewed Preprint and is now published as the final version, describes what the editors call fundamental discoveries with solid evidence for how dying (or necrotic) cells contribute to through a previously uncharacterized mechanism. It suggests that these cells play a role in signaling for the body to produce other types of cells that are involved in controlling natural and inflammation, with findings that may have implications for wound repair and tissue regeneration.

As our bodies grow and develop, cells naturally die off where they are no longer needed, in a process called apoptosis. On the other hand, cells can be damaged and die prematurely due to injury, infectious diseases or other factors, in a process known as necrosis.

Study shows that some voices are more memorable than others, irrespective of who is listening to them

The term “memorability” refers to the likelihood that a particular stimulus, such as an object, face or sound, will be remembered by those exposed to it. Over the past few years, some psychology studies have been exploring the extent to which some stimuli are intrinsically more memorable than others, or in other words, whether people are generally more likely to remember them compared to other stimuli of the same type.

Researchers at the University of Chicago recently set out to specifically investigate the memorability of voices. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that some voices are more memorable than others and their memorability can be consistently predicted across different listeners.

“Research on intrinsic memorability—the consistencies in what people remember and forget—is a fairly new but active area of cognitive psychology,” Cambria Revsine, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Many studies from our lab and others have extensively explored this phenomenon over the past decade, finding that participants tend to remember the same images of faces, scenes, objects, and much more. However, no prior study to our knowledge has investigated the memorability of auditory stimuli.”