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Researchers at Imperial College London and Lund University in Sweden found that by giving heart attack patients two drugs together – statins and ezetimibe, a cholesterol-lowering drug – their risk of another heart attack, stroke or death was reduced.

“This study shows that we could save lives and reduce further heart attacks by giving patients a combination of two low-cost drugs,” said Prof Kausik Ray, of Imperial’s School of Public Health.

But at the moment patients across the world aren’t receiving these drugs together. That is causing unnecessary and avoidable heart attacks and deaths – and also places unnecessary costs on healthcare systems.

Since most cells naturally repel DNA, delivering these nanodevices into cells requires specialized techniques, such as transfection methods and transformation protocols. Once inside, cellular factors such as salt concentration, molecular crowding, and heterogeneous environments influence strand displacement reactions. To overcome the limitations of direct delivery, researchers are also developing transcribable RNA nanodevices encoded into plasmids or chromosomes, allowing cells to express these circuits.

Toward Smart DNA Machines and Biocomputers

DNA strand displacement has been applied to the innovation of computational models. By integrating computational principles with DNA strand displacement, the structured algorithms of traditional computing can be combined with random biochemical processes and chemical reactions in biological systems, enabling biocompatible models of computation. In the future, DNA strand displacement may enable autonomously acting DNA nanomachines to precisely manipulate biological processes, leading to quantum leaps in healthcare and life science research.

Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter—stars, galaxies and gas—in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. In fact, more than half of normal matter—half of the 15% of the universe’s matter that is not dark matter—cannot be accounted for in the glowing stars and gas we see.

New measurements, however, seem to have found this missing matter in the form of very diffuse and invisible ionized hydrogen gas, which forms a halo around galaxies and is more puffed out and extensive than astronomers thought.

The findings not only relieve a conflict between astronomical observations and the best, proven model of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, they also suggest that the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies are more active than previously thought, fountaining gas much farther from the than expected—about five times farther, the team found.