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Rogue DNA can move from cell to cell and change how they function

“We were looking at this in a two-dimensional culture, but in actual human tissue where cells are packed together very tightly, you might anticipate that this would occur even more frequently,” said Gary Gorbsky, OMRF professor and study co-author. “This opens up the possibility of a new process of genetic transfer of information.”

What effect did rogue DNA have on the new cell?

To test whether this new DNA that came from another cell had a functional impact on the new cell, the scientists engineered donor cells with resistance to a specific antibiotic. After combining donor and recipient cells in culture and inducing chromosome damage, they found that recipient cells acquired the same antibiotic resistance – direct evidence that mammalian cells can trade genetic material through simple cell-to-cell contact.

Startup founders urge Trump not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, are urging the Trump administration not to cut off access to Chinese open-weight artificial intelligence models or risk crippling the next generation of U.S. startups.

On Wednesday, the sent letters to President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others in the administration with its appeal, marking the first coordinated effort by Silicon Valley’s wider influential startup community to weigh in on one of the Trump administration’s most closely watched AI debates. At issue: whether Washington should restrict access to increasingly powerful open-weight — meaning, AI models whose weights are publicly available — AI models released by Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI and Alibaba.

“American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide,” the startup founders wrote in , also sent to Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards…

Pregnancy complications linked to long-term risk of peripheral artery disease

Women who experience pregnancy complications such as gestational diabetes, preeclampsia or preterm delivery have a significantly increased long-term risk of developing peripheral artery disease (PAD) later in life, according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine by Casey Crump of the University of Texas, U.S., and colleagues.

PAD, a condition in which narrowed arteries reduce blood flow to the limbs, affects more than 230 million people worldwide and is a strong predictor of future stroke, ischemic heart disease and premature mortality. Adverse pregnancy outcomes have been identified as risk factors for other cardiovascular diseases, but their association with long-term PAD risk had not been well established.

‘Cellular behavioromics’ reveals how immune cells swarm during sepsis

Despite the best efforts of intensive care unit (ICU) staff and physicians and the most advanced life support, Dr. Bryan Yipp, witnesses many deaths in the ICU attributed to sepsis. “Sepsis is the body’s overwhelming immune response to an infection, and sometimes that response can cause death,” says Yipp, a critical care physician and clinician-scientist at the Cumming School of Medicine. “While many cases involve people with long-term illnesses, seemingly healthy people can be at work or home one moment and then, within hours, be admitted to the ICU.”

Earlier this year, 41-year-old NASCAR race champion Kyle Busch died after pneumonia progressed to sepsis. Yipp says a recent discovery in his lab, published in Science, could lead to new treatments for this often-fatal condition.

DMTInduced Shifts in Criticality Correlate with SelfDissolution

Psychedelics profoundly alter subjective experience and brain dynamics. Brain oscillations express signatures of near-critical dynamics, relevant for healthy function. Alterations in the proximity to criticality have been suggested to underlie the experiential and neurological effects of psychedelics. Here, we investigate the effects of a psychedelic substance (DMT) on the criticality of brain oscillations, and in relation to subjective experience, in humans of either sex. We find that DMT shifts the dynamics of brain oscillations away from criticality in alpha and adjacent frequency bands. In this context, entropy is increased while complexity is reduced. We find that the criticality-shifts observed in alpha and theta bands correlate with the intensity ratings of self-dissolution, a hallmark of psychedelic experience. Finally, using a recently developed metric, the functional excitatory-inhibitory ratio, we find that the DMT-induced criticality-shift in brain oscillations is toward subcritical regimes. These findings have major implications for the neuronal understanding of the self and psychedelics, as well as for the neurological basis of altered states of consciousness.

Keywords: DMT; EEG; brain oscillations; criticality; self-dissolution.

Copyright © 2025 Irrmischer et al.

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