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A new study puts a fresh spin on what it means to âgo with your gut.â The findings, published in Nature, suggest that gut bacteria may control movement in fruit flies and identify the neurons involved in this response. The study was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
If you havenât heard, universities around the world are offering their courses online for free (or at least partially free). These courses are collectively called MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses.
In the past six years or so, over 800 universities have created more than 10,000 of these MOOCs. And Iâve been keeping track of these MOOCs the entire time over at Class Central, ever since they rose to prominence.
In the past four months alone, 190 universities have announced 600 such free online courses. Iâve compiled a list of them and categorized them according to the following subjects: Computer Science, Mathematics, Programming, Data Science, Humanities, Social Sciences, Education & Teaching, Health & Medicine, Business, Personal Development, Engineering, Art & Design, and finally Science.
Continue reading “190 universities just launched 600 free online courses. Hereâs the full list” »
Evidence has been building in recent years that our diet, our habits or traumatic experiences can have consequences for the health of our children â and even our grandchildren. The explanation that has gained most currency for how this occurs is so-called âepigenetic inheritanceâ â patterns of chemical âmarksâ on or around our DNA that are hypothesised to be passed down the generations. But new research from the University of Cambridge suggests that this mechanism of non-genetic inheritance is likely to be very rare.
A second study, also from Cambridge, suggests, however, that one way that environmental effects are passed on may in fact be through molecules produced from the DNA known as RNA that are found in a fatherâs sperm.
The mechanism by which we inherit innate characteristics from our parents is well understood: we inherit half of our genes from our mother and half from our father. However, the mechanism whereby a âmemoryâ of the parentâs environment and behaviour might be passed down through the generations is not understood.
Exposure to toxic air both indoors and out kills some 600,000 children under the age of 15 each year, the World Health Organization warned Monday.
Data from the UN health body shows that every day, 93 percent of children under the age of 15âa full 1.8 billion youngsters, including 630 million under the age of fiveâbreath dangerously polluted air.
This has tragic consequences: In 2016 alone, some 600,000 children died from acute lower respiratory infections caused by polluted air, the WHO report found.
In the spirit of Halloween, where ghouls, ghosts, and vampires walk among us, our perception of reality will soon transform as well, forever possessed by the specter of Transhumanism!
Last year, I wrote about how people could transform themselves into one of my favorite horror creaturesâa real-life werewolfâusing modern science and tech. This merely scratches the surface, however, in terms of how far an individual can go. In a Transhumanist future, youâll be empowered to not only question the extent of your humanity but equally put those questions into action.
Continue reading “In a Transhumanist Future, Everyday Could Be Halloween” »
Proteins are the building blocks of the cell. They do most of the work and are essential for the structure, function and dynamic regulation of the cell and bodyâs tissues and organs. Proteins rarely work alone, they interact, form protein complexes or bind DNA and RNA to control what a cell does. These complexes are key pieces of many important reactions within the cell, such as energy metabolism or gene regulation. Any change in those interactions, which can for example be caused by a mutation, can make the difference between health and disease. Hence, for understanding how cells operate, or what might go wrong in ill cells, it is essential to know how their building blocks interact.
New technologies allowed scientists during the last decades to understand the genetic information an organism possess, which of this information is actively used and which proteins are made by the cell in different circumstances. Now it is a big challenge to understand how biomolecules such as proteins and RNA messenger molecules combine to form the complexes required for a functional cell. In other words, we know the ten thousands of parts a cell is build off, but we donât know how they belong together.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) describe the development of a new method, named ârec-YnHâ, which was designed to understand the complexes formed between hundreds of proteins and RNAs at the same time.
