Lifeboat Foundation

A process that involves the “murder” of living, newly-generated cells has been discovered for the first time in recent research conducted at the University of Haifa. The research, which was described in the esteemed journal Science Advances, discovered that throughout the cellular differentiation process in fruit flies, phagocytic cells consume and destroy healthy living cells.

“We found that phagocytes can function as ‘murderers.’ It is well-known that phagocytic cells swallow and dissolve dead cells, but we show for the first time that they also kill newly-created normal cells. Essentially we have characterized a new mechanism of cell death. The more we know the mechanisms of cell death, the better we understand how to cope with various diseases, particularly cancer”, explained Professor Hilla Toledano, head of the Department of Human Biology at the University of Haifa and author of the study.

The origin of several bodily tissues, including skin, hair, stomach, and testicles, may be traced back to stem cells. By continuously supplying new cells to replace the old ones, these powerful stem cells enable tissue replenishment. Each stem cell in this process splits into two cells, one of which is retained for use in the future and the other of which develops to take the place of the lost cell in the tissue.

Many efforts have been made to image the spatiotemporal electrical activity of the brain with the purpose of mapping its function and dysfunction as well as aiding the management of brain disorders. Here, we propose a non-conventional deep learning–based source imaging framework (DeepSIF) that provides robust and precise spatiotemporal estimates of underlying brain dynamics from noninvasive high-density electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. DeepSIF employs synthetic training data generated by biophysical models capable of modeling mesoscale brain dynamics. The rich characteristics of underlying brain sources are embedded in the realistic training data and implicitly learned by DeepSIF networks, avoiding complications associated with explicitly formulating and tuning priors in an optimization problem, as often is the case in conventional source imaging approaches. The performance of DeepSIF is evaluated by 1) a series of numerical experiments, 2) imaging sensory and cognitive brain responses in a total of 20 healthy subjects from three public datasets, and 3) rigorously validating DeepSIF’s capability in identifying epileptogenic regions in a cohort of 20 drug-resistant epilepsy patients by comparing DeepSIF results with invasive measurements and surgical resection outcomes. DeepSIF demonstrates robust and excellent performance, producing results that are concordant with common neuroscience knowledge about sensory and cognitive information processing as well as clinical findings about the location and extent of the epileptogenic tissue and outperforming conventional source imaging methods. The DeepSIF method, as a data-driven imaging framework, enables efficient and effective high-resolution functional imaging of spatiotemporal brain dynamics, suggesting its wide applicability and value to neuroscience research and clinical applications.

In an ancillary study of the Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL), we tested whether supplemental vitamin D₃ would result in a lower risk of fractures than placebo. VITAL was a two-by-two factorial, randomized, controlled trial that investigated whether supplemental vitamin D₃ (2000 IU per day), n−3 fatty acids (1 g per day), or both would prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease in men 50 years of age or older and women 55 years of age or older in the United States. Participants were not recruited on the basis of vitamin D deficiency, low bone mass, or osteoporosis. Incident fractures were reported by participants on annual questionnaires and adjudicated by centralized medical-record review. The primary end points were incident total, nonvertebral, and hip fractures. Proportional-hazards models were used to estimate the treatment effect in intention-to-treat analyses.

Among 25,871 participants (50.6% women [13,085 of 25,871] and 20.2% Black [5106 of 25,304]), we confirmed 1991 incident fractures in 1,551 participants over a median follow-up of 5.3 years. Supplemental vitamin D₃, as compared with placebo, did not have a significant effect on total fractures (which occurred in 769 of 12,927 participants in the vitamin D group and in 782 of 12,944 participants in the placebo group; hazard ratio, 0.98; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.89 to 1.08; P=0.70), nonvertebral fractures (hazard ratio, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.87 to 1.07; P=0.50), or hip fractures (hazard ratio, 1.01; 95% CI, 0.70 to 1.47; P=0.96). There was no modification of the treatment effect according to baseline characteristics, including age, sex, race or ethnic group, body-mass index, or serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. There were no substantial between-group differences in adverse events as assessed in the parent trial.

Vitamin D₃ supplementation did not result in a significantly lower risk of fractures than placebo among generally healthy midlife and older adults who were not selected for vitamin D deficiency, low bone mass, or osteoporosis. (Funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases; VITAL ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01704859.)

AI-powered predictions of the three-dimensional structures of nearly all cataloged proteins known to science have been made by DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The catalog is freely and openly available to the scientific community, via the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.

The two organizations hope the expanded database will continue to increase our understanding of biology, helping countless more scientists in their work as they strive to tackle global challenges.

This major milestone marks the database being expanded by approximately 200 times. It has grown from nearly 1 million protein structures to over 200 million, and now covers almost every organism on Earth that has had its genome sequenced. Predicted structures for a wide range of species, including plants, bacteria, animals, and other organisms are now included in the expanded database. This opens up new avenues of research across the life sciences that will have an impact on global challenges, including sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases.

Elon Musk has already shaped our world in several different ways, and the debate of whether they’re all beneficial to humanity is ongoing. But apart from putting electric vehicles on top of the automotive world’s agenda and making us dream about outer space travel, there is one somewhat unintentiona…

Experiments indicate that bees have surprisingly rich inner worlds.

The CD was initially soaked in 40 mL of acetone for 1.5 minutes, releasing the metal layer by breaking down the polycarbonate substrate. The metal from the CD was easily harvested with polyimide tape, which also serves as the substrate layer in the new device integration to improve the mechanical durability and robustness of the thin metal film.

“When you pick up your hair on your clothes with sticky tape, that is essentially the same mechanism,” said Assistant Professor Ahyeon Koh, who led the research. “We loosen the layer of metals from the CD and then pick up that metal layer with tape, so we just peel it off. That thin layer is then processed and flex ible.”

Researchers created the sensors utilizing a commercially available Cricut cutter, an off-the-shelf machine for crafters that generally cut designs from materials like paper, vinyl, card stock, and iron-on transfers. The flexible circuits then would be removed and stuck onto a person. The whole fabrication process was completed in 20–30 minutes, without releasing toxic chemicals or needing expensive equipment, and it costs about $1.50 per device.

SpaceX shared how it’s making its Starlink satellites less bright. The space exploration company published a document titled, Brightness Mitigation Best Practices for Satellite Operators that outlines how it’s working with the astronomy community to reduce light pollution.

New document from @SpaceX https://api.starlink.com/public-files/BrightnessMitigationBe…rators.pdf explaining what they have been doing to make their satellites less bright. I applaud SpaceX for their work on this (and for making the document public), while remaining concerned to see how bright the Gen2 Starlinks end up being.

— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) July 29, 2022

Researchers discovered that lunar pits and caves could provide stable temperatures around 63 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to new possibilities for experiments and life there.