Come with me if you want to live. – The Terminator.
‘Close enough’ only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. – Traditional.
Category: futurism – Page 25
12 (Every) Plague That Wiped Out Humanity in Sci-Fi Movies — Explored
Humans think they can conquer everything in this world, like they have a solution for every problem, but this is where people get greedy, overambitious and most importantly, desperate. For example, in most of the science fiction and survival thrillers, people dig their own grave by creating deadly viruses in the labs, sometimes for political reasons and sometimes to create a medical miracle. These movies show how these man-made viruses wipe out humanity and make the world a living hell for a few immune survivors. Now, this has been a widely explored trope in every survival thriller, but deep beneath this layer, these films talk about something really ominous about our future.
#SciFi #ScienceFiction #SciFiMovies #SpeculativeFiction #scifiart
Fantastic fungi found with ability to freeze water
Can fungi influence the weather? Turns out, they just might. An international group of researchers that includes Virginia Tech’s Xiaofeng Wang and Boris A. Vinatzer discovered the identity of fungal proteins that can catalyze ice formation at high subzero temperatures. The research is published in Science Advances. One potential application of this discovery could be to engineer weather.
Dendrite-Targeting Inhibitory Interneurons Form Biased Circuits with Deep and Superficial Pyramidal Cells in Hippocampal CA1
JNeurosci: Johantges et al. used mice to study excitatory and inhibitory synaptic connections in the CA1 region, creating a circuit map with cell-type resolution that will guide future research on how the hippocampus supports learning and memory.
▶️
In the CA1 hippocampus, pyramidal cells (PCs) can be classified as deep or superficial based on their radial position within the stratum pyramidale. Deep and superficial PCs form biased circuits with perisomatic-targeting PV+ basket cells, but it is unknown if such cell-type–specific circuit motifs extend to dendrite-targeting interneurons. Using male and female mice, we investigated synaptic connectivity and physiology in brain slices from four transgenic lines thought to capture distinct subsets of interneurons: SST-IRES-Cre, Nkx2.1-Cre, Chrna2-Cre, and Htr3a-GFP. First, we found that oriens-lacunosum moleculare (OLM) cells captured by the Chrna2-Cre line are a subset of Htr3a-GFP+ cells in the hippocampus. This novel finding is consistent with previous work showing Nkx2.1-Cre OLM cells are distinct from both Chrna2-Cre and Htr3a-GFP+ OLM cells.
Nuclear import of malaria RNA rewires splicing in host immune cells
Abou Karam et al. identify a cell communication mechanism used by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The parasite delivers its mRNAs into monocytes and imports them into their protected nuclei, where they perturb the splicing. This extracellular RNA-based strategy disrupts host transcript processing and immune signaling, revealing another layer of host interference.