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How cells fight infection from the inside: Newly identified ADX pathway may broaden understanding of immunity

When thinking of the immune system, most people imagine white blood cells putting up a fight against invading germs in the bloodstream. But now, in research published in Molecular Cell, scientists detail a separate but equally important route by which our bodies fight infection—directly inside already infected cells.

In the report, the authors define a previously undescribed method of germ resistance they coin “antibody-directed xenophagy” (ADX), where cells can digest bacteria and viruses that cross the cell membrane, including Salmonella and adenoviruses.

“People have talked about viral xenophagy before as a sort of concept, but if you look in literature, there aren’t any good examples where people have shown this operating to potently block infection,” says Leo James of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Activity-dependent protein synthesis in neurons requires microglial-metabolic coupling

During learning, the brain requires an exceptional amount of glucose to be imported into specific neural circuits, where it is used to form new memory-related proteins. Adler et al. discover that microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain, are critical for this process via a mechanism called microglial-metabolic coupling.

New IronWorm malware hits 36 packages in npm supply-chain attack

A new supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages on the Node Package Manager (npm) index with infostealer malware called IronWorm.

The malware targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files.

According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network.

JWST ‘weighs’ dormant black hole 10 billion light-years away

The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and “weighed” by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, published in Science, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant dormant black hole yet detected, 15 times farther away than the previous record.

The black hole’s mass is about 6 billion times that of the sun, and is being observed at a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, about a quarter of its current age, offering unprecedented details into black holes in the early universe.

To find this, the team used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to track the motion of stars orbiting around the otherwise invisible black hole to measure its mass. Though the technique—known as stellar dynamics —has been used to measure dormant black holes in galaxies much closer to Earth, this is the first time it has been used to weigh one located such a great (cosmological) distance away.

Measuring gravitational waves in a humming universe with a coordinate-free approach

Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in spacetime. Their first direct detection in 2015 marked a revolutionary moment in astronomy. Today, we have a thorough understanding of signals that travel far from their sources through quiet, nearly empty space, such as those emitted when black holes merge. In this case, the wave can be considered a minor disturbance on a silent background. The distinction between “background” and “wave” is clear, and the quantity measured by the detector—a tiny stretching and squeezing—is clearly determined.

In cosmology, however, things are more subtle. The focus shifts to the universe in its entirety—encompassing spacetime and everything contained within it, such as stars, black holes and galaxies. The background itself is dynamic. Small fluctuations in density and velocity gently stir spacetime everywhere, blurring the boundary with the wave.

But what exactly does a gravitational-wave detector measure when the entire universe is gently vibrating? Previously, theoretical predictions were entirely dependent on the choice of mathematical coordinates. However, the only meaningful quantity is what a real instrument records, which must be coordinate-independent.

Record ultraviolet quasar wind reaches 30% light speed near supermassive black hole

A team led by York University researchers has discovered the fastest wind near a supermassive black hole ever found at ultraviolet wavelengths, driven by the disk of matter (quasar) surrounding the black hole.

“This quasar has a black hole of 1.7 billion times the mass of the sun. That’s typical. What’s not typical is that it has gas moving towards us at 30% of the speed of light,” says York Professor Patrick Hall of the Faculty of Science.

The finding is published in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

Novel synthetic biomolecule degrades disease-related proteins

Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed a novel synthetic biomolecular condensate that can degrade intracellular disease-causing proteins, providing a framework for new therapeutic approaches for a wide range of diseases, as detailed in a recent study published in Nature Communications.

Shana Kelley, Ph.D., the Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, was senior author of the study.

Targeted protein degradation is an emerging therapeutic strategy that harnesses cells’ own degradation machinery to clear disease-causing proteins. However, achieving this degradation process across different cell types has remained a challenge due to subtle variations in protein structure.

Photoexcitation flips 2D moiré devices from metals to insulators in ultrafast test

Quantum materials, materials with properties that are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics describing many-body interactions, have proved promising for the development of various advanced technologies. Many of these materials undergo so-called phase transitions, switching between different physical states that alter how electrons flow through them.

Some previous studies have demonstrated the transition from insulating states to metallic states in quantum materials, via a process called photoexcitation (i.e., the excitation of electrons using light). Yet the opposite transition, from metallic to insulating states, has so far proved difficult to realize using light alone.

Researchers at Columbia University, in collaboration with UC Riverside, recently demonstrated an ultrafast photo-induced metal-to-insulator transition in two-dimensional (2D) moiré heterostructures, quantum materials consisting of 2D layers stacked on top of each other, with a slight misalignment between them.

Full faces sharpen emotion recognition, even when eye details are blurred

A teary eye, a furrowed eyebrow, creases at the edge of the eye tell us what a person is feeling without them having to express it with words. New data indicate that eyes might be the window to the soul, but with curtains blocking half of their view, because the eyes alone do not contain enough information for our brain to derive emotions solely from them.

Researchers from the College of Wooster, USA, wanted to understand how much we actually rely on the eyes versus the whole face to recognize emotions. After examining participants’ brain activity using EEG (electroencephalography) as they viewed photographs of people displaying different emotions, they discovered that people can recognize emotions both more quickly and more accurately when they can see the entire face rather than just the eyes.

Blurring details in the eyes had little impact on people’s ability to recognize facial expressions as long as the rest of the face remained visible. When details in the eyes are reduced, the ability to read emotions takes a hit if the rest of the face is concealed, suggesting that the brain uses other features to fill in the gaps when information from the eyes is missing.

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