Researchers mapped influenza–host protein interactions in intact human cells using cross-linking mass spectrometry and structural modeling. They identified 198 viral-host pairs and found the virus exploits transport pathways.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Humans Can Learn to Echolocate in Just 10 Weeks, And It Rewires The Brain
Echolocation is a fascinating way that animals like bats and whales find their way around the world.
By emitting sounds and decoding the echoes that come back, these species are able to detect what’s around them in their local environment.
It’s something we know that humans can do too – and it takes less training than you might think.
A better way to turn 2D designs into 3D models for rapid prototyping
“GIFT” is a new system that teaches vision-language generative AI models to produce accurate, computer-aided design programs that can be used to simulate and test 3D objects.
Credits :
Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT; iStock.
Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to “MIT.”
Two heart nerve cell types sustain cardiac stability in mice
Researchers identified two major intrinsic cardiac neuron populations in mice: Npy-positive neurons regulate parasympathetic heart rate control and support coronary perfusion, while Ddah1-positive neurons help maintain electrical stability during extreme stress. Removing Npy-positive neurons caused fatal cardiac failure, whereas loss of Ddah1-positive neurons increased susceptibility to malignant arrhythmias and sudden cardiac arrest under stress.
How Cryonics Really Works
Cryonics is one of the most misunderstood ideas in science today: most people think it means “freezing dead people.” It doesn’t. This video breaks down what…
Blurred genome boundaries emerge as a new layer of Alzheimer’s biology
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Washington have shed new light on Alzheimer’s disease that could point to new directions for treatment.
In a paper published in Science, researchers from SCS’s Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, Pitt’s Department of Neurobiology and collaborating institutions show that 3D genome architecture is organized differently in certain brain cells from people with Alzheimer’s disease, uncovering a previously underexplored layer of the disease’s biology.
The research team linked genome folding to gene activity and brain tissue organization in Alzheimer’s disease. The team did this with single-cell technology, spatial mapping of brain tissue and a new deep-learning model.
The perfect pesticide?
A native of the Rocky Mountains, the beetle now occurs across the Northern Hemisphere, causing more than half a billion dollars of crop losses each year. It’s a master of resistance, making it hard to control. The pest was an early driver of research into chemical pesticides starting in the 1930s. Ever since, it has evolved immunity to one compound after another—now more than 50 pesticides, representing all major types of active ingredients.
“They were chewing through treated plants like it was nothing,” Andrei Alyokhin, an entomologist at the University of Maine, says of the moment, in 2001, when farmers in Maine noticed that a still-new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, were no longer controlling the beetle. Finding additional tools has been “increasingly difficult,” he adds.
This year, however, U.S. farmers will have a new weapon against the pest, one that works in an entirely different way from traditional pesticides and that proponents say should be safer for people and the environment. Based on a mechanism called RNA interference (RNAi), the spray targets a vital gene in the Colorado potato beetle. The gene target is unique to the pest and its close relatives, which should prevent damage to pollinators and other species. “You can … hit the insect you want to kill with precision,” says Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who published a review last year in Frontiers in Insect Science describing the development of RNA-based pesticides. “You cannot get anything better than this.”
Artery-on-a-chip helps predict stroke risk
Predicting an individual’s risk of ischemic stroke is difficult because thrombosis embolization—the process of a blood clot detaching from the area where it formed, traveling and then sticking in another blood vessel—is based on factors unique to each person.
In a study published in Cell Biomaterials, researchers developed a tool to address this challenge: an artery-on-a-chip platform that can replicate a patient’s specific vascular structure and blood flow dynamics, called a “physical twin.”
“This idea was born out of a critical clinical gap,” says author Lining Arnold Ju of the University of Sydney in Australia. “We know that even patients at ‘low risk’ can suffer from severe or fatal strokes. We wanted to find a better way to predict this risk.”
