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Summary: Study identifies a significant way in which a disrupted circadian clock drives inflammation in the body’s immune cells.

Source: RCSI

New research from RCSI has demonstrated the significant role that an irregular body clock plays in driving inflammation in the body’s immune cells, with implications for the most serious and prevalent diseases in humans.

In this DNA factory, organism engineers are using robots and automation to build completely new forms of life.
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Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston company specializing in “engineering custom organisms,” aims to reinvent manufacturing, agriculture, biodesign, and more.

Biologists, software engineers, and automated robots are working side by side to accelerate the speed of nature by taking synthetic DNA, remixing it, and programming microbes, turning custom organisms into mini-factories that could one day pump out new foods, fuels, and medicines.

While there are possibly numerous positive and exciting outcomes from this research, like engineering gut bacteria to produce drugs inside the human body on demand or building self-fertilizing plants, the threat of potential DNA sequences harnessing a pathological function still exists.

Mounded, luminous clouds of gas and dust glow in this Hubble image of a Herbig-Haro object known as HH 45.

Herbig-Haro objects are a rarely seen type of nebula that occurs when hot gas ejected by a collides with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, creating bright shock waves. In this image, blue indicates ionized oxygen (O II) and purple shows ionized magnesium (Mg II). Researchers were particularly interested in these elements because they can be used to identify shocks and ionization fronts.

This is located in the nebula NGC 1977, which itself is part of a complex of three nebulae called The Running Man. NGC 1977—like its companions NGC 1975 and NGC 1973—is a reflection nebula, which means that it doesn’t emit light on its own, but reflects light from , like a streetlight illuminating fog.

Roscosmos launched a new docking node module to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, November 24 at 13:06 UTC / 8:06 am EST.

Launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the module will add additional docking ports to the Russian Segment of the station to provide options for future expansion but is the final Russian model planned for the outpost.

Background

The original design for the Russian Segment of the ISS called for a Universal Docking Module (UDM) to expand the Russian Segment’s available docking ports for the addition of future modules. This module was canceled early in the ISS program due to budget issues.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has marked the 10th anniversary of its launch to Mars by sending back a spectacular ‘picture postcard’ from the Red Planet.

The robotic explorer snapped two black and white images of the Martian landscape which were then combined and had colour added to them to produce the remarkable composite.

Curiosity, which launched to the Red Planet almost exactly 10 years ago on November 26, 2011, took the pictures from its most recent perch on the side of Mars’ Mount Sharp.