General anesthesia doesn’t just work on your brain or on your mind. It works on your consciousness. By altering the delicate electrochemical balance within the neural circuitry inside your head, the basic ground state of what it is to “be” is — temporarily — abolished. In this process lies one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science, and in philosophy too.
Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now.
Based on an electrochemical approach, the process can be used to fabricate copper objects as small as 25 nanometers in diameter. For reference, an average human hair is around 3000x thicker at 75 microns.
According to the research team led by Dr Dmitry Momotenko, the new 3D printing technique has potential applications in microelectronics, sensor technology, and battery technology.
The ultra-slippery nature of a two-dimensional material called magnetene could be down to quantum effects rather than the mechanics of physical layers sliding across each other, say researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada and Rice University in the US. The result sheds light on the physics of friction at the microscopic scale and could aid the development of reduced-friction lubricants for tiny, implantable devices.
Two-dimensional materials are usually obtained by shaving atomically thin slices from a sample of the bulk material. In graphene, a 2D form of carbon that was the first material to be isolated using this method, the friction between adjacent layers is very low because they are bound together by weak van der Waals forces, and therefore slide past each other like playing cards fanning out in a deck. For magnetene, the bulk material is magnetite, a form of iron oxide with the chemical formula Fe3O4that exists as a 3D lattice in the natural ore. The bonds between layers are much stronger in magnetene than in graphene, however, so its similarly low-friction nature was a bit of a mystery.
On October 15, 2020, the European Union imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a leading Russian research institute over the alleged use of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Russia dismissed as baseless the EU’s allegations that it had not complied with its obligations, under the convention it ratified in 1997, to discontinue its chemical weapons program. Russian officials said the country had nothing to do with Navalny’s poisoning and implied that if any party had used nerve agents on him, it would have been Western secret services. Vladimir Putin, who in 2017 had personally watched over the destruction of the last remaining Russian chemical weapons stash, ridiculed the findings of four separate laboratories, confirmed by the OPCW, that a Novichok-type organophosphate poison was identified in Alexey Navalny’s blood.
Two years earlier, in 2018, Russia had dismissed as unfounded allegations that its military intelligence had used Novichok to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Similarly, Russia had then stated that it had no ongoing chemical weapons program and had destroyed all of its prior arsenals; while alluding that UK agencies may have used their own stash of Novichok to poison the Skripals in a false-flag operation.
A year-long investigation by Bellingcat and its investigative partners The Insider and Der Spiegel, with contributing investigations from RFE/RL, has discovered evidence that Russia continued its Novichok development program long beyond the officially announced closure date. Data shows that military scientists, who were involved with the original chemical weapons program while it was still run by the Ministry of Defense, were dispersed into several research entities which continued collaborating among one another in a clandestine, distributed R&D program. While some of these institutes were integrated with the Ministry of Defense – but camouflaged their work as research into antidotes to organophosphate poisoning – other researchers moved to civilian research institutes but may have continued working, under cover of civilian research, on the continued program.
Roche and its Genentech subsidiary have committed up to $12 billion to Recursion in return for using its Recursion Operating System (OS) to advance therapies in 40 programs that include “key areas” of neuroscience and an undisclosed oncology indication.
Recursion OS applies machine learning and high-content screening methods in what the companies said would be a “transformational” model for tech-enabled target and drug discovery.
The integrated, multi-faceted OS is designed to generate, analyze and glean insights from large-scale proprietary biological and chemical datasets—in this case, extensive single-cell perturbation screening data from Roche and Genentech—by integrating wet-lab and dry-lab biology at scale to phenomically capture chemical and genetic alterations in neuroscience-related cell types and select cancer cell lines.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest, most powerful, and most technologically challenging space telescope ever built.
The Webb Telescope is so large; it must be folded like origami to fit inside its rocket fairing for the ride into space. Once in space, unfolding and readying Webb for science is a complex process that will take about six months.
Webb is designed to see the most distant galaxies in the Universe and study how galaxies evolved over cosmic time. Webb will study planets orbiting other stars looking for the chemical signatures of the building blocks of life. Webb will also study planets within our own solar system.
A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions in Japan has developed a vaccine that tricks the immune system into removing senescent cells. In their paper published in the journal Nature Aging, the group describes their vaccine, how it works and how effective it was when given to test mice.
Prior research has shown that part of the aging process is the development of senescent cells —cells that outlive their usefulness but fail to die naturally. Instead, they produce chemicals that can lead to inflammation, aging and a host of other ailments. Prior research has shown that senescence occurs when cells stop dividing. Prior research has also shown that senescent cells can lead to tumor growth in some instances and tumor suppression in others. Senescence also plays a role in tissue repair, and its impacts on the body vary depending on factors such as overall health and age. It is suspected that senescence is related to telomere erosion, and in some cases, environmental factors that lead to cell damage. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a vaccine that creates antibodies that attach to senescent cells, marking them for removal by white blood cells.
The team was able to create the vaccine after identifying a protein made in senescent cells but not in healthy active cells. That allowed them to develop a type of vaccine based on the amino acids in the protein. When injected, the vaccine incites the body to produce antibodies that bind only to senescent cells, and that sets off an immune response that involves sending white blood cells to destroy the senescent cells.
This research can also offer a glimpse at how other forms of thinking might be organized. “It lets us get at this issue of what are the options for a nervous system or behavior,” Weissbourd says. It’s hard to put yourself into the mind of a jellyfish—their life cycle of polyps and spores is utterly alien, their weird array of sensory organs have no analogues to our own. Clytia have specialized balance organs called statocysts; other species of jellyfish have sensors called rhopalia that detect light or chemical changes in the surrounding water.
Researchers have observed some things that could be thought of as akin to our emotional states; for example, Clytia display a unique set of behaviors when spawning, and they perform their feeding action more quickly when they’re hungry. “But they might have a totally different set of nervous system states,” Weissbourd says.
These gene-tweaked jellies are an exciting new platform for research, says Sprecher. Future experiments will improve our understanding of modular nervous systems, not only in jellyfish but in more complex species too. These are ancient creatures, but we know so little about how they see the world, or if it even makes sense to think of them as “seeing” in the way that mammals do. Literally peering inside them could help provide the answers.
