Lifeboat Foundation

A University of Texas at Dallas bioengineer has developed synthetic enzymes that can control the behavior of the signaling protein Vg1, which plays a key role in the development of muscle, bone and blood in vertebrate embryos.

The team of researchers is using a new approach, called the Synthetic Processing (SynPro) system, in zebrafish to study how Vg1 is formed. By learning the molecular rules of signal formation in a developing animal, researchers aim to engineer mechanisms – such as giving cells new instructions – that could play a role in treating or preventing disease.

Dr. P.C. Dave P. Dingal, assistant professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, and his colleagues published their research online Oct. 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Autoimmune disorders are among the most prevalent chronic diseases across the globe. Emerging treatments for autoimmune disorders focus on “adoptive cell therapies,” or those using cells from a patient’s own body to achieve immunosuppression. These therapeutic cells are recognized by the patient’s body as “self,” therefore limiting side effects, and are specifically engineered to localize the intended therapeutic effect.

In treating autoimmune diseases, current adoptive cell therapies have largely centered around the regulatory T cell (T_reg), which is defined by the expression of the Forkhead box protein 3, orFoxp3. Although T_regs offer great potential, using them for therapeutic purposes remains a major challenge. In particular, current delivery methods result in inefficient engineering of T cells.

T_regs only compose approximately 5%–10% of circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Furthermore, T_regs lack more specific surface markers that differentiate them from other T cell populations. These hurdles make it difficult to harvest, purify and grow T_regs to therapeutically relevant numbers. Although there are additional tissue-resident T_regs in non-lymphoid organs such as in skeletal muscle and visceral adipose tissue, these T_regs are severely inaccessible and low in number.

Once inflation comes to an end, and all the energy that was inherent to space itself gets converted into particles, antiparticles, photons, etc., all the Universe can do is expand and cool. Everything smashes into one another, sometimes creating new particle/antiparticle pairs, sometimes annihilating pairs back into photons or other particles, but always dropping in energy as the Universe expands.

The Universe never reaches infinitely high temperatures or densities, but still attains energies that are perhaps a trillion times greater than anything the LHC can ever produce. The tiny seed overdensities and underdensities will eventually grow into the cosmic web of stars and galaxies that exist today. 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as-we-know-it had its beginning. The rest is our cosmic history.

Every cell in the human body contains the same genetic instructions, encoded in its DNA. However, out of about 30,000 genes, each cell expresses only those genes that it needs to become a nerve cell, immune cell, or any of the other hundreds of cell types in the body.

Each cell’s fate is largely determined by chemical modifications to the proteins that decorate its DNA; these modification in turn control which genes get turned on or off. When cells copy their DNA to divide, however, they lose half of these modifications, leaving the question: How do cells maintain the memory of what kind of cell they are supposed to be?

A new MIT study proposes a theoretical model that helps explain how these memories are passed from generation to generation when cells divide. The research team suggests that within each cell’s nucleus, the 3D folding pattern of its genome determines which parts of the genome will be marked by these chemical modifications.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and KU Leuven have discovered a suite of genes that influence head shape in humans. These findings, published this week in Nature Communications, help explain the diversity of human head shapes and may also offer important clues about the genetic basis of conditions that affect the skull, such as craniosynostosis.

By analyzing measurements of the cranial vault —the part of the skull that forms the rounded top of the head and protects the brain—the team identified 30 regions of the genome associated with different aspects of head shape, 29 of which have not been reported previously.

“Anthropologists have speculated and debated the genetics of cranial vault shape since the early 20th century,” said co-senior author Seth Weinberg, Ph.D., professor of oral and craniofacial sciences in the Pitt School of Dental Medicine and co-director of the Center for Craniofacial and Dental Genetics.

The core–mantle boundary (CMB) is the interface between the Earth’s iron metal core and the thick rocky layer of mantle just above the core. It is a world of extremes—temperatures thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and pressures over a million times the pressure at the surface of the Earth. While it may seem far away from our environment on Earth’s surface, plumes of material from the CMB can ascend upwards through the planet over tens of millions of years, influencing the chemistry, geologic structure, and plate tectonics of the surface world where we live.

Though scientists cannot travel to the center of the Earth to study the CMB, they can get clues about what lies beneath the planet’s surface by measuring earthquakes. Seismic waves travel at different speeds depending on the material they are traveling through, allowing researchers to infer what lies deep below the surface using seismic signatures. This is analogous to how ultrasound uses waves of sound to image inside of the human body.

Recent research shows that the base of Earth’s mantle is actually complex and heterogeneous—in particular, there are mountain-like regions where seismic waves mysteriously slow down. These blobs, named ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs) and first discovered by Caltech’s Don Helmberger, are dozens of kilometers thick and lie around 3,000 kilometers beneath our feet.

For a magnet to stick to a fridge door, several physical effects inside of it need to work together perfectly. The magnetic moments of its electrons all point in the same direction, even if no external magnetic field forces them to do so.

This happens because of the so-called exchange interaction, a combination of electrostatic repulsion between electrons and quantum mechanical effects of the electron spins, which, in turn, are responsible for the magnetic moments. This is a common explanation for the fact that certain materials like iron or nickel are ferromagnetic or permanently magnetic, as long as one does not heat them above a particular temperature.

At ETH in Zurich, a team of researchers led by Ataç Imamoğlu at the Institute for Quantum Electronics and Eugene Demler at the Institute for Theoretical Physics have now detected a new type of ferromagnetism in an artificially produced material, in which the alignment of the magnetic moments comes about in a completely different way. They recently published their results in the journal Nature.

In 1973, physicist Phil Anderson hypothesized that the quantum spin liquid, or QSL, state existed on some triangular lattices, but he lacked the tools to delve deeper. Fifty years later, a team led by researchers associated with the Quantum Science Center headquartered at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has confirmed the presence of QSL behavior in a new material with this structure, KYbSe₂.

QSLs—an unusual state of matter controlled by interactions among entangled, or intrinsically linked, magnetic atoms called spins—excel at stabilizing quantum mechanical activity in KYbSe₂ and other delafossites. These materials are prized for their layered triangular lattices and promising properties that could contribute to the construction of high-quality superconductors and quantum computing components.

The paper, published in Nature Physics, features researchers from ORNL; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Los Alamos National Laboratory; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; the University of Missouri; the University of Minnesota; Stanford University; and the Rosario Physics Institute.

For the first time in space, scientists have produced a mixture of two quantum gases made of two types of atoms. Accomplished with NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, the achievement marks another step toward bringing quantum technologies currently available only on Earth into space.

Physicists at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), part of a collaboration led by Prof. Nicholas Bigelow, University of Rochester, provided the theoretical calculations necessary for this achievement. While quantum tools are already used in everything from cell phones to GPS to medical devices, in the future, quantum tools could be used to enhance the study of planets, including our own, as well as to help solve mysteries of the universe and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.

The new work, performed remotely by scientists on Earth, is described in Nature.