Illinois engineers fused ultrafast imaging with smart algorithms to peek at living brain chemistry, turning routine MRIs into metabolic microscopes. The system distinguishes healthy regions, grades tumors, and forecasts MS flare-ups long before structural MRI can. Precision-medicine neurology just moved closer to reality.
While glucose, or sugar, is a well-known fuel for the brain, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers have demonstrated that electrical activity in synapses—the junctions between neurons where communication occurs—can lead to the use of lipid or fat droplets as an energy source.
The study, published in Nature Metabolism, challenges “the long-standing dogma that the brain doesn’t burn fat,” said principal investigator Dr. Timothy A. Ryan, professor of biochemistry and of biochemistry in anesthesiology, and the Tri-Institutional Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The paper’s lead author, Dr. Mukesh Kumar, a postdoctoral associate in biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medicine who has been studying the cell biology of fat droplets, suggested that it makes sense that fat may play a role as an energy source in the brain like it does with other metabolically demanding tissues, such as muscle.
Satyendra Nath Bose FRS, MP [ 1 ] (/ ˈ b oʊ s / ; [ 4 ] [ a ] 1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian theoretical physicist and mathematician. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics, and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India’s second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the Government of India. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ]
The eponymous particles class described by Bose’s statistics, bosons, were named by Paul Dirac. [ 8 ] [ 9 ]
A polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields, including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature, and music. He served on many research and development committees in India, after independence. [ 10 ] .
Southwest Research Institute has collaborated with Yale University to summarize the scientific community’s notable progress in advancing the understanding of the formation and evolution of the inner rocky planets, the so-called terrestrial planets. Their paper focuses on late accretion’s role in the long-term evolution of terrestrial planets, including their distinct geophysical and chemical properties as well as their potential habitability.
The Review paper is published in the journal Nature.
Solar systems form when clouds of gas and dust begin to coalesce. Gravity pulls these elements together, forming a central star, like our sun, surrounded by a flattened disk of consolidating materials. Our terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars—formed as smaller rocky objects accumulated, or accreted, into larger planetesimals and eventually protoplanets, when late impacts made critical contributions. Earth was probably the last terrestrial planet to form, reaching about 99% of its final mass within about 60–100 million years after the first solids began to consolidate.
A tiny grain from asteroid Ryugu has revealed djerfisherite, a mineral that normally forms in scorching, oxygen-poor settings—conditions Ryugu was never thought to experience.
The surprise find hints that the asteroid either endured unexpected heat spikes or captured exotic material transported across the early Solar System. Microscopy and chemical clues now challenge the idea that Ryugu is compositionally uniform and point to a far more chaotic mixing of planetary building blocks. Scientists are turning to isotopic “fingerprints” to trace the grain’s true origin and decode how primitive asteroids really formed.
Hayabusa2 brings ryugu samples & surprising mineral clues.
The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic growth of wearable sensor technology, mainly represented by flexible, stretchable, on-skin electronic sensors that provide rich information of the wearer’s health conditions and surroundings. A recent breakthrough in the field is the development of wearable chemical sensors based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) that can detect molecular fingerprints universally, sensitively, and noninvasively. However, while their sensing properties are excellent, these sensors are not scalable for widespread use beyond small-scale human health monitoring due to their cumbersome fabrication process and limited multifunctional sensing capabilities. Here, a highly scalable, wearable SERS sensor is demonstrated based on an easy-to-fabricate, low-cost, ultrathin, flexible, stretchable, adhesive, and biointegratable gold nanomesh. It can be fabricated in any shape and worn on virtually any surface for label-free, large-scale, in situ sensing of diverse analytes from low to high concentrations (10–106 × 10−9 m). To show the practical utility of the wearable SERS sensor, the sensor is tested for the detection of sweat biomarkers, drugs of abuse, and microplastics. This wearable SERS sensor represents a significant step toward the generalizability and practicality of wearable sensing technology.
Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) continues to devastate the global swine industry, yet the structural basis of how small molecules block its entry into host cells remains unclear. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba and Mahidol University developed a refined model of the PRRSV receptor domain CD163-SRCR5 using state-of-the-art computational approaches, offering new avenues for rational drug design.
While traditional drug discovery often relies on static crystal structures, many biologically important proteins, including the scavenger receptor CD163-SRCR5, contain flexible loop regions poorly captured by crystallography. These loops are critical for recognizing ligands and viral proteins, making them challenging yet attractive drug targets.
In their new study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, the researchers used molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, ensemble docking, and fragment molecular orbital calculations to generate a dynamic, physiologically relevant structural model of the CD163-SRCR5 domain.