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Summary: Brain mapping study identifies important neural networks and their connections that appear to enhance the conscious experience.

Source: University of Tokyo

Science may be one step closer to understanding where consciousness resides in the brain. A new study shows the importance of certain types of neural connections in identifying consciousness.

The research, published in Cerebral Cortex, was led by Jun Kitazono, a corresponding author and a project researcher in the Department of General Systems Studies at the University of Tokyo.

A gene that University of Virginia (UVA) Health researchers have discovered is responsible for the deadliest type of brain tumor is also responsible for two forms of childhood cancer, the scientists have found.

The new discovery may open the door to the first targeted treatments for two types of , a cancer of the soft tissue that primarily strikes young children.

The gene may also play an important role in other cancers that form in muscle, fat, nerves and other connective tissues in both children and adults, the research suggests.

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NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have agreed to “significant and advantageous changes” to a major part of the conceptual design for its Perseverance mission, NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurburchen states in the recent announcement.

This car-sized rover is the newest member of NASA’s robotic Mars fleet, and reached the Red Planet in February 2021 through an unprecedented landing. Arguably one of its most important responsibilities is the Mars Sample Return campaign. Perseverance’s six wheels leave grooves on the planet’s regolith as it works towards that goal, traversing Mars’ Jezero Crater to gather the telltale sedimentary proof that water — and possibly life — once existed there.

In October, the space agencies will dive into the details of their redesign: rather than having Perseverance leave caches of its pebble collection on Mars’ surface for another yet-to-be-built land-based spacecraft to pick up, the existing Mars rover will be the one to carry the precious parcels to their launch site. In addition, Perseverance’s high-flying robotic companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, has inspired the design of two future rotorcraft that would swerve over the Martian terrain to pick up other samples. This duo would be part of an existing concept, NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander.

In late 2020, Alphabet’s DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system’s results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.

Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this undertaking, which covers proteins from across the kingdoms of life — animal, plant, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl, and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, “for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health,” per the AlphaFold website.

“AlphaFold is the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI,” Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, siad in a press statement Thursday. “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new addition of structures illuminating nearly the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved each day.”