Viruses that infect bacteria can still do their job in microgravity, but space changes the rules of the fight.
In a new experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station, scientists found that viruses which infect bacteria can still successfully infect E. coli under near-weightless microgravity conditions. While infection still occurred, the interaction between viruses and bacteria unfolded differently than it does on Earth. The research, led by Phil Huss of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A., was published today (January 13th) in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.
A microscopic arms race in an unusual environment.
In the fossil record, creatures without hard shells or skeletons, such as jellyfish, are rarely preserved for long periods of time. Preservation is even less likely in sandstone, a rock made of coarse grains that is full of pores and typically forms in environments shaped by strong waves and frequent storms. Despite these challenges, fossils dating to about 570 million years ago tell a very different story. During the Ediacaran period, unusual soft-bodied organisms died on the seafloor, were quickly buried by sand, and were preserved with striking detail.
These remarkable fossils have since been discovered in rock formations across the globe. Researchers are working to understand how the Ediacara Biota could be preserved so clearly, especially as impressions in sandstone, a process rarely seen elsewhere in the fossil record. Solving this puzzle could help clarify a major missing chapter in the history of large, visible life on Earth.
“The Ediacara Biota look totally bizarre in their appearance. Some of them have triradial symmetry, some have spiraling arms, some have fractal patterning,” says Dr. Lidya Tarhan, a paleontologist at Yale University. “It’s really hard when you first look at them to figure out where to place them in the tree of life.”
Researchers at the University of New Mexico have uncovered an unexpected role for OTULIN, an enzyme best known for its involvement in immune system regulation. The team found that OTULIN also plays a key role in the production of tau, a protein linked to many neurodegenerative disorders, along with brain inflammation and the biological processes associated with aging.
The findings were reported in the journal Genomic Psychiatry. In the study, scientists showed that disabling OTULIN stopped tau from being produced and cleared existing tau from neurons. This was achieved in two ways: by using a specially designed small molecule or by removing the gene responsible for producing the enzyme. The experiments were carried out in two types of cells, including cells derived from a person who had died from late-onset sporadic Alzheimer’s disease and human neuroblastoma cells that are commonly used in laboratory research.
A ‘boom’ of light that appears when a particle exceeds the speed of light set by a medium could, in other contexts, signal a kind of quantum instability that could trigger what’s known as vacuum decay.
If ever spotted in the emptiness of space, according to theoretical physicist Eugeny Babichev of the University of Paris-Saclay, the eerie blue glow of Cherenkov radiation could be interpreted as a manifestation of negative-energy ghost perturbations.
Why does it matter? Because our current theory of gravity is incomplete, and such a signal would offer rare insight into how spacetime behaves in regimes where existing theories break down, and potentially narrow the search for better models.
A new investigation of the early Universe led by Poland’s National Centre for Nuclear Research has just found that there may be an interaction between two of the most elusive components of the cosmos.
By combining different kinds of observations, cosmologists have shown that what we see is more easily explained if neutrinos, aka ‘ghost particles’, weakly interact with dark matter.
With a vexing certainty of three sigma, the signal isn’t strong enough to be definitive, but is also too strong to be a mere hint or noise in the data.
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign dubbed SHADOW#REACTOR that employs an evasive multi-stage attack chain to deliver a commercially available remote administration tool called Remcos RAT and establish persistent, covert remote access.
“The infection chain follows a tightly orchestrated execution path: an obfuscated VBS launcher executed via wscript.exe invokes a PowerShell downloader, which retrieves fragmented, text-based payloads from a remote host,” Securonix researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News.
“These fragments are reconstructed into encoded loaders, decoded in memory by a. NET Reactor–protected assembly, and used to fetch and apply a remote Remcos configuration. The final stage leverages MSBuild.exe as a living-off-the-land binary (LOLBin) to complete execution, after which the Remcos RAT backdoor is fully deployed and takes control of the compromised system.”
