Lifeboat Foundation

Within a given tissue or organ, cells may appear very similar or even identical. But at the molecular level, these cells can have small differences that lead to wide variations in their functions.

Alex K. Shalek, an MIT associate professor of chemistry, relishes the challenge of uncovering those small distinctions. In his lab, researchers develop and deploy technologies such as single-cell RNA-sequencing, which lets them analyze differences in gene expression patterns and allows them to figure out how each cell contributes to a tissue’s function.

“Single-cell RNA-sequencing is an incredibly powerful way to examine what cells are doing at a given moment. By looking at associations among the different mRNAs that cells express, we can identify really important features of a tissue — like what cells are present and what are those cells trying to do,” says Shalek, who is also a core member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and an institute member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

JoAnn Morgan was the only woman in the launch firing room during the launch of Apollo 11.

Credits: NASA

In spite of working for all of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and being promoted to a senior engineer, Morgan was still not permitted in the firing room at liftoff — until Apollo 11, when “Karl Sendler went to bat for me.”

Tedros said the risk posed by monkeypox is moderate globally, but the threat is high in Europe. There’s clearly a risk that the virus will continue to spread around the world, he said, though it’s unlikely to disrupt global trade or travel right now.

In early May, the United Kingdom reported a case of monkeypox in a person who recently returned from travel to Nigeria. Several days later, the U.K. reported three more cases of monkeypox in people who appeared to have become infected locally. Other European nations, Canada and the U.S. then also began confirming cases. It’s unclear where the outbreak actually began.

The WHO last issued a global health emergency in January 2020 in response to the Covid-19 outbreak and two months later declared it a pandemic. The WHO has no official process to declare a pandemic under its organizational laws, which means the term is loosely defined. In 2020, the agency declared Covid a pandemic in an effort to warn complacent governments about the “alarming levels of spread and severity” of the virus.

A potential cure for haemophilia B has been announced by British doctors, which corrects the genetic defect associated with the condition.

LONDON (AP) — The chief of the World Health Organization said the expanding monkeypox outbreak in more than 70 countries is an “extraordinary” situation that now qualifies as a global emergency, a declaration Saturday that could spur further investment in treating the once-rare disease and worsen the scramble for scarce vaccines.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the decision to issue the declaration despite a lack of consensus among experts serving on the U.N. health agency’s emergency committee. It was the first time the chief of the U.N. health agency has taken such an action.

“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” Tedros said.

Neuroscientist and physician Matthew Schrag found suspect images in dozens of papers involving Alzheimer’s disease, including Western blots (projected in green) measuring a protein linked to cognitive decline in rats.

The Neuro-Network.

𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐓𝐒 𝐎𝐍 𝐀 𝐅𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐃?

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Our bodies have evolved formidable barriers to protect themselves against foreign substances—from our skin, to our cells and every component within the cells, each part of our bodies has protective layers. These defenses, while essential, pose a significant challenge for pharmaceutical drugs and therapies, such as vaccines, that have to bypass multiple barriers to reach their targets.

Although these barriers are vitally important in pharmaceutical science and drug design, much is still unknown about them and how to overcome them.

In a recent study, researchers from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Nanjing University in China, and Western Washington and Emory University in the U.S., shed some light on why the delivery of therapeutics to cells can be so difficult.

DNA from ancient fossils suggests interbreeding regularly occurred between the two species by about 45,000 years ago, two studies find.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed the world’s first electric nanomotors made of DNA. The self-assembling structures can be activated by an electric charge to spin a ratcheting rotor arm.

The tiny motor was made using a technique called DNA origami. Like its namesake papercraft, the method involves intricately folding strands of DNA into three-dimensional shapes, with past examples including virus traps, immune-evading drug delivery systems, and even microscopic Van Gogh replicas. These structures are made by carefully selecting DNA sequences that will fold and attach to each other in certain ways, so researchers can add specific strands to a solution and let the DNA objects assemble themselves.

For the new study, the team used this process to make a molecular motor out of DNA for the first time. The motor consists of a rotor arm measuring up to 500 nanometers (nm) long, which is mounted on a base about 40 nm high that’s fixed to a glass plate. Wrapped around the tip of the base, just below the rotor, is a platform with several ratcheting obstacles built into its surface, which controls the direction that the rotor can spin.